Goodreads Review of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

 My first book review in over a year is bound to be rough and this thing feels rough. Got to start from somewhere, I guess. 

Happy New Year.

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Been a minute since I have done any type of real serious reading, but here I am.

This year is the last year of the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent. For the last 10 years that I have been on here I have been saving a bookshelf of books by or about people of African descent here on Goodreads if you wish to check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

This book was on my radar from the time it came out, but I needed it in a reasonable price-range before I decided to read it given it's length. It is the second-to-last book published during Toni Morrison's lifetime and it is an edited publishing of her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. As the title suggests, she uses the idea of the other or othering and how in the U.S. context slavery and it's afterlife helped to create "the other" as we have it in America today.

"One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example."

She spends the book using various examples from literature like Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to show how whites "other" black people, but she also uses people like Harriet Jacobs, Camara Laye, and most noticeably herself to show how Black writers push back against the attempts to dehumanize them. This book also reminded me that I need to read Paradise ASAP.

"I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy."

This book is like a career-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and a lot of what she brings up here will be familiar to those who have read that book or The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. I confess, with this being the first book that I had to sit and think on in some time, I had a time trying to say something here that was different from the other non-fiction books of her that I have read, but the fact is that this book is transcript of a lecture she gave so it was no surprise that there would be little surprise here if you are familiar with her non-fiction writing. I will say that if you only know Toni Morrison from her novels, this is the perfect place to start for seeing what her thought-process is in condensed form.

I wish I could feel like this review was up-to-snuff with how I usually do, but this is what I have in the tank at the moment.

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My Review of The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I wrote this review in March of 2019, about six months before Toni Morrison's death. It would be the first of two books I would read before their author's death. This books importance to me has only grown since I first read it (as a library book, no less). I hope to own it one day, but I do at least have access to the two essays that have affected the way I think of fiction the most-deeply.

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One thing that can be said about Toni Morrison is that she has no time for modesty and all the time for hubris. She's the athlete that trash-talks, but can back it up with skill: a literary Muhammad Ali (whose autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story she edited). As interesting as it was to read her views on literature and her literary criticism, I was fascinated at how she configured her own personae. That added a very unusual dynamic to this book since most of this book was transcripts of speeches rather than actual essays.

Some of these selections were amazing. I was intrigued by her thoughts on the so-called "canon wars" of the late 1980s-early 1990s, because she (or rather her work) was one of the big topics of it. One quote by her that caught my attention was "Canon building is empire building, canon defense is national defense." Lines and passages like that gave me food for thought, especially given how out-dated that controversy is now. That same section had a very powerful examination of Moby-Dick, or, the Whale, which has prepared me even more to read it.

Her use of the Cinderella fable, Sula, and Beowulf to explain her own theory of feminism was very well-done. I know that Morrison does not identify as a card-carrying feminist (or at least she has said in interviews that she has problems with the term as we know it), but she seems to outline ideas and a philosophy that can easily be called feminism. For her, showing the importance how women relate to each other is very important. At the very least, it would be interesting to compare her ideas with that of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie--another Black woman novelist who very much identifies as a feminist (though not a womanist).

In another passage Morrison says, "When I hear someone say, 'Truth is stranger than fiction,' I think that old chestnut is truer than we know, because it doesn't say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it's stranger, meaning that it's odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the important thing is that it's random--and fiction is not random." (-- Both bold texts are mine.) This was like the key piece of thought that I'd been looking for for awhile now. This is something so profound, but not appreciated enough by writers or readers now-a-days. This fact is what separates myth from history. The site of memory in this book is something you really appreciate as you go deeper into your self as a reader. Lines like this quotation are found throughout the book.

