That Sula Is a Problem to Be Thought

I keep thinking about Sula and space. Or: Sula with Jude, the husband of her good friend Nel, naked, on the floor—on all fours. I keep thinking about that space. And Jude, soft (“so soft”). The two of them touching “like dogs.” Only touching one another with their lips. “Nibbling at each other, not even touching, not even looking at each other, just their lips.” I keep thinking about Jude turning to Nel, who has stumbled into the room, “catching” her husband and best friend on the floor in that savagery—in some peculiar state of primitive curiosity. I keep thinking about Jude then turning to Nel, giving Nel that look she recognizes—the one he gives the children when he’s listening to Gabriel Heatter on the radio and they come and “break [his] train of thought.” Jude giving Nel, like he gives the children in those moments—giving Nel, like a child—an opportunity to bow out. Jude giving Nel—as if she were a child—a moment, “a piece of time, to remember what [she is] doing,” that she is “interrupting” and should “go on back to wherever [she was] and let [him] listen to Gabriel Heatter.” That she should scram. That Nel should leave him with Sula on the floor, free to concentrate on the meaning being made off the currents of the music from what has opened before him and Sula as a pleasure-space. And Nel—and really, the thing I’ve been thinking about is Nel—just standing there with a grin somehow on her face. Nel “seeing [them] and smiling, because maybe there [is] some explanation, something important that [she doesn’t] know about it that would make it alright.”(1) Yikes!

Yes, Sula and Jude are nude. Yes, Sula later admits to Nel that they “fucked.”(2) Indeed, the fact of the scene in Nel’s home is obscene... Also-and, at the same time, where we meet Sula and Jude is not the pornographic. The purported lewdness of what happened between them lies in its having happened, not in the happened’s how. When we see them, Jude’s genitalia is soft—so soft. When we see them, they’re not even touching but for their lips. This means they’re face-to-face with the rest of their separate bodies hiding from the other’s body—hunched over on all fours—their bodies not together but turned away. And their lips are not even kissing, they’re nibbling—tasting. Perhaps teasing. And, their eyes are elsewhere. We intrude upon Sula and Jude as they perform a queer sort of intimacy. An oddity so far passed the act of normative sex that Nel, in her recall, can retrieve only one name for it. And the name that she retrieves for it is animal. 

I concede that by all accounts our Sula is a problem. Left bewildered at age 12, Sula is let into the wild.(3) Not long after the death of her Uncle Plum, who was set afire in his sleep by his mother, Sula’s grandmother, in their family home, Sula overhears, in that same home, her mother Hannah speaking with two friends. Hannah tells her friends that she does not like Sula. She loves her daughter, yes, but she “just don’t like her.” Hannah’s candid confession releases Sula from the domestic sphere. Hannah’s words, when they reach Sula’s ears, untether something in her. Sula goes “flying” up the stairs “in bewilderment,”(4) then down the stairs and out of one of the home’s many doors. Where she runs is with Nel into the wild where she does a wild thing. On the fly, “where trees group themselves in families”(5) near where the river widens, she tosses a boy, sends him flying into the water and does nothing to safeguard his survival. She does not intercede in his subsequent drowning.

Sula grows into a woman whose sole responsibility is that of herself. She comes to lead a life unsubscribed from the supposed to’s prescribed to her social position as “a woman and a colored woman at that.”(6) As Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie writes in her book African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Sula emerges as “an individual person distinguishing herself and exceeding the allowable community norms,” a distinction that carries with it “[the] potential to destabilize the collective’s balance.”(7) The woman is a threat, “considered to have powers superior to mortals, which places her under the highest suspicion. The townsfolk note that she is impervious to insect bites, had ‘no childhood diseases,’ and it is said that ‘when Sula drank she never belched.’”(8) Incorporated into the Bottom’s folklore, Sula becomes a legend, an object of surveillance and a topic for discussion. 

The mere sight of her makes the mothers better mothers, and makes the women of the Bottom better lovers. Sula is something else. The townsfolk’s disdain for Sula gives them something to compete with, a figure to rub up against and be better than. Sula is a wild woman. Undomestic, unpredictable, and uncontrolled by communal codes, the townsfolk curse her and oust her as other. So Sula resides on the outskirts of the Bottom. While physically settled within the town’s limits, figuratively she occupies someplace else as an outsider—and that else is the space that I want to get to.

Every problem is a question to be understood, to be taken up as thought and sought an answer. What an inquiry does is supply us with direction because a question, open-ended, takes its quester somewhere. So, here I am in-query, seeking what there is to learn in Sula from the problem Sula. This elusive she who gathers up her own personhood, transcends the narrative written for her, comes up legendary.(9) This she on all fours. What is it that leads Sula toward this display—toward this play with Nel’s husband on the floor? 

Detached from external motivators and notions of accumulating capital, Sula lives an “experimental life” “free of ambition.”(10) Ambition concerns itself with time after now—it reaches for result. Sula’s reach does not extend beyond the current moment. Absent creative materials like clay or paint, absent training in creative disciplines like dance or music composition,(11) Sula’s chosen artistic craft is improvisation. This leaves her preoccupied with whim(12), intrinsically led by sudden turns and inclinations of her mind, which requires her full presence in the present. (And pleasure is what gratifies the mind.) 

