The ambivalent association Frantz Fanon makes between "Blackness" and "Nature" in Black Skin, White Masks manages to be both appropriating and ironical:

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and, as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United States, "The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance." (129)

For Fanon, the "human sustenance" granted the "Negro" is often read as a preternatural kinship with Nature itself, "he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, 'open to all breaths of the world.' I embrace the world! I am the world!" (127) Quotations from Césaire and Nordey, "My blacknessthrusts into the red flesh of the sun/ It thrusts into the burning flesh of the sky" (124) among them, attempt to make a place for the "Negro" in Nature, a spiritual kin with the earth. "Nevertheless" notes Fanon,

one had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal marriage of the group and the cosmos. Black Magic, primitive mentality, animism, animal eroticism, it all floods over me. All of it is typical of peoples that have not kept pace with the evolution of the human race. Or, if one prefers, this is humanity at its lowest. Having reached this point, I was long reluctant to commit myself. (125-26)

And yet, Fanon finds he has no "choice" of identifications; lines like Senghor's, "Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek" (127) condemn him. "From all sides dozens and hundreds of pages assail me and try to impose their wills on me. But a single line would be enough," (8) he writes in the Introduction. The seductiveness of this perceived power between the "Negro" and Nature-heirs to the earth, is as Fanon asserts, nothing more than a fiction, for "The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it" (128). This "acquisitive relationship" means that the Negro can only act as the Natural "human sustenance" link for white culture; s/he cannot consider this relationship, or any other between them, separate and equal: "The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes" (140).

But the last lines of Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" chapter are a bit more ambivalent:

I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limitYesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. (140)

Nature is both within and without Fanon; he has become a part of the world, but the world, the silence, oppresses. Similar ambivalence surrounds the character of Son in Tar Baby, one of Toni Morrison's earliest attempts to create and rely upon connections between myth and the personification of Nature; her island is haunted by Nature, and the characters who interact with it and each other are often ascribed relationships to this Natural force, which acts like yet another character in the novel.

The fact that Morrison's descriptions of Son use language that associates him with Nature-he is first described immersed in the sea, "his skin blended well with the dark waters," (1) he is called "wild, aggressive, vicious" by Jadine (97) and her relationship with him is mediated by "small dark dogs" (98)-and his effect on the plants in Valerian's greenhouse, and the coordination of his arrival on the island and an insurgence of ants all seem to point to a Senghorian connection between Son's "Blackness" and the Natural world. He is, in short, the breeze that blooms the cyclamen.

But I would argue that the Natural world in Morrison's novel is forever mediated by commerce, by capitalistic industrialization and the pursuit of the "improvement" of Nature. The commodification of race and gender that negotiates the characterizations of Margaret (the beauty queen), Valerian (the candy and candy factory), and Jadine (the model) is extended to the classed, typed inhabitants of the island (a continuum maintained by Sydney, Ondine, Yardman, and Alma Estée), the places in which they live, and their relationship to the Natural world. While the Street's picture-perfect home on the island, with its monogrammed sheets and silk pajamas is House Beautiful incarnate, the niche that the rest of the characters occupy is reconciled through its filter; dependent on Valerian as a source of income, all but one of the characters we encounter are unable to live a life unfettered by commerce, or enjoy a relationship to the island independent of L'Arbe de la Croix, its "oldest and most impressive" (8) structure.

The notable exception, the character whose blindness to the materiality Son and every other character in the novel seeks affords her the greatest perspective is Thérèse, the woman "as blind as justice" (261) whose anonymity perpetually allows her work at the Street's but whose ability to "hear fish calling from the sea," (261) and see the spirits of the island rather implies a ubiquity, an immeasurable breadth of vision. She warns Son away from Jadine, who "has forgotten her ancient properties" (263) and urges him toward phantoms in a last attempt to subvert the wealthy, commodified package that has seduced him:

You can choose now. You can get free of her. They are waiting in the hills for you. They are naked and they are blind too. I have seen them; their eyes have no color in them. But they gallop; they race those horses like angels all over the hills where the rain forest is, where the champion daisy trees still grow. Go there. Choose them. (263)

Son's retreat into the darkness, to join the men on faith and reject his love for a woman "like Jadine," represents the only moment in the book when the Natural world is unmediated by commerce.