The only parts of this book I skipped over are the parts that reference books by her that I have not read yet. Morrison is her biggest fan so her primary reference for her literary criticism is her own work. This obvious means we get expert commentary by the author, but we also get spoiled or a very "guided" interpretation of the work. I wanted more examinations of her own contemporaries or works she liked (or hated), but one has to settle. I was fascinated by her ideas on writing, even though I don't think I agreed with half of it. It is always interesting to see the psyche of a particular writer, especially one who is this knowledgeable and...we'll say confident. Some of these speeches I'd already heard like her Nobel Lecture and eulogy of James Baldwin, but most of these were definitely "archive/lost tapes" material.

I wish I could go in further, but I will have to reread the book with more time (and after reading more novels by Toni Morrison).

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Some Thoughts After My First Quarter of Moby Dick

I got the first quarter of Moby Dick down and am moving along at a decent pace. So far in the book we are finally at sea bound for the Indian Ocean and we finally get the actual appearance of Ahab in the last (29th) chapter. Also so far: we get a look at coastal New England at the mid-19th century, we learn how one goes about getting on a fishing vessel back then, and most importantly we really become part of the mind of Ishmael. Ishmael would be an interesting character today, he must've really stood out when this book was published in 1851. Pertaining to my interests, it is intriguing to see his journey from a 19th century version of a "non-racist" to what we may call now "antiracist" (in no small part due to his partnering up with the Austronesian harpooner Queequeg). It is a very much in-process transformation, but even a quarter of the way in, it is noticeable his change since the beginning of the book. As I am reading this book according to Toni Morrison's recommendation in Unspeakable Things Unspoken, this gives the book an interesting feel to it that I'm guessing most people who read this novel don't have.
 

 It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” “white.” In fact it is studiously so. In fact these absences of vital presences in Young American literature may be the insistent fruit of the scholarship rather than the text. Perhaps some of these writers, although under current house arrest, have much more to say than has been realized. Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by never questioning the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise the writer, diminish the text, and render the bulk of the literature aesthetically and historically incoherent - an exorbitant price for cultural (whitemale) purity, and, I believe, a spendthrift one. The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances. - "Unspeakable Things Unspoken by Toni Morrison

 
Many folks want to be like Toni, but ain't really trying to be like Toni—at least in the way she was as a reader. I decided after reading The Source of Self-Regard last year that I would take-up Morrison's suggestion of reading this book (and others of "the canon" with new eyes for a deeper meaning—what she called the "Afro-American presence in American Literature." I suspect I may have been doing this subconsciously with classic literature for awhille anyway, but Morrison articulated this in a way that I have not been able to forget since I read The Source of Self-Regard last year. 

My Review of Sula by Toni Morrison

Before last year, I had not planned to read this book. I felt I had the novels by Toni Morrison that I was going to read, but seeing this on sale in the used goods store for $1 changed my plans. I used a book club selection of this book on Goodreads this past February (which was a very disappointing affair) as my excuse to read this book and managed to make a reasonable read of it. I'd read The Source of Self-Regard the previous year and had wait until enough time after Morrison's death to pick-up another book by her. I am always a little doubtful of my analysis of this book because of how short it is, but I had Morrison's own words from THoSR to go by and I think I did as best a look of it from my view as I could.

Sula by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I began to write my second book, which was called Sula, because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way in which I heard her name pronounced. Her name was Hannah, and I think she was a friend of my mother's. I don't remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember is the color around her--a kind of violet, a suffusion of something violet--and her eyes, which appeared to be half closed. But what I remember most is how the women said her name: how they said 'Hannah Peace' and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret about her that they knew, which they didn't talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seemed loaded in the way in which they said her name. And I suspected that she was a little bit of an outlaw but that they approved in some way." - from The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

This is year 6 of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent

In The Sweet By and By by the Peerless Quartet - This song is sung in the book by a mysterious character: a near silent drunk who either was really light-skinned or just white depending on which character you asked. But the book says he sung with a very "hill mountain" voice.

