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Mouth Full of Blood
A vital new non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time
‘Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference―the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993
Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout A Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.
The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye , Sula and Beloved ; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers.
A Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all.
‘To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And, if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?’
The Alexander Lecture series, 2002
‘Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference―the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993
Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout A Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.
The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisits The Bluest Eye , Sula and Beloved ; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers.
A Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all.
‘To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And, if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?’
The Alexander Lecture series, 2002
368 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2019
2303 people are currently reading
32971 people want to read
About the author
Toni Morrison
239 books23.6k followersChloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
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February 13, 2019
This review was originally published for Bitch Media on February 12, 2019:
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/to...
Toni Morrison began writing her seminal debut novel, The Bluest Eye, more than 40 years ago as a way to cure her own loneliness. “I never planned to be a writer,” she told Jane Bakerman in a 1978 interview in Black American Literature Forum. “I was in a place where there was nobody I could talk to and have real conversations with. And I think I was also very unhappy. So I wrote then, for that reason. And then, after I had published, it was sort of a compulsive thing because it was a way of knowing, a way of thinking that I found really necessary.” At the time, Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, was a single mom living in Syracuse, New York, and working as a textbook editor for Random House. “In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience,” she said, according to an 1987 annotated bibliography of her work. “It’s always seemed to me that Black people’s grace has been with what they do with language.”
Morrison’s newest collection, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations, demonstrates the same pragmatic and spiritual vision that weaves throughout her award-winning novels and her prescient nonfiction. The title is typical Morrison: An enigmatic, subtle, and powerful proclamation that also invokes a question. What is the source of self-regard—for me and for her? “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” she writes in what reads as the book’s sole prologue, “Peril.” It’s one of the many answers that Morrison offers within the book’s 368 pages.
That the book is being released during Black History Month feels like a given, but the fact that is Morrison is turning 88 the week after indicates that this might be one of her last major works. While reading it, I was struck by the prospect of losing such an important writer, whose work—particularly cherished among Black women writers—is outlined in these pages. The Source of Self-Regard is divided into three sections that span four decades of Morrison’s previously published essays and speeches, so it would be impossible to write about each section without writing a book of my own. But a few essays and speeches, about the importance of protecting writers and artists who are working under an increasingly alarming amount of threats; what it means to be a foreigner; a media environment that exploits information as entertainment in what she referred to during the O.J. Simpson trial as an “age of spectacle;” and notes on her writing process, particularly resonated with me.
The third section of the book, “God’s Language,” begins with the most beautiful piece of writing I have ever read—the eulogy Morrison delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral on December 8, 1987. It is also the closest glimpse we’ve had into Morrison’s personal relationships. Morrison lays her heart bare for a friend in a short poetic jubilee that’s reminiscent of Smokey Robinson’s recent speech at his childhood friend Aretha Franklin’s homegoing service.
“Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and much too much to feel,” she begins. “The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.” Morrison might as well be speaking about herself. For me and many other writers, Morrison demonstrates how to be in a world that’s committed to your destruction. “You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect it seems my own invention,” she continues.
Throughout the book, Morrison reveals herself to be a teacher-student who is not just giving readers information that they’re expected to take in and regurgitate. Instead, she’s a “literary homegirl” (a phrase that she actually uses in the text). Referring to a friend as a “homegirl” implies a sense of ease in the presence of someone who knows and loves us, who evokes in us the joy, relaxation, comfort, and depth we typically only associate with home. Home is where we learn who we are, if not who we will become. Home is the starting point. In the title essay, delivered in Portland in 1992, Morrison explains how she viewed self-regard while writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Morrison’s lecture deeply resonates with me because it gives context for arguably her most famous work, which at its heart, offers Black women an artistic vision of our liberation.
“In Beloved, I was interested in what contributed most significantly to a slave woman’s self-regard,” Morrison writes. “What was her self-esteem? What value did she place on herself? And I became convinced, and research supported my hunch, my intuition, that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to be and to remain exactly what the institution said she was not, that was important to her.” This is a subtle description of what we would now call resistance or subversive behavior—a Black woman reclaiming her identity from those who told her that she did not deserve to possess herself or her children.