Other moments in the text, when Son's presence intimates a connection with Nature are thus proven false by comparison. Flicking the stems in Valerian's greenhouse in simulation of a billowing wind is seen more concretely as human interference within a human-controlled garden-a stark manipulation of Nature by the same forces that "grew houses" in the rainforest (8). Son's suggestion for getting rid of the ants, after dousing them with chemicals, is the installation of mirrors-the creation of an unnatural universe that the ants will reject. And the dislocated bricks leading to the greenhouse, "like they were poked from beneath" (245) and the "heavy branch" (245) obscuring the washhouse, both manifestations that occur after Son leaves, are but intimations of the urging earth below-notice is only taken of the disturbing effects of the Natural world upon the commodified, its own qualities are unnoticed.

Other scenes when Son's presence is invoked, Jadine's immersion in tar, and her soldier ant monologue, are also similarly corrupted by a mediating materialism. For, while Jadine thought "the women hanging in the trees looked down at her" (156) while she struggled with the tar, her rejection of them and her return to her stalled car signifies her reliance upon the considerations of an industrialized existence. From the tops of the trees, the women "wondered at the girl's desperate struggle down below to be free, to be something other than they were" (157), but when Jadine leaves the scene, she doesn't look up, and from a distance, she "could not identify the tree that had danced with her" (158). While the possibility that Jadine will recant her decision on the plane to reject the complex commodification of race, gender, and class that have typed her and denaturalized the landscape, her recognition of Son's potential to bring her away into the phantom world of the island is objectified in Natural imagery; he is the worker ant to her queen. The Natural has become a way of poetically rendering her rejection, and while her imagined narrative denotes loss and hurt, "soldier ants do not have time for dreaming," (251) and she presses on on a jet to Paris, her sealskin coat adjacent. Her appropriation of the Natural as a vehicle for the rationalization of materiality is the last reference the text makes before Son joins the phantoms of the island; her figurative application is countered by his literal abandon.

Natural imagery has a tendency to be so ambivalent in Tar Baby because of the catalytic effect Son has on the island and its inhabitants, and the Naturalistic language used to describe him. And yet, those doing the describing are generally viewed as commodified stereotypes for whom everything is exotic and bothersome in the same breath. Son's influence is indeed fresh air, but as the narrative makes plain, his own fantasies of Eloe and idealization of Jadine connote his own illusions. Ultimately, I think it can be argued that Son's Natural associations prove "true," in a sense, for he is the only character to abandon himself to the spirits of the island; the imagery acts as a foreshadowing, or an indication of his potential for identification, rather than a Fanonian appropriated irony of the Nature-related "Negro." It is mediated through enculturation until he himself breaks free, "Lickety-lickety-lickety split" (264). What such a critique accomplishes, however, is the situation of a Nature-force in the island itself, rather than in Son; the power of place and its history is reinforced rather than the power of a small-town man with a frank (if deluded) relationship to his origins. The place assumes all the magic, raising questions about the ability of one's origins to connect with one, as opposed to the diametrical, conventional journey. Morrison's novel seems to be assuming that one's receptivity gauges one's ability to "Return;" the magic is already in place.

An interesting response to Morrison's imagery, as well as the ambivalence behind it, can be found in Audre Lorde's prose. In her "biomythography," Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, central scenes take place in Nature, most notably her "coming out" revelation to Ginger:

Ginger was not much of a nature lover, but she had taken me to see her favorite spot, a wooded hill on the west edge of town where, hidden from view by the overgrown bushes and trees, we could sit on two old tree stumps left from long ago, smoking and listening to Fats Domino and watching the sun go down. (134)

After the conversation they join "hands there on the top of the hill, with the sound of the car radio drifting upward through the open door belowgrinning at each other while the sun went down," (136) the car radio being the only remnant of mechanistic civilization touching the scene. Indeed, after the women come together, they "Naturalize" the spaces around them, "usually on that old brass bed in the insulated sunporch, that drafty haven on Walker Road which we turned tropical with the heat of our young bodies' wildness" (142).

