Rebellious and Strong Black Women in Paradise

The main aim of this paper is to apply black feminist tenets especially those of Bell Hooks and Alice Walker to demonstrate that unlike the passive black female characters of The Bluest Eye, and the resisting but finally victimized black women of Beloved, the wise and strong black women of Paradise who live in the Convent, are strong enough to recreate themselves as subjects, and to cultivate their own unique identity in a hegemonic environment which is replete with racial and gender discrimination. Black feminist actions and womanistic rituals help them accomplish this improvement. Consolata, and Mavis are two of such strong women of the Convent who not only succeed in healing themselves, but also in healing other black women as well. Black feminists claim in order to place black women at the center of stories about the American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency. In Paradise black women are depicted thus, have their own voices, and completely reject the patriarchal ideology.


INTRODUCTION
In Paradise, Morrison focuses on the color prejudice of the dark-skinned people of Ruby toward less dark-skinned women. The town of Ruby's leaders are especially fearful because the women who have taken refuge in the Convent "don't need men and they don't need God," at least not the patriarchal Christian God that these men follow (Morrison, 1997: 276).
Ruby's people are the descendants of a group of ex-slaves who, due to their poverty and the "coal black" : 160) color of their skin, were constantly rejected by already existing communities; both white as well as less black skinned ones, in the Western United States. Though the Founding Fathers of Ruby decide to create their own town, called Haven, where they can raise and educate their children in a place free from racial prejudices, however, as Jeannette King observes, "In trying to create a safe haven beyond the reach of white racism, they create a world which ironically becomes dependent on the same kind of binary oppositions that underpin white supremacist thinking" (2000: 155-156). Moving farther from their ideals, the Founders inadvertently make a racist and sexist community. While the Founders' offspring eventually move away from Haven and create Ruby, the tensions and hypocrisies begun by their forefathers remain with them.
The Ruby men's obsessive focus on the injustices of racial discrimination they have suffered leads them from the position of victim to that of victimizers of the less black women, and this makes the women decide to move to the Convent, and maintain a space that is psychically and physically safe.
Seventeen miles from the town, migratory women from Ruby establish a multiracial community in a former convent, and as Peter Widdowson writes the Convent women demonstrate ''refusal to accept crude ("black and white") binaries and stereotypes'' (2001,313). The women gathered at the convent, led by Consolata, live outside the authority of the founding black fathers of Ruby, and the Ruby men decide this outrageous independence must be suspended. This determination culminates in an armed group of Ruby men that goes out to the Convent and battles the women. The battle between the Ruby men and the Convent women demonstrates the women's courage, bravery and self-assertion against the men. The battle continues with the Convent women subjects. In other words, black women in Paradise undergo alterations to emerge as committed revolutionary subjects. Speaking about her commitment to revolution, Angela Davis notes: For me revolution was never an interim ''thing-to-do'' before settling down: it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or a new kind of social life-made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime. : 59) Bombarded with images representing black female bodies as sites of exploration, black women have either passively absorbed this thinking as in The Bluest Eye or rebelliously resisted it as in Paradise. Convent women ''challenge assumptions that the black body, its skin color and shape,'' are signs of shame and sites of exploration (ibid, 63).
They also challenge the ideology that turns a black woman's body into an ''ideological site, a space where a variety of discourses cross and converge'' and the condition that ''her body is written on by discourses of power and domination manufactured in a white supremacist society'' (Jozwiak, 2001: 189).
In Paradise we observe that Morrison portrays how African American women might have houses, but not homes. Haven, this group's first settlement, and then Ruby fail to be ideal places because the racial ideologies that the inhabitants of Ruby sought to escape from, follow them within their hearts and minds. Paradise thus illustrates the difficulties of building a real home within the racialized social contexts of the United States. Understanding these issues leads to the creation of "safe spaces." Safe spaces are "social spaces where black women speak freely" (Collins, 2000: 100). In order for the oppressed group to continue to exist as a social group, the members must have spaces where they can express themselves apart from the hegemonic or ruling ideology. In Paradise, unlike what we saw in The Bluest Eye, and in Beloved, this space almost exists for the Convent women who have a space in which according to Morrison a woman can walk out of home at night without any fear of being attacked. According to Hooks, to reach such spaces black women have been struggling for a long period of time: Yet all through the darkest period of the colored women's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming odds, that often ended in a horrible death. (1982: 2) Therefore, while the social marginalization caused by institutionalized racism still exists in Paradise, the black women in the novel have not internalized racism, and courageously stand against patriarchy and racism in discursive social contexts. Krumholz believes the Convent women carry no ideals of family or society in their wanderings, but together they tackle the anxiety of belonging and create an open house by challenging the social and historical strictures that surround them and by confronting the scary things inside themselves. (Krumholz, 2002: 21) Traditionally, all black women of The Bluest Eye, and Beloved, ''irrespective of their circumstances, were lumped into the category of available sex objects'' (Hooks, 1982: 58). In Paradise the Convent women defy this condition and become agents with their own identity. Their deeds are a direct challenge to patriarchal and racist notions about the inherent inferiority of black women, and they demonstrate that given the same opportunities as whites they can succeed in all areas.
While the black women in Beloved believe some day their social regeneration will occur, black women in Paradise take actions and create that regeneration and this helps in solving their problems of race contact and cooperation.