On the persistent gulf between Black and white feminism, Morrison takes on what would later come to be known as “intersectionality,” a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989—the same year she delivered her “Women, Race and Memory” lecture. Describing a 45-year-old veteran named Harriet Tubman who requested three years’ back pay from the federal government in 1868, Morrison details another persistent question for all feminists: “How can a woman be viewed and respected as a human being without becoming a male-like or male-dominated citizen?”
The answer, she explains, aligns with what she’d said 30 years ago: Despite the fact that “in this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by Black liberation,” it’s also true that “chief among these reasons is our (women’s) own conscious and unconscious complicity with the forces that have kept sexism the oldest class oppression in the world.” So much of what we hear about oppression emphasizes placing agency in the hands of some external force. Morrison is saying that we can’t internalize sexism, misogyny, racism, or other oppressions and inflict it on others.
Throughout The Source of Self-Regard I got the sense that Morrison has always been her own intellectual starting place. Perhaps it is this ease that allows a profundity and an erudite wit reserved for the sole Black woman in possession of both a Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded in 1993) and a Pulitzer Prize (1988). She describes, for instance, being her own first reader and editor, which goes against the common understanding that writers need the eyes of others in order to improve (and approve) their work. You might infer that she’s the source of her self-regard given that the book has no acknowledgments section. She writes as much, saying her oeuvre has been written in order to satisfy her own longings and curiosity.
The Source of Self-Regard’s lucid, stunning prose offers not just a glimpse at a master novelist’s and intellectual’s inner workings, but lays bare the mantle which those of us who write might pick up. In her eulogy for Baldwin, she says: “Yours was a tenderness, a vulnerability that asked everything, expected everything and like the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver… ‘Our crown,’ you said, ‘has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,’ you said, ‘is wear it.’ And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.” With this book, the Queen of American Letters has again blessed us with a work that is profound, soaring, intimate, and gives us permission to become the source of our self-regard.
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/to...
Toni Morrison began writing her seminal debut novel, The Bluest Eye, more than 40 years ago as a way to cure her own loneliness. “I never planned to be a writer,” she told Jane Bakerman in a 1978 interview in Black American Literature Forum. “I was in a place where there was nobody I could talk to and have real conversations with. And I think I was also very unhappy. So I wrote then, for that reason. And then, after I had published, it was sort of a compulsive thing because it was a way of knowing, a way of thinking that I found really necessary.” At the time, Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, was a single mom living in Syracuse, New York, and working as a textbook editor for Random House. “In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience,” she said, according to an 1987 annotated bibliography of her work. “It’s always seemed to me that Black people’s grace has been with what they do with language.”
Morrison’s newest collection, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations, demonstrates the same pragmatic and spiritual vision that weaves throughout her award-winning novels and her prescient nonfiction. The title is typical Morrison: An enigmatic, subtle, and powerful proclamation that also invokes a question. What is the source of self-regard—for me and for her? “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” she writes in what reads as the book’s sole prologue, “Peril.” It’s one of the many answers that Morrison offers within the book’s 368 pages.
That the book is being released during Black History Month feels like a given, but the fact that is Morrison is turning 88 the week after indicates that this might be one of her last major works. While reading it, I was struck by the prospect of losing such an important writer, whose work—particularly cherished among Black women writers—is outlined in these pages. The Source of Self-Regard is divided into three sections that span four decades of Morrison’s previously published essays and speeches, so it would be impossible to write about each section without writing a book of my own. But a few essays and speeches, about the importance of protecting writers and artists who are working under an increasingly alarming amount of threats; what it means to be a foreigner; a media environment that exploits information as entertainment in what she referred to during the O.J. Simpson trial as an “age of spectacle;” and notes on her writing process, particularly resonated with me.
The third section of the book, “God’s Language,” begins with the most beautiful piece of writing I have ever read—the eulogy Morrison delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral on December 8, 1987. It is also the closest glimpse we’ve had into Morrison’s personal relationships. Morrison lays her heart bare for a friend in a short poetic jubilee that’s reminiscent of Smokey Robinson’s recent speech at his childhood friend Aretha Franklin’s homegoing service.
“Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and much too much to feel,” she begins. “The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.” Morrison might as well be speaking about herself. For me and many other writers, Morrison demonstrates how to be in a world that’s committed to your destruction. “You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect it seems my own invention,” she continues.