Similarly, her move to Mexico City is an attempt to connect with place in a sensual, physical manner: "It was a sea of strange sounds and smells and experiences that I swam into with delight daily" (164) and her return to New York and its "humid heat was oppressive after the dry hot climate of Mexico" (176). Like Fanon himself, Lorde is both within and without Nature; a connection to the Natural world isn't solely rudimentary and primitive because the earth isn't always in compliance. As Fanon writes, "for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world," (126-27) a statement that allows mood, temperament and memory to influence responses to Nature. The "Negro" isn't on an instinctive basis with the external world; the separation of thought and soul, so easily dichotomized in Senghor, cannot be so clearly delineated for Fanonconsciousness isn't no easily dissected. That both Fanon and Lorde are writing first-person narratives makes their relationship to place and imagery all the more intimate; while Morrison's narrative explores the consciousness of several characters, their own self-awareness is limited. Even Jadine's "dance" with the trees and her frustration and embarrassment at the sight of the ghost-women looking down at her isn't approached in a way that suggests she's aware of the scene's effect on her, or the ways in which her own experiences color it.

A work like Lorde's Cancer Journals affords us the most intimate interaction with Fanonian self-awareness, and the ways in which the Natural world and its characterizations manifest themselves according to the complexities of consciousness and circumstance. Lorde's intent, to "integrate this crisis (breast cancer, radical mastectomy) into my life" (10) is a way to "Naturalize" or attempt to "embody" medical invasiveness; the subtext asserts the power and comfort of the "Natural," but the effort involved in "Naturalizing" unmasks Nature as a construct, a malleable set of norms that become comfortable and organic. Like Morrison's Son, Lorde has to circumvent the commodification of Nature (here represented both by surgery and post-op breast implants) in an effort to accept and interact with Life, that passionate, abandoning self Son finally becomes. Asserting that the only way to achieve this kind of triumph is through personal, subjective narrative, the self-ordering of the Natural in prose, Lorde writes, "And yes I am completely self-referenced right now because it is the only translation I can trust" (11).

Of course, Lorde realizes the ways in which this translation colors everything:

Spring comes, and still I feel despair like a pale cloud waiting to consume me, engulf me like another cancer, swallow me into immobility, metabolize me into cells of itself; my body, a barometer. I need to remind myself of the joy, the lightness, the laughter so vital to my living and my health. Otherwise, the other will always be waiting to eat me up into despair again. And that means destruction. I don't know how, but it does. (12)

This hyperawareness of her subjectivity lends a particular slant to Lorde's series of associations with Spring, needing to allow herself the kinds of optimism the season represents, yet acknowledging how different life feels from mood to mood. But Lorde additionally attaches the transitions from life to death to these conditions; the "Natural" state of one's body can be manipulated by dispositions, seasons, and medical intervention, by the very commodification of the body's processes. The bridge between life and death, that most "Natural" of circumstances, is thus infiltrated by commerce; "I am an anachronism," Lorde writes, "Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. There must be some way to integrate death into living" (13). "Science" attempts to dictate, like the capitalist arches of L'Arbe de la Croix, the ways in which people relate to Nature, to their body's processes, for good and ill. Lorde's challenge, like Son's, lies in usurping that mediated connection, Fanon's "acquisitive relationship" to Nature, and returning to an instinctive association with one's body that, while also "constructed" (following invasive surgery), is nevertheless closer to an organic reunification of the consciousness and the body, synthesized as Life.

Again, as the seasons change, Lorde finds this reunification taking place:

Last spring was another piece of the fall and winter before, a progression from all the pain and sadness of that time, ruminated over. But somehow this summer which is almost upon me feels like a part of my future. Like a brand new time, and I'm pleased to know it, wherever it leads. I feel like another woman, de-chrysalised and become a broader, stretched-out me, strong and excited, a muscle flexed and honed for action. (14)

As her body heals, Lorde's perception of time and the Natural changes; optimism and health are capable of "birthing" her anew, and she is able to reconstruct a sense of self, once mediated by medicine, on a plane with Son's alignment with Nature. But Lorde's later narrative, positioned after her journal excerpts, brings out the disturbances of the medical in more detail-a narrative equally self-reflective, but with a more politicized account of her lingering and post-surgical relationship with medicine.

