Toni Morrison’s Desdemona and #BlackGirlMagic
by Marissa Joseph
Shakespeare has a complicated relationship with black America. Many black intellectuals reject or reluctantly engage with his work, widely deeming Shakespeare a symbol for Eurocentricity in the American education system. Despite this, as Patricia A. Cahill and Kim F. Hall argue, the black American community’s greatest writers “have found a source of joy, inspiration and innovation even as they resist his use as an agent of dominion.” In an attempt to express and confront the abandoned narratives and identities within Shakespeare’s Othello, Toni Morrison responded with a play set in its aftermath: Desdemona.
Throughout Desdemona, Morrison constructs a magical realist model for self-liberation by removing the previously established natural social order. In exchange, she offers Shakespeare’s characters a supernatural world where they are granted dialogue, agency, and a chance to reclaim their narratives by harnessing their magic. Desdemona legitimizes the mystical as a means for deconstructing barriers to empowerment and thus, reimagines a space for self-definition that is defined by a fantastical nature that black women both real and literary emulate to encounter their personal magic.
Desdemona stands as an innovative development in a long black feminine tradition of storytelling, and the play’s elements are found in the foundation’s of modern social movements: most specifically, #BlackGirlMagic. #BlackGirlMagic, a social media hashtag where black women share their daily grind and triumphs, calls for black women to embrace the metaphorically “magical” or amazing parts of their identities. The hashtag envisions spaces for black women to uplift their voices because their specific narratives have traditionally been left out of the fight for black liberation or in the celebration of black achievement. However, #BlackGirlMagic finds its roots in Morrison’s magical realism, which through the supernatural literally and physically demonstrates the complexity and illustriousness of the black feminine experience.
Desdemona seeks to deconstruct normalized oppressive power structures and achieves this by employing complex time structures and supernatural realms. These alterations of reality underscore the themes of freedom and self-expression in Morrison’s works and compliment the complex identities of her characters. To accomplish this, Morrison sets her play in a realm “between being killed and being undead” where “there is only the possibility of wisdom.”
The evocation of a supernatural purgatory allows for Othello’s marginalized characters to reconcile, reflect, and heal. For instance, Desdemona’s maid Barbary rises from death to finally speak plainly and truthfully to her previous master. She reminds Desdemona that she was her slave and tells her “you don’t know me.” Desdemona tries to foster solidarity with Barbary through their mutual womanhood; however, she fails to recognize that her privilege by virtue of her status as a wealthy white woman facilitates a disconnect in her relationship with Barbary.
The play’s purgatory framework reduces barriers or apprehension for expression. As a result, Barbary, freed from the confines of Shakespeare’s imagination, can own the intersections within her identity, while also forcing Desdemona to gain greater consciousness about her feminism’s inaccessibility and to reconcile with her role in an exploitative labor system. Desdemona allocates Othello’s voiceless characters expansive real estate to explore their development without the natural world’s boundaries or established order threatening their security.
The defining motivations for social movements are visions of a better future. However, conceptualizing possibilities for a divergent world that is completely free of inequity can be an arduous task for the oppressed who have experienced some form of subjugation as the status quo for centuries. In other words, what does a world without racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice truly even look like? Shakespeare’s Othello reflects, maintains, and normalizes his world’s systems. But, perhaps due to her revolutionary spirit, Morrison declines reality, defies the feasibility of Shakespeare’s natural world, and dares to imagine what social, emotional, and spiritual growth black women can accomplish in a world where the status quo is eradicated in exchange for complete freedom.
There is no better forum for this expression than magical realism, which allows for a radical escape from the confines of the realistic through fantastical literary elements. #BlackGirlMagicalRealism is a literary spinoff of #BlackGirlMagic’s capacity to surreally produce new opportunities for the burgeoning of identity. In an interview (above), Morrison observes that magical realism most holistically informs the past; however, Desdemona’s #BlackGirlMagicalRealism extends fantasy’s intentions to also provide an objective for a future where black women are limitless.
In ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ W.E.B Dubois describes how colonized peoples are forced to measure themselves “by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt,” creating a “double-consciousness” where the oppressed are constantly aware of their inferior standing in society while attempting to “attain self-conscious manhood.” As Ayanna Thompson has addressed, Shakespeare’s discussion of race in Othello magnifies “double consciousness” by neglecting to reference Othello’s Moorish identity and mystical cultural practices beyond exaggerating its differences, making “white, Western culture the norm from which everything else is a lesser deviation.” Contemporary media continues to reinforce whiteness as an ideal standard and establish white women as the apex for beauty and authentic femininity generating self-esteem issues in black women.