EXPRESSION OF RADICAL BLACK FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN PARADISE
As Channette Romero writes ''The Convent women learn to empower themselves without needing to adhere strictly to male patriarchal control or a rigid belief system predicated on division and hierarchy'' (2005: 420). It will be conducive for the aim of this study to note that in 1998, the Texas prison authorities banned Toni Morrison's Paradise from Texas prisons because the prison authorities believed it contains racial information that might be regarded as written for communicating information designed to encourage strikes in prisons.
The Convent women have all rebelliously escaped from what Bhabha would call "unhomely" dangerous spaces. In Paradise the subjugation of black women in different aspects, for example their inability to gain control over their bodies has been a primary impetus behind their rebellious deeds, and they bravely fight to obtain complete control over their bodies and identities.
The Convent women, rather than remaining passive about the discriminations they face, speak with confidence about what they can do to improve their lives. They are not brainwashed by the US patriarchal and racist social system, and this is why they accomplish in overthrowing the system in their Convent community.

3.3.
CONVENT WOMEN ACT AS THEY WISH The women from the Convent dress as they wish: Mavis, Gigi, and Seneca, appear at the wedding of K.D. and Arnette. They are provocatively dressed, "looking like go-go girls: pink shorts, skimpy tops, see-through skirts… obviously no underwear, no stockings" (Morrison, 1997: 156). After the wedding, the girls dance, "throwing their arms over their heads'' (ibid, 156). Convent women are not afraid of violent conflicts that could happen as a result of their efforts to establish a utopia, which is why they attempt to construct a place which could act as a model of cultural and social collectivity. It is interesting to note also that in the Convent the women have their own road ''It was women who walked this road. Only women. Never men'' (ibid, 270).
And some of them learn to drive even at an old age, in one scene Lone screamed joyfully because ''finally, at seventy-nine, unlicensed but feisty, she was going to learn to drive and have her own car too'' (ibid, 270).
According to Hooks ''The reality is that many black people fear they will be hurt if they let down their guard, that they will be the targets of racist assault since most white people have not unlearned racism'' (1992: 16) but the black women in the Convent are not afraid of taking new roles in discursive social contexts. They know that ''loving blackness as political resistance transforms'' their ''ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for'' them ''to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life'' (ibid, 20).
Convent women are not afraid to transgress boundaries, to take risks, and to deride the fact that it is difficult for black women to recreate their own identity in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Most of them, as it will be soon discussed in more detail, frequently assert themselves as active subjects. They rebel against enforced domesticity, in other words domestic slavery, and assert the primacy of female friendship, they attempt to break with patriarchal male identification and lose the friendship of those conservative friends who have surrendered to convention.

