Song of Solomon represents the dialogic encounter of two cultures, African and Western, through the use of African myths and European legends and fairy tales. Morrison employs magic realist strategies in her insertion of Western myths within an African American framework with the aim of valorising a so far discredited knowledge. She combines the acceptance of the supernatural with a profound rootedness in the real world, producing a mixture of fairy tale and family chronicle very close to Garcfa Mdrquez's saga of the Buendfas. Morrison bases her strategy on the beliefs of the black community and its way of viewing reality, thus claiming a particular cosmology that accommodates magic within the quotidian reality. This involves an ontological question: how do we name the world around us? Where lies the power to define reality and perception? What is true and what a product of our imagination? The blending of two codes of reality, the natural and the supernatural, implies a transgression of boundaries: spiritual/material, life/death, animate/inanimate, subject/object, truth/fiction. It also implies a peculiar treatment of time and space, outside Western parameters. Morrison employs characteristics of black literature: a deliberate oral quality, based on storytelling; a chorus with a leading role; the presence of an ancestor; the participation of the reader. Song of Solomon acquires political dimensions by dealing with a number of social and historical topics, such as the loss of black culture as a result of the migration to the North, the clash between social classes, the emergence of black political activism, the role of black women, or the achievement of identity as a communal gesture. Strongly influenced by the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s, Song of Solomon offers a powerful combination of Afro-centric and feminist politics, which brings to the fore the political potential of magic realism.