The mind turns toward pleasure. The sharpest stage Sula finds for this satisfaction is lovemaking. She’s learned that when she surrenders herself to the act in-body, there is a limitless power available for her to access and embody.(13) She surrenders by relinquishing all desire of control, by submitting to what is, as it is. In the here-now of pleasure’s whelm, Sula experiences, at the point of the act’s climax, a soundlessness that is the “silence… [of] the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself [has] no meaning.” In the falling action of the act, she weeps for what does not exist there in that expanse of solitude. And in the following moment that is the act’s denouement, Sula experiences “the postcoital privateness in which she [meets] herself, welcome[s] herself, and join[s] herself in matchless harmony.”(14)

There’s power, as it were, found in the bliss of release. Sula’s key to entering pleasure-space is allowing the sensation of what’s here-now to possess and overtake her. To be taken rather than to be the taker. It’s only when Sula has a mishap with Ajax that she steps out of the present moment and her experience with/in pleasure gets away from her. 

She and Ajax have a fling—it is a spontaneous thing. He comes to her when he comes, bearing impromptu gifts—bottles of milk he nabbed from a truck, a branch he knocked down to bring her its berries. But somewhere in their dalliance Sula forgets herself. She begins to anticipate his visits; she bends toward longevity. In her expectation she clings to a future moment of what has not yet come; her desire for the long-term is the intention to hold onto what has already been. When Ajax does not return, their situationship ending as abruptly as it began, Sula ends up no different from Nel—searching for evidence of his having-been-there-at-all amid the immense vacancy of his non-presence in the place that she, in her “new and alien” feeling of “possession”(15) over Ajax, made for him. 

Sula’s want to possess Ajax is her want to keep him. Recognizing this, Ajax moves to make his swift exit because he is a free man—he doesn’t want to be kept. In the wake of his departure, Sula acknowledges her error: “I did not hold my head stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it.”(16) Sula’s budding ambition takes her from the here-now’s pleasure-space, and she ends up lost.

At the novel’s climax, Nel visits Sula as she lays dying. It’s been three years since they’ve seen one another, three years since Nel found Sula with Jude. She asks Sula to fill her in. Nel asks her how could she have done it and Sula sucks her teeth. The answer Sula provides is one of space: it was in front of her and behind her, in her head even, and that Jude was filler: “And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.”(17) When she asks Sula did she love him, Sula looks to the room’s boarded-up window, “about to fall off into sleep,”(18) bored by what Nel still doesn’t know. (And this thing that Nel doesn’t know is perhaps the thing that Jude, on the floor, allotted Nel—like a child—the “piece of time” for.) 

That Nel was upset about the whole thing to begin with, “behav[ing] the way the others [in the Bottom] would have,” had originally surprised and saddened Sula.(19) Nel’s enduring grievance about it disappoints Sula again. Nel brings the conversation to herself—she was a good friend, doesn’t that account for something? To this, Sula replies that being good to someone is just like being bad to them: “Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.”(20) Nel mistakes Sula’s response for confusion, an insensible answer. But Sula speaks aptly from the sense she knows—that people do not owe you. Debt is predicated upon the past. Sula spends no time dwelling on what’s did and done—the past is where she’d have to be to pathologize her prior desires. What Sula knows intimately is that despite our ties all we truly have are ourselves, and physical intimacy—that is, sexual play as a form of feeling and figuring out ourselves in order to continue to meet and join with ourselves—is one way to enter further into that knowing. The thing Sula’s living praxis of pleasure-in-the-now makes room for is a space without teleological assemblages, unattached to progressions of time; a space outside of colonial capitalist logics of laying claim to people as things, of owning other people’s bodies, their pleasure(s). Sula’s improvisations proffer what Nel does not yet know: an other way of being—of embodying the strangeness of being an actual singular being, made so by yourself, not anyone else. 

(1) Morrison, Toni (2002). Sula. Vintage Books, 2002. (Original work published 1973). pp. 105-106.

(2) Ibid. p. 145.

(3) bewilder—from be- "thoroughly" + archaic wilder "lead astray, lure into the wilds" Source: Douglas Harper. (n.d.). Bewilder (v.). Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/bewilder#etymonline_v_11100 

(4) Morrison, Toni (2002). Sula. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1973). p. 57.

(5)  Ibid.

(6) When, three years following the Jude incident, Nel visits Sula on her sickbed, the two get into a heated exchange where Nel tells her, in part: “You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.” Ibid. (p. 142)

(7) Zauditu-Selassie, Kokahvah (2014). African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison. University Press of Florida. p. 64. 

(8) Ibid. p. 63.

(9) This inquest begins not with ‘what is Morrison in her book—what is Sula—trying to teach us?’ but ‘what can Sula teach us?,’ as characters complex in nature come to life. It is in their living that we as readers can believe them as real persons. Like living people, dynamic characters are individuals able to show us something that no one else can. While introduced into the (storied) world by their author, these characters exist beyond the author and may even live beyond the writer’s original intentions for them. 

(10) Morrison, Toni (2002). Sula. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1973). p. 118, 119.

(11) Ibid. p. 121.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Ibid. p. 122.

(14) Ibid. p. 123.

(15) Ibid. p. 131.

(16) Ibid. p. 136.

(17) Ibid. p. 144.

(18) Ibid. p. 144.

(19) Ibid. p. 120.

(20) Ibid. p. 145.

C. LaSandra Cummings is a poet/writer based in her hometown of Orlando, Florida. Her research interests lie where queer theory meets black feminist thought in space(s) outside the reigns of colonial time. She earned her BA and MA from the University of Central Florida; and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she received the Jovanovich Imaginative Writing Award. Her recent paper appears in Callaloo. She works as an educator.

SISTORIES PROMPT

Write in your journal or respond in the comment section below.

1. What does living a life solely committed to pleasure look like for you? Are you living that life? Why or why not?

2. Write a love poem about a friend. If desired, it can be about more than one friend.

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