Hooks believes
Radical black female subjects are constantly labeled crazy by those who hope to undermine our personal power and our ability to influence others. Fear of being seen as insane may be a major factor keeping black women from expressing their most radical selves. (1992: 54) The Convent women urge those who oppress black women, to confront the consequences of their actions, and to know that in Gates' view tolerating each other is also very important and society won't survive without it, in other words "cultural tolerance comes to nothing without cultural understanding" (Kjelle, 2004: 67).
The Convent women know the feminist premise that ''happiness and power come to women who learn to beat men at their own game, to throw off any investment in romance and get down to the real dog-eat-dog thing'' (Hooks, 1992:69). They express their radical black female subjectivity by confronting the cliché representations of their sexuality as a burden they must suffer, and they succeed in making ''the oppositional space where'' their ''sexuality can be named and represented, where'' they are not sexual objects, and where they are no longer brainwashed and trapped (Hooks, 1992: 77).

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Volume 53 Black feminists believe ''black woman and black man are unable to respond fully to one another because they are so preoccupied with the white power structure, with the white man'' (ibid, 104) and this condition is what we encounter between Convent black women and Ruby black men. In other words, solidarity between black women and men continues to be undermined by sexism and misogyny.

3.4.
REBELLIOUS AND STRONG CONVENT WOMEN Gazing also has been a medium of resistance for colonized black women. The historical attempts to repress black peoples' right to gaze had produced in them a strong desire to gaze with opposition, and this desire reaches its climax and is accomplished for the Convent women. For them spaces of agency exist wherein they can interrogate the gaze of the men. According to Hooks: ''Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional'' (1992: 116). Moreover, the black women of the Convent know that how they see themselves in the Convent is most important, not how they will be stared at by others.
The Convent women led by Consolata have understood that white imperialist racist ideology has cut bonds between African Americans and their historical roots. This helps them to gain a rebellious gaze at their surrounding and create an alternative community for themselves. Magali Cornier Michael believes In a utopian gesture, Paradise depicts an alternative community of women actualized through coalition processes; at the same time, however, the novel examines the ways in which this group of women threatens the dominant societal structures that remain patriarchal and hierarchical. (2002: 644) Black women of the Convent struggle to end negative images of black womanhood which were perpetuated by Ruby men as well as the whites and attempt to overthrow the myth that all black women are sexually loose, and they demonstrate that once the social restraints on black women have been eradicated, they will be as autonomous and self-determining as men. Moreover, the Convent women are like traditional Amazons who were a group of women who joined together to promote female self-government. Diner writes of Amazonic women: Amazons deny the man, destroy the male progeny, concede no separate existence to the active principle, reabsorb it, and develop it in themselves in androgynous fashion female on the left, male on the right. (Hooks, 1982: 82) According to black feminism fear of being lonely or unloved, had caused women of all races to accept gender discrimination, however, in Paradise convent women are courageous and rebellious and are not afraid of loneliness and such conditions. They openly confront gender discrimination and armed racism of Ruby men to the point of death.
Convent women go on to heal the wounds suffered as a result of maternal neglect and struggle to create a new way of seeing and interacting with the world around them, recognizing their individual responsibilities for creating better communities, and seeking, above all, a society that sustains people regardless of gender, race, class, ethnicity, or sexuality.
Before the attack on the Convent, the Convent women are represented as women who are no longer brainwashed by the patriarchal hegemony of Ruby; they dance in the rain, symbolically washing away their fear and pain. The Convent women by rejecting the patriarchal ideology, and free from the laws and traditions of Ruby, ''are the ultimate outsiders, and thus a threat to the community the men have worked their entire adult lives to build'' (Beaulieau: 266).
Awareness of one's own subjectivity, which is a feminine goal, has become finally feasible and accomplished in Morrison's novel, Paradise, and for black women of the Convent. Julia Kristeva believes femininity is marginalized, and oppressed, just as the working class is marginalized and oppressed (Tyson, 2006: 103). However, at the end of Paradise the experiences of women of color, and poor, undereducated women in the Convent is not undermined, and the