The third day after her surgery, when Lorde is "still not thinking too much, except about why was I hurting more and when could I reasonable expect to go home," (42) she is visited by a representative of the American Cancer Society's Reach for Recovery program, who gives her a lambswool prosthesis for her missing right breast and says cheerfully, "nobody'll ever know the difference" (42). "But," as Lorde writes, "what she said was 'You'll never know the difference,' and she lost me there, because I knew sure as hell I'd know the difference" (42). The expectation colors her attempt to wear the prosthesis; a mediated self, commodified in pink lambswool and sold in stores, could never allow Lorde the ability to relate with herself as a "Natural," organic being-however constructed such a self-perception can be:

I came around my bed and stood in front of the mirror in my room, and stuffed the thing into the wrinkled folds of the right side of my bra where my right breast should have been. It perched on my chest askew, awkwardly inert and lifeless, and having nothing to do with any me I could possibly conceive of. Besides, it was the wrong color, and looked grotesquely pale through the cloth of my bra. I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable, than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes. For not even the most skillful prosthesis in the world could undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself. (44)

The commodified mediation, here glaringly represented as "pale" and "false" and "lifeless"-the prosthetic equivalent of Morrison's L'Arbe de la Croix-interrupts even the most alien relationship Lorde has to her own body, that intercepted by clothing, and prevents healing and connection. Like Fanon, Lorde isn't asserting that because of her "blackness" she is Nature incarnate, threatened by all mediation; rather, she asserts that a relationship to the Natural is both a mind and a body activity, and as much as she will feel the difference in a prosthetic breast, she will know it. The "reality" of her mastectomy scars is truly a modification of Nature, of "herself," but insofar as nothing has been added, her body is in a "Natural" state. Lorde's primary problem with prosthetics is that they treat breast cancer as a cosmetic issue, denying women the ability to come to terms with their post-op bodies, and denying them the ability to be verbal and visible as cancer survivors, shrouding their courage in pretense. The Natural in this way additionally represents solidarity, community and courage, as much a war on cosmetics as a war on cancer. Of course, the communities that are borne out of such trauma and the trauma itself, as well as the ultimate decision to brand one look "Natural" and one "Unnatural" are all constructed; one mustn't necessarily be blind like Thérèse or uninhibited like Son to connect to a mythical "Nature." Rather, one creates one's own Nature in Lorde's work, its very birth a "Natural" act. In Morrison, "place" seduces; the Island has its mysteries and only a few can know them; in Lorde, the few create their own mysteries, their own "rhythms" (to use a Fanonian phrase), and "place" is seductive only if chosen to be so.

This conversation between the locations of and relationships between Nature and Self plays out much of Fanon's ambivalence towards the trope of the perceived power between the "Negro" and Nature; it takes turns situating that power in different places. Whether Nature is earth, or the concept of home, or the location of one's "origins," or the body, the idea that one is connected to Life within and without one's consciousness and that one's relationship to that very Life is mediated by internal and external factors both explodes and embraces the romantic connection between the "Negro" and Nature. On the one hand, Fanon notes that a "Negro" relationship to a predominately white "Nature" can be nothing more than a slave relationship; on the other, he writes, "Yes, we are-we Negroes-backward, simple, free in our behavior. That is because for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. your white civilization overlooks subtle riches and sensitivity (126-27). Each one of the protagonists in the works I've discussed runs up against some totalitarian, ratiocinate regime of the norm that threatens to displace them. Son is threatened by Valerian, Jadine, Margaret and others, Audre of Zami is threatened by her mother, her teachers, and an ice cream parlor in Washington, and Audre of The Cancer Journals is threatened by doctors, nurses, institutions like the Reach for Recovery program, and matrices of cosmetic and medical power. Each "explodes" in his or her own way, to break, as Fanon foresees, "the hellish cycle." That explosion is an escape into a constructed "Natural," a paroxysm of dreams deferred, behaviors united only by the act of rebellion.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1980.

--. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom: Crossing Press, 1982.

Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Signet, 1983.