What a book, I had not planned on reading this book, but here we are. I have to say that though I knew a little bit about the action that takes place in the pages reading it was an experience that one comes to expect from a Toni Morrison novel. Morrison wrote this book as her examination of how black women related one another and it is also her second novel. The fact that this book was written during the height of the second-wave feminist movement is notable, but this book seems to wooking in parallel to that instead of out of it. She wanted to come-up with a very black-female language or sensibility (though that might be a dangerous word) for the book.

Save A Little Dram for Me by Bert Williams. This song is mentioned directly in the book.

I'm not going to spoil the entire story but here is the set-up. We are, as usual, in a fictional mid-western valley town that is in Ohio close to the Great Lakes. The story is told as one big flashback as we go back to a time when the town was racially segregated with white people living in the valleys and black people cramped up on the hills (like the favelas of Brazil). We get to the proper story with the introduction of a PTSD WWI veteran who ends-up by crazy hap-in-stance in Medallion at the place called "The Bottom" which was actually in the hills because racism (for those who've read Song of Solomon think of "No Mercy" Street). All you need to know about Shaderack is that he is the first character we are properly introduced to and he starts a holiday in The Bottom called National Suicide Day that is celebrated on January 3rd. After this we are slowly introduced to the inhabitants of the town and the two main families we will be reading about the Wright's and then the Peace families.

Wild Women Don't Have the Blues by Ida Cox

The two main characters in this book are Nel Wright the main protagonist of-sorts and her friend and the title character Sula Peace. These two are the yin/yang, blue oni/red oni, sane friend, crazy friend trope in-play....but of course this wouldn't be a Toni Morrison novel if it was all that easy to figure them out. Nel is from a family that were creole prostitutes in New Orleans, but had become reformed conservative Christians in The Bottom. The Peace family meanwhile...well they were the opposite. Sula is the granddaughter of Eva Peace (this book's resident Pilate Dead or Baby Suggs) and daughter of Hannah Peace a friendly, aloof woman...who was a nymphomaniac. This last detail caused problems with the married women of the town.

Your Enemy Cannot Harm You by Rev. E.W. Clayborn

Sula is the kind of character I have not read a lot of recently: an Übermensch. As she comes to define herself in-part 2 of the book, she simply refuses all of the rules and norms of the world she lives in and we spend half the novel seeing the crazy, devastating consequences of this. Because I have read a good share of existential philosophy and remembering Camus' The Stranger I knew how things were going and my feelings about the books second-half is similar to how I felt reading about the cold, otherworldly Meursalt was how I felt reading about Sula. Of course the difference is that The Stranger is a realist work and this is a magical-realist work so the rules are a bit different. In any case, we spend part 1 of the novel world-building, and part 2 watching that world be un-built. The fact is that this book is not about The Bottom or people's reaction to Sula, but how the very not-Übermensch Nel reacts to having a best friend that does not believe in any certainties or truths and how black women learn to forgive each other for stuff. Here is how Morrison describes Sula:

"I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black, metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World black and New World woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained, and uncontainable. And dangerously female...A modernity that overturns prewar definitions, ushers in the Jazz Age (an aged defined by Afro-American art and culture), and requires new kinds of intelligences to define oneself."

Man Stealer Blues by Lucille Bogan

In my opinion of the book, I don't know if the forgiveness aspect was as emphasized as Morrison claimed it was, but it was interesting how Sula and the town were affected by each other. As always there was some beautifully poetic words in this book and I always like seeing how magical-realism is manifested in a particular work of fiction and this book did not disappoint. I couldn't help but compare this novel to the one Morrison wrote after it, Song of Solomon. I still like it best of all of Morrison's novels that I have read so far, but Sula is an interesting spiritual predecessor or sibling. Milkman wanted wings, but Sula simply wanted to tread o'er the Earth.

Shall We Gather at the River by The Stillman College Tour Choir. This song was sung (view spoiler)[at Sula's funeral...ironically by the happy townspeople (hide spoiler)].

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