Throughout the book, Morrison reveals herself to be a teacher-student who is not just giving readers information that they’re expected to take in and regurgitate. Instead, she’s a “literary homegirl” (a phrase that she actually uses in the text). Referring to a friend as a “homegirl” implies a sense of ease in the presence of someone who knows and loves us, who evokes in us the joy, relaxation, comfort, and depth we typically only associate with home. Home is where we learn who we are, if not who we will become. Home is the starting point. In the title essay, delivered in Portland in 1992, Morrison explains how she viewed self-regard while writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Morrison’s lecture deeply resonates with me because it gives context for arguably her most famous work, which at its heart, offers Black women an artistic vision of our liberation.
“In Beloved, I was interested in what contributed most significantly to a slave woman’s self-regard,” Morrison writes. “What was her self-esteem? What value did she place on herself? And I became convinced, and research supported my hunch, my intuition, that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to be and to remain exactly what the institution said she was not, that was important to her.” This is a subtle description of what we would now call resistance or subversive behavior—a Black woman reclaiming her identity from those who told her that she did not deserve to possess herself or her children.
On the persistent gulf between Black and white feminism, Morrison takes on what would later come to be known as “intersectionality,” a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989—the same year she delivered her “Women, Race and Memory” lecture. Describing a 45-year-old veteran named Harriet Tubman who requested three years’ back pay from the federal government in 1868, Morrison details another persistent question for all feminists: “How can a woman be viewed and respected as a human being without becoming a male-like or male-dominated citizen?”
The answer, she explains, aligns with what she’d said 30 years ago: Despite the fact that “in this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by Black liberation,” it’s also true that “chief among these reasons is our (women’s) own conscious and unconscious complicity with the forces that have kept sexism the oldest class oppression in the world.” So much of what we hear about oppression emphasizes placing agency in the hands of some external force. Morrison is saying that we can’t internalize sexism, misogyny, racism, or other oppressions and inflict it on others.
Throughout The Source of Self-Regard I got the sense that Morrison has always been her own intellectual starting place. Perhaps it is this ease that allows a profundity and an erudite wit reserved for the sole Black woman in possession of both a Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded in 1993) and a Pulitzer Prize (1988). She describes, for instance, being her own first reader and editor, which goes against the common understanding that writers need the eyes of others in order to improve (and approve) their work. You might infer that she’s the source of her self-regard given that the book has no acknowledgments section. She writes as much, saying her oeuvre has been written in order to satisfy her own longings and curiosity.
The Source of Self-Regard’s lucid, stunning prose offers not just a glimpse at a master novelist’s and intellectual’s inner workings, but lays bare the mantle which those of us who write might pick up. In her eulogy for Baldwin, she says: “Yours was a tenderness, a vulnerability that asked everything, expected everything and like the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver… ‘Our crown,’ you said, ‘has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,’ you said, ‘is wear it.’ And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.” With this book, the Queen of American Letters has again blessed us with a work that is profound, soaring, intimate, and gives us permission to become the source of our self-regard.
October 22, 2020
This is a wonderful collection of Toni Morrison's writing, primarily in speeches given at various functions. Admittedly, some of the themes are repetitive and we don't necessarily have the context in which she is speaking, but her words always have such power and beauty. What I really enjoyed was when she was writing about her own books, about how she writes, and about the influences on her writing. It was all so passionate and interesting. I certainly got new insights into her first 7 novels. She only briefly mentions A Mercy, her 8th, and there is no mention of the novels after that, none of which I have read yet, but I am not incented to do so!
One of the great quotes in her introduction:
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
Although here she is talking about the plague of racism in the US, I found this quote quite apropos:
...it leaves me wide open for criticism about bizarre characters and non-positive images. I know. But I am afraid I will have to leave the "positive" images to the comic-strip artists and the "normal" black characters to some future Doris Day, because I believe it is silly, not to say irresponsible, to concern myself with lipstick and Band-Aid when there is a plague in the land.
Another longer quote here which is from "Racism and Fascism" in The Nation from May 29, 1995. Very, very relevant to politics now 25 years later. It is a list of how fascism is built.
1. Construct an internal enemy as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterace of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy - especially its males and absolutely its children
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.
