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Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008.
In this carefully researched study, La Vinia Jennings opens a new area of inquiry within African American literary studies, arguing persuasively that, with some exception, literary scholars have been misreading Toni Morrison's oeuvre for the last forty years. Morrison, Jennings reveals, has consistently included in each of her novels extensive references to West and Central African cosmological systems. It is only in recognizing and understanding these coded allusions that we can better understand the fictional world of Toni Morrison. In her introductory chapter, "Finding the elusive but identifiable Blackness within the culture out of which Toni Morrison writes," Jennings plainly lays out her argument: "An aesthetic goal of Morrison's fiction is to dust off the survivals of West and Central African traditional civilizations that Christianity obscures in the Western hemisphere" (2). Her novels, then, expose "an African palimpsest upon which European-American culture superimposes itself" (2). Jennings cites the cross within the circle, the Yowa of the Kongo civilization, as the most easily identifiable African symbol, and demonstrates that Morrison utilizes this and other signifiers of African belief systems as a "substructure for her literary landscapes and interior spaces, and as a geometric figure performed by or inscribed on the bodies of her characters" (2). In addition to the religious beliefs of the Bakongo, Jennings cites Dahomey and Yoruba traditions as well as their New World expressions of Haitian Voudoun, United States Voodoo, and Brazilian Candomblé throughout her analysis. For her, Morrison uses these tools to record and recover the ancestral African past for all peoples of African descent so as to remind them of the riches of their heritage. These belief systems are not lost to history; they simply remain dormant in the collective imaginary of African-descended peoples. Jennings convincingly argues that Morrison's novels mean to rouse her readers, stirring belief systems long suppressed, as a means by which to live.
In her second chapter, "Dahomey's Vodun and Kongo's Yowa: the survival of West and...