The Use of Color Imagery in the Novels of Toni Morrison

This paper attempts to show how Toni Morrison uses color as an image and a symbol in her novels to “un-matter” the race-sex combine which relegates the women of color to the very bottom of the social ladder and causes the Black woman writer to be ignored and derided as a voice of complaint exploiting race and gender to propagate her writing. In her novels, color moves beyond the reductivist black-white binary to achieve a mythical African significance of its own, countering the cruel reality of life in America. The use of an alternative mythography inherent in African racial memories also counters the power of the ‘logos’ interpreted as the written word by a dominant culture against the assumed inferiority of orality. Color is inherent in the traditional activities that Black women pursue, perhaps nowhere better than in the patchwork quilts they sew, a predominant image of the stories these women tell. It is also latent in the horror of their individual and racial memories of slavery and exploitation. This paper attempts to demonstrate that in Morrison’s work color is used to objectify both suffering and salvation. The horrors of slavery being expressed through color imagery may be a way to heal the trauma and perhaps lay it to rest. ‘Black’ loses its negative connotations and assumes various shades of ‘black-ness’ indicating various degrees of integration into the African identity. By using color as an alternative signifier in her novels, though not as an aggressive power dynamic, Morrison is thus offering a more comprehensive vision.