In the spirit of posting something a little lighter and less totally fleshed out, in the spirit of having the beginnings of ideas out there as well as the middles and the ends, I wanted to share with anyone who reads this some beautiful quotes from one of my favorite writers Toni Morrison that pertain in powerful ways to different borders and their functions.
This first quote is from the end of “The Bluest Eye,” a story about the silent tragedy of one person, Pecola, a sad little girl, which is really intimately connected with the tragedies of all the other people in that town and in the rest of Black America. Despite these interconnections, these others ignore and exclude her, taking comfort in the idea that by denying the continuities between her tragedy and theirs that they can improve their situation. This is Morrison’s particular reading of the phenomenon of self-hatred. Some of her characters believe that their situation has intimately to do with Blackness, and if they become less Black then they will gradually improve themselves. But she parodies this idea with Pecola, whose childish gloss on the idea of improvement-through-whiteness is to have blue eyes, the bluest eyes, and that this change will make her pain stop. This quote is a confession from the end of the book:
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us– all who knew her– felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used– to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our own strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it the truth, seeing in the new pattern an old idea of the Revelation and the Word.
She, however, stepped into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end.”
Here I believe that Morrison is describing the ways that racially disempowered and oppressed people can maintain borders, the reasons they would have for reproducing oppression. This first quote to me reflects the threads of radical literature and scholarship that study the intersections of the personal and the political, the psychological and the social reproductions of racism. I find that part of the reason I am interested in depictions of Black life in America, like Toni Morrison’s, is because I see so many parallels between this and the Jewish experience in the US, Israel and Europe. That’s definitely something I want to look at, given that of the few authors that I know many Jewish and Black authors were writing at the same time about these parallel and sometimes intersecting conditions.
The second quote is from “Tar Baby,” a very interesting novel that is more open-ended than “The Bluest Eye.” It tackles, among other things, the relationships between and old and young, Black and white, country and city dwellers, servant and master. The novel mostly takes place on a Caribbean island somewhere around Haiti. There is an incredible rant about…so many things, triggered when the white, aging head of the family, and an heir of the fortune of a candy company, fires two black servants for stealing apples around Christmas time:
“Son’s mouth went dry as he watched Valerian chewing on a piece of ham, his head-of-a-coin profile content, approving even of the flavor in his mouth although he had been able to dismiss with a flutter of the fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him to grow old in regal comfort; although he had taken the sugar and cocoa and paid for it as though it had no value, as though the cutting of the cane and the picking of beans was child’s play and had no value; but he turned it into candy, the invention of which really was child’s play, and sold it to other children and made a fortune in order to move near, but not in the midst of, the jungle where the sugar came from and build a place with more of their labor and then hire them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself and when those people wanted a little of what he wanted, some apples for their Christmas, and took some, he dismissed them with a flutter of the fingers, because they were thieves, and nobody knew thieves and thievery better than he did and he probably thought that he was a law-abiding man, they all did, and they all always did, because they had not the dignity of wild animals who did not eat where they defecated but they could defecate over a whole people and come there to live and defecate some more by tearing up the land and that is why they loved property so, because they had killed it and soiled defecated on it and they loved more than anything the places where they shit. Would fight and kill to own the cesspools they made, and although they called it architecture it as in fact elaborately built toilets, decorated toilets, toilets surrounded with and by business and enterprise in order to have something to do in between defecations since waste was the order of the day and the ordering principle of the universe. And especially in the Americans who were the worst because they were new at the business of defecation spent their whole lives bathing bathing bathing washing away the stench of the cesspools as though pure soap had anything to do with purity.
That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to despise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate. And it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally the would know true peace and happiness they had been looking for all along. In the meantime this one here would chew a morsel of ham and drink white wine secure in the knowledge that he had defecated on two people who had dared to want some of his apples.”
Wow. What is not in that? A new set of metaphors to think about colonialism/capital accumulation with.