...
Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing-marketing for power.
I don't think any additional commentary is necessary here.
Still a critical voice, Toni will forever remind us of our duty to remain human and humane.
One of the great quotes in her introduction:
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
Although here she is talking about the plague of racism in the US, I found this quote quite apropos:
...it leaves me wide open for criticism about bizarre characters and non-positive images. I know. But I am afraid I will have to leave the "positive" images to the comic-strip artists and the "normal" black characters to some future Doris Day, because I believe it is silly, not to say irresponsible, to concern myself with lipstick and Band-Aid when there is a plague in the land.
Another longer quote here which is from "Racism and Fascism" in The Nation from May 29, 1995. Very, very relevant to politics now 25 years later. It is a list of how fascism is built.
1. Construct an internal enemy as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterace of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy - especially its males and absolutely its children
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.
...
Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing-marketing for power.
I don't think any additional commentary is necessary here.
Still a critical voice, Toni will forever remind us of our duty to remain human and humane.
November 21, 2025
"Writing the reading involves seduction-luring the reader into environments outside the pages".
And so it is this line that partly ends "The Source of Self-Regard", written by the late, great Professor Toni Morrison. Reading this collection of eulogies, anecdotes, interviews, speeches give the reader an insight of one of the most brilliant writers who has lived, and sees how at first hand, that race and blackness are social constructs that beg to be viewed as one that is harmful and destructive, created by white people to maintain control, systemic racism and oppression.
However, the book also gives us glimpses into Professor Morrison's artistic process- of how some of her most canonical and revered novels were created: Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise most exemplified. This book is a gift from one of the greats, whose political views and voice of dissent will always be missed by those who believe in true social justice.
The most beautiful thing about this collection is her eulogy for the great James Baldwin. Heartbreaking and full of nothing but love for his spirit, she shows such a generosity and affection for someone equally iconic as she was- two of the greatest dissents of American literature.
Note: I saw Professor Morrison at an event two months before she passed away promoting this book. When I heard she passed away in August 2019, I was driving on a Vermont highway and pulled over and wept. My favorite writer and inspiration gone, but I’ll never forget her.
And so it is this line that partly ends "The Source of Self-Regard", written by the late, great Professor Toni Morrison. Reading this collection of eulogies, anecdotes, interviews, speeches give the reader an insight of one of the most brilliant writers who has lived, and sees how at first hand, that race and blackness are social constructs that beg to be viewed as one that is harmful and destructive, created by white people to maintain control, systemic racism and oppression.
However, the book also gives us glimpses into Professor Morrison's artistic process- of how some of her most canonical and revered novels were created: Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise most exemplified. This book is a gift from one of the greats, whose political views and voice of dissent will always be missed by those who believe in true social justice.
The most beautiful thing about this collection is her eulogy for the great James Baldwin. Heartbreaking and full of nothing but love for his spirit, she shows such a generosity and affection for someone equally iconic as she was- two of the greatest dissents of American literature.
Note: I saw Professor Morrison at an event two months before she passed away promoting this book. When I heard she passed away in August 2019, I was driving on a Vermont highway and pulled over and wept. My favorite writer and inspiration gone, but I’ll never forget her.
March 25, 2023
4.75 stars
“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,”
“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.”
This is a collection of essays, speeches, lectures, meditations and short pieces by Toni Morrison spanning about four decades. There are also a few question and answer sessions. There are a couple of eulogies (Martin Luther King and James Baldwin), lot of writing about race and an equal amount of writing about writing. Morrison also talks about her own work and the origins of a number of her novels. She also writes about the literary canon (“canon building is empire building”). There is plenty on belonging and exclusion. She lots at gender and violence towards women throughout. There is plenty of insight:
“We will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.”
“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.”
There is some familiarity in some of the pieces and a bit of repetition, which could have been sorted with better editing, but that is a minor point.
Morrison looks to history when she analyses present ills. Looking at the American Revolution she sees not a nascent democracy and an “Age of Enlightenment” but an “Age of Scientific Racism”, pointing out that many the intellectual forefathers (Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin) judged black people as “incapable of intelligence”. Morrison talks about feeling both “native” and “alien” in the US and goes on to ask questions about what a literary canon really is.
