Religiosity, cosmology, and folklore: The African influence in the novels of Toni Morrison

This study intends to reveal an often overlooked method of reading Toni Morrison's novels. The majority of existing criticism regarding Morrisons works focuses on her indebtedness to African American history, cosmology, and culture. Even the most current scholarship gravitates toward Morrison's conceptions of the traumas of her people (African Americans ) and their collective past as it relates to a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history. While other African-based readings of Morrison's works exist, very few deal directly with the many ancient African cosmologies, religiosities, and cultures which pervade her fiction. This study is not limited to Morrison's African American roots; it delves into the continent of Africa itself and into the customs of its people in order to reveal the African American/African link found in her novels. Morrison herself said that what she most longed for in a critic was the knowledge of the culture out of which she wrote. That culture is not only African American; her roots and the roots of her characters extend back to the homeland of Africa.;The purpose of this investigation, then is threefold: first, to present background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions, and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples; second, to relate these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African American product; third, to elucidate how this connection helps to understand and to clarify many of Morrison's allusions to the culture out of which she writes. This study contends that to read Morrison without any knowledge of African cosmology, religiosity, and folklore, even when one is well-versed in their African American counterparts, is to miss an essential point. Only when the African elements of her novels are revealed, buttressed by the American elements, will her canon be fully understood.