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 53
Convent women are not victimized by any oppressive force, whether the force be racial, gender or class discrimination.
The Convent women who are neither farm slaves, nor domestic and kitchen slaves, successfully turn an embezzler's pornographic house into a feminized, matriarchal space and into a black feminist Convent, and into a true haven for the town's black female castoffs, and it becomes a shelter from the excesses of black patriarchy. In Hooks' terms, the convent women turn their "marginality" into "a site of resistance, as location of radical openness and possibility" (1990: 22).
Each of the Convent residents, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas, comes to the Convent because she escapes from a painful aspect of her past. As Raynor claims what Paradise does is to". . . give voice to the voiceless and record a history of a people, especially ordinary people, ''who have been ignored or purposely forgotten" (2007: 177).
According to Ghasemi, in Paradise, ''By resisting to conform to the definitions imposed on them as stereotypes and rejecting the socially accepted notions of motherhood,'' the Convent women ''refuse to be solely their children's nurturing sources and by showing an awareness of the options open to them, they are able to recognize the value of their own individuality (2012: 478).
The Convent women even remove Christian iconography from the Convent building, as one of the male invaders notes that on the wall, "Clean as new paint is the space where there used to be a Jesus" (Morrison, 1997: 12). The destruction of Catherine of Siena's image by the Convent women represents the destruction of a patriarchal ideology in which women are slaves to patriarchal Christianity. Actually the fact that Catherine of Siena's image is destroyed is a deconstruction of oppressive Christian thought, even when that image is of a "feminist" saint. Thus, the Convent women begin a gendered cultural war to the hope of creating an earthly paradise, and it is for this reason that the novel opens in dystopia, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time" (ibid,3).
It will be a huge work to analyze all the Paradise women in terms of their strength and rebelliousness, and the reason is that there are many women in the novel that can be categorized as rebellious and strong. In this regard, Craig S. Womack writes: Paradise, with its huge cast of characters-I lost count after sixty-abandons the tradition of a single literary protagonist to opt instead for an entire community as its focus, the towns of Haven and Ruby. (2009: 20) However, in the following parts, the most outstandingly wise, strong, and rebellious Convent women will be discussed:

CONSOLATA (CONNIE)
After years of drunken decline, Connie has an awakening, takes her full name (Consolata Sosa), and begins to remake the female community at the Convent. The Convent women begin to decolonize their minds when Connie claims: "I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for" (Morrison, 1997:262). In this passage, Connie renames herself Consolata, which symbolizes an effort to recreate herself and subvert the colonialist ideology that has marked her body and mind.
Consolata leads the Convent women into a new sense of purpose and life. She instructs the women to paint images of themselves, and their fears on the basement floor, and begins to lead them into sessions of womanistic loud dreaming that allow them to exorcise the ghosts that haunt them by telling their stories to each other (Beaulieau, 265). She teaches the women who come to live with her how to practice a way of life that could improve their mental and physical well being. Consolata wants to awaken the black women so that they would not only oppose the injustices of racist domination, but be so moved that they would engage in anti-racist struggle.
Throughout the novel, Consolata functions as a sort of Christ figure. The women view her as someone who accepted each black woman as she was and who acted as an ideal parent, friend, and companion in whose company the black women were safe from any harm. Like Christ, she revives two individuals who have crossed over into death. Infused with her own divinity, she prepares a special meal for the women-a sort of Last Supper-and then like Christ she invites the women on the journey of self discovery.
Her dictum that mind and body must be valued equally thus stands as her foundational lesson for the women: "Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve" (Morrison, 1997:263). Thus, the chief cause of the transformation of the Convent from house to home is Consolata, who plays the role of the Convent wise women and almost a mother to the Convent women.

MAVIS ALBRIGHT
Mavis Albright is the brave woman whose arrival in 1968 turns the Convent into a safe haven for wayward women, some on the run from men or the law, some searching for something or someone. After the battle with her husband, Mavis intentionally leaves the house through the front door, "did not look toward the kitchen and never'' returns to it again (ibid, 27). Mavis has understood this fact about men that most men, both white and black, will only respect those women who oppose their subjugation, and acknowledge as equals those who will not submit to their rule. Obviously, this black feminist knowledge is essential for the freedom of Convent women.

PATRICIA
Like other Convent women, Patricia is not brainwashed by the dominant discourse of society and knows that ''Emptying themselves of internal conflicts, Europeans located their own rejected parts in "others," identified as enslaved Africans, who became black in European eyes in order for Europeans to become white'' (Morrison, 1992:34).

GIGI
Gigi is one of the Convent women who is rebelliously fond of sunbathing naked and wearing few clothes.

