The Unspeakable in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination

In her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison develops the “unspeakable” while critiquing the U.S. American literary canon’s Whiteness – or, more directly, White U.S. American authors’ marginalization and exclusion of Blackness in the U.S. literary canon – arguing that “Canon building is empire building” (8). In her lecture-turned-essay, race itself is the “unspeakable thing,” in particular how racial matters remain silenced due to the sociopolitical climate and racial anxieties resulting from the collective traumas of slavery and its afterlives, and the “unspoken” signifies how Blackness haunts U.S. American literature and society – the proverbial “ghost in the machine” (8). One of Morrison’s chief tactics for speaking the unspeakable in her own literary work is her employment of the nonhuman to identify and challenge the ontological violence upon which the U.S. master narrative’s curation of Blackness is built. It’s the Whiteness in Song of Solomon (1977) that is representative of the overwhelming and oppressive brutality of White supremacy – the white bull; the white peacock; the divinity candy, traditionally white, that turned Guitar to anything sweet for how it reminds him of his mother’s pandering performance after the White sawmill owner responsible for his father’s death gives her $40 dollars as compensation. It’s Claudia’s blue-eyed baby doll and the Shirley Temple cup that symbolize internalized racism in The Bluest Eye (1970). It’s the personification of 124 to demonstrate the breadth and continuity of U.S. slavery’s hauntings and Mister the Rooster who is offered a dignity that is denied Paul D in Beloved (1987). And still more. Morrison (re)codifies these objects and figures such that they function metaphorically to illuminate aspects of the anti-Black climate that surrounds us – what Dr. Christina Sharpe theorizes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) as “the weather” – and problematize and complicate U.S. American literature and culture’s limited and limiting framing of Blackness, while contemporaneously calling out the construction of Whiteness as the privileged, “natural” state that too often operates under a cloak of invisibility. The exploration of the nonhuman is familiar within the study of Black literature and culture. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Alexander G. Weheliye