In order to prioritize the perspective of Othello’s marginalized characters, Othello’s dominant persecutor and most prevalent orator, Iago, is notably absent from Desdemona because he does not possess a ‘magic’ or sense of ‘otherness’ necessary to inhabit Morrison’s world that centralizes the marginalized and traditionally voiceless. Through the alternative text, Othello’s characters can convey bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze,” a critical gaze that allows room for dissection of power structures. Desdemona depicts Iago as an outsider, demoting Othello’s dominating culture to foreign and obsolete status. By removing Iago’s white gaze, Morrison births an oppositional gaze that is free from the desire or pressure to achieve white acceptance and empowers her characters to obtain consciousness apart from judgment. #BlackGirlMagic follows the same avenue when addressing the contemporary struggle for black women to exist without comparison to white women and constructs a black girls-only club for reflection on a shared experience. When whiteness is removed as an objective in both Desdemona and #BlackGirlMagic, blackness is granted permission to not simply just exist, but thrive.
Magic and the supernatural in Othello serve as symbols of Othello’s ties to his lineage and culture, which only serve as barriers to his success. However, in Desdemona, Othello is free from white projections about his culture, allowing him to instead appreciate and draw courage from the magic of the black women who raised him. He recalls how his mother “worshipped the natural world” and encouraged him to “rehearse certain songs to divine its power.” The juxtaposition of “natural” and “rehearse” implies that magic is both inherent to the existence of black women and perfected as black women undergo life’s challenges. While embracing white misunderstanding of Othello’s mother, caregivers, and the culture they pioneered and bestowed to him, Morrison simultaneously shifts their mystical association from a wicked connotation to a glorious one. By doing so, Morrison re-imagines Othello’s cultural differences into uplifting symbols and legitimizes magic as a source of strength rather than a means of destruction.
Utilizing #BlackGirlMagicalRealism, Morrison manifests that black women are magical and supplies a literary model on how they can begin to encounter their magic. As a student, I never enjoyed reading Shakespeare and felt that he was far removed culturally from my experience as a black woman; however, through remixing Shakespeare’s Othello in lieu of employing #BlackGirlMagicalRealism in a vacuum, Morrison “appropriates the alleged properties of Western culture.” In the process, as Cahill and Hall discuss, Morrison transforms “them into something uniquely African American,” encouraging generations of black women and influencing how popular culture consumes us.
Morrison’s unapologetically black literary structure endures in contemporary media frameworks seeking to increase media representation of black women with black women superhero leads such as Lady Knight in the Emmy-winning HBO television series Watchmen, or the sibling pair Thunder and Lightning in the CW’s Black Lightning. The popular children’s show That’s So Raven highlights the coming-of-age trials and tribulations of a psychic black teenage girl, displaying that “magic” is found in its greatest abundance amongst black youth. As hooks argues, representations of black women in conventional media have historically been derivatives of a racist status quo; however, when black women reinvent narratives and media in their own gaze and image, they undermine the systems of white supremacy and structures that seek to restrict their identity and self worth. #BlackGirlMagic supports black women in defining their own representation, and thus, demands a new status quo where black women are seen and presented accurately and intentionally.
#BlackGirlMagic materializes Morrison’s literary dream world into reality by creating a social media movement where black women can dismiss their place in the world’s social hierarchy and white standards for femininity, instead, normalizing blackness and celebrating the magic that is foundational to their existence. #BlackGirlMagic creates an important haven and empowers black women to carry their reclaimed magic out into a less than perfect larger American society. The celebration of black women and their magic is growing increasingly relevant as present generations are reclaiming the resources they deserve and taking seats at tables they built for themselves. Whether they are using their powers to fight paranormal evils or high school mean girls, black women continue to persist with an ease that seems supernatural.
Marissa Joseph is a sophomore at Harvard College studying History and Literature. A child of Haitian immigrants, Marissa centers her studies on the history and development of the Caribbean and Latin American, and these cultures provide her writing with a culturally enriched style and perspective. Marissa specializes in personal essays and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for outstanding contributions in journalism. Marissa is currently a staff writer on The Harvard Crimson editorial board, and on campus, she serves on the Executive Board of the Association of Black Harvard Women.