WOMANISM AMONG THE CONVENT WOMEN
The Convent women are depicted in a way that reminds one of Alice Walker's definition of womanism: sociable and connecting when they spoke to you, otherwise they were still and appraising. But if a friend came by, her initial alarm at the sight of the young women might be muted by their adult manner; how calmly themselves they seemed. :265-266) Moreover, the Convent women are not brainwashed by the cliché that men are naturally more domineering, while women are seen as nurturing, child rearing and domestically inclined. As it was briefly discussed, they rebelliously follow their own minds, and do as they please.
Consolata begins the process of womanistic loud dreaming at the Convent when she speaks to the other women of her past. The process involves the women telling each other their stories in the form of loud dreaming, which is… willingly sharing and experiencing each other's painful stories, histories, and dreams and with their bodies and psyches simultaneously, they provide for each other unmatched nurturing support. (Magali, 2002) The loud dreaming at the Convent is a social process of womanistic healing to heal the Convent women's psychic wounds and to recreate their identity as subjects or agents. The Convent women are able to heal each other collectively by first articulating their traumas and then learning to recognize and love the connections between themselves and other women. As Dalsgård writes ''Once the women are coherent and strong and clean in their interior lives, they feel saved'' (2001: 233).
However, the women learn to heal themselves through confronting and sharing stories of their traumatic pasts. This point is especially applicable to Billie Delia who takes refuge in the Convent after she fights with her mother, and her memories of her stay there demonstrate how intertwined physical and psychic healing are: They had treated her so well, not embarrassed her with sympathy, had just given her sunny kindness. Looking at her bruised face and swollen eyes, they sliced cucumber for her lids after making her drink a glass of wine. No one insisted on hearing what drove her there, but she could tell they would listen if she wanted them to. : 308)

WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF THE CONVENT WOMEN'S POWER?
According to tenets of black feminism and womanism, the Convent women are aware that dependency of a woman on a man for definition of her own identity leads to her emotional breakdown when she feels unloved or neglected, the reason being that without him, she lacks her center of being. Morrison, a responsible black feminist, has also suggested the potential solution for black women's self recovery. Her proposition says that black women must take pride in their color and their gender. They need to be reliant upon other females of the community for self-fulfillment and for identification with their own selves. Female friendship not only helps black women to cope with the dehumanizing effects of patriarchy, but it also heals them emotionally. Mutual understanding and affection between black women can help them survive the discursive systems of oppression, fight against them and ameliorate the conditions of society. In Hooks' words a black woman ''Without the distortions … is a healthy, attractive looking woman who in no way resembles white people's negative stereotype of black women (1982: 65).
Convent women also feel empowered by God's protection and they know how to respect and empower themselves since they believe: "not only is God interested in you; He is you" : 147. original italics).

CONCLUSION
The development of Morrison's female characters from weak and passive stereotypes of women in The Bluest Eye to assertive, decisive, and rebellious women in Paradise, indicates that the Convent women of the Paradise do not limit themselves by blindly obeying the cliché norms of black maternity and matriarchy which assume certain cliché qualities attached to black women. The Convent women's replacement from Ruby to the Convent is generally regarded to be a flight from oppression to freedom, by which they seek to maintain their own identity in spite of the socially defined notions of conventional motherhood. Thus, the assertive women of the Convent, deconstruct the old image of black women's passivity and seclusion, and exhibit their humanity by exercising decisiveness and self-defense. Finally they succeed in decolonizing their minds from racial and patriarchal oppression as they free themselves from white and black paradoxical and hegemonic patriarchal norms imposed on them.
In Paradise, gender discrimination and racism are systems of societal and psychological restrictions which have affected the lives of the Convent women, but the restrictions have not succeeded in brainwashing their psyche and in demolishing their identities. Therefore, the novel also urges a scrutiny of the African American concepts of gender, race, and nation. That is why ''Convent women subvert the white supremacist ideology that defined black people as less than human, as genetically inferior to the country's majority'' (Elijah, 2000: 54).
The Convent women recreate themselves by the help of Connie who renames herself ''Consolata''. This gesture symbolizes her effort to reconstruct her identity as she wishes. She and other Convent women know that creating an earthly paradise is possible as long as individuals especially black women acknowledge the necessity of African American and black feminist tenets in their lives, and as long as they believe in the following sentence of the Declaration of Independence that says: All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.