SULA

Today I heard the voice of Toni Morrison in my head for the first time. As she read out each line of her book “Sula” to me, a clear and flowing narration from the right distance, the exact line that divides the real from fiction, I felt the powerful connection to the world in which Sula lived and the lives she entered and destroyed through the sheer beauty of the words that Toni Morrison uses. Each word was so miraculously placed, it seemed like they were all holding hands with the right partners. Each line that she created was beautiful in so many aspects: the way in she describes a thought or a scene or an emotion. When I started reading, I was curious because something in which the way her name was written on the cover, maybe the font or maybe the name itself struck a chord. I knew she must be famous but I didn’t subject this book to the usual scanning of the fine print about the reviews and the summary at the back. I didn’t even read the note about the author. I turned to the page one and began to read as if I was in a hurry to get on with the reading.
Set in a town called Medallion, during the world war days ( first and second), the story is weaved around the lives of two black girls, Sula and Nell who became friends when they were mere girls. Both come from very different households and have personalities which doesn’t seem to be able to get along if you rip apart the personality from the person, but together the two personalities seem to make one beautiful relationship. Sula is the freebird, the wild one who stands out from the rest of the town girls with her curiosity and individuality. Nell is the typical sweet one on the exterior but with a mind of her own inside and the reason she loves Sula is because only she can bring out the real Nell who has thoughts as daring as those that shouldn’t be allowed. Nell is the person that Sula reaches out to when she wants tranquility the only person who means anything in her restless, bondless world. It starts with their lives as girls and later Sula leaves the town in search of freedom only to come back to Medallion after being unable to , find peace or that intangible substance of life that she was after. Her uncompromising, wild and seemingly evil ways make the townspeople brand her as a witch. The bond that she once shared with her best friend becomes hazy as their differences take over and soon they are left to themselves, their lives empty and ugly.
It is a typical story if you try to summarize it, but what makes the book enchanting is the compelling writing that sucks you into its depths of metaphors, wonderful moments and sadness. One moment you are free falling through Sulas mind and the next you are caught in Nells. Its like poetry came home disguised as a novel. Great writing is being able to make the reader abandon the environment she inhabits entirely to step into the book and smell the earth the walk on, be all the characters in it, lead their lives and take a while to come back to where you are. I felt that because I couldn’t bring myself to close the book and I kept hoping that I hadn’t read the last line.I couldn’t switch on the tv and expose myself to my ordinary life after such fine writing. More than Nell and Sula what I wanted was more of the words, the writing. That’s when I read about Toni Morisson on the first page. It was only right that she was a Nobel Prize winner with other awards in her bag such as the Pulitzer and the National Critics award. What I loved most about it is the irony of calling the town “The bottom” in spite of it being at the top of the hill and not the valley. That’s because it was inhabited by the blacks of the region and the whites lived in the valley. The Bottom of heaven is how she described it.

“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no top and no bottom only circles and circles of sorrow”