Giant Steps
Toni Morrison, one of America’s great visionary authors, passed away last week. We lost not only a supremely talented writer, but also a woman of profound courage, incisive vision, and sublime sensibilities. As an African-American woman, her writing enveloped and embraced the marginalized in our society—her society. Novels like Sula, Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Jazz, and Paradise examined the sweeping effects that slavery, hatred, and discrimination left on both broadly social and intensely personal levels, and scrutinized how these forces shaped the African-American psyche.
Pecola Breedlove, the abused and traumatized little girl in Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, is presented not as an object of pity (although her suffering is evident) but as a product of self-loathing and internalized racism produced by the society around her. Pecola’s one desire is to have eyes as blue as Shirley Temple’s. She believes herself ugly; she believes her eyes, her color, her people are ugly. She wants to be white. The reader finds herself walking the tightrope between sympathy for the girl and outrage against those (usually those closest to Pecola) responsible for what she has gone through.
Toni Morrison understood how to use language as few others did, how to navigate the landscape between description and implication, and to balance the work of fiction between writer and reader. The framing of The Bluest Eye exemplifies this narrow line.
The beginning frame of the novel mimics the elementary school Dick and Jane reading primers widely used in the forties and fifties: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family….” and on and on. (To view the text, click on the link below and scroll to the section immediately following the title page.)
The house, the father, the mother, the brother, and the family pets are all represented in the introduction. But then Morrison repeats the primer text, at first without punctuation, and then, once more, in a block form without spaces between the words, creating an increasingly frenzied reading of what normal—white—America looks like in Pecola’s world, implying, perhaps, her descent into insanity as she realizes the impossibility of assimilating mainstream American culture, of getting her bluest eye.
Each section of the primer reading: the house, the father, the mother, brother, and the pets, is addressed in subsequent chapters of the novel as part of a life that is not a Dick and Jane experience, but that is a marginalized existence that underlines the stark contrast between the white ideal and the black reality.
This introduction also represents a symbolic breakdown of the mainstream language. As the author states in her foreword to the book, “…my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture.” To transfigure the language, she must first deconstruct it.
To Ms. Morrison, language was not a means to control or subjugate or to only describe, it was a means to coax meaning from experience. As she wrote:
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.
Language was a compass for Morrison, a riddle, and an affirmation. Perhaps it spoke most loudly when it acknowledged what it could not capture.
When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,” his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the “final word,” the precise “summing up,” acknowledging their “poor power to add or detract,” his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.
While Ms. Morrison focused the subject matter of her novels on the African-American experience, her themes of alienation and belonging, self-loathing and love, individuality and assimilation, pertain to us all. When speaking of language as a tool for discovery, as a means of outlining truths too monstrous or abject to be spoken aloud, she underlines the power and subtlety of language.
Words can also be used to defame, bully, and belittle others, to exclude and insulate the very truths Ms. Morrison seeks to uncover with it. Language is knowledge, but language is also the suppression of knowledge. It depends on which job you’re using the tool for, what your final aim is.
Ms. Morrison’s reaction to racial inequity was to use language as a means of discovery, as a tool to scrape meaning from the inscrutable, to articulate the unspeakable, and to communicate the trauma and pain of the African-American experience. She used language as a scalpel, as a retractor, and as a bandage.
Today’s politicians use language as a club to heighten fear and divisiveness, to stoke hatred and loathing, and to maintain power at all costs. Those in power today use language to separate and subjugate. This will not do. We need to look to Toni Morrison and to follow her lead, to uncover, reveal, to understand, and to heal. We need to take our own baby steps in order to follow in her giant ones.
James Baldwin was pretty good too, writing about the African-American experience. I wish I could recommend the film adaptation of his “If Beale Street Could Talk”, but alas, no. The best parts were the verbatim recitations of his words. The rest, meh.
For literature completely different…. I learned of a contemporary Russian author, Maxim Osipov. I’m reading a collection of his short stories now and it’s wonderful. It reminds me of how I fell in love with the classic Russian authors, the dead guys.
Cheers and thanks for writing.
Thanks, Mark. I’ll check out Osipov. You know, we do welcome guest bloggers if you ever feel the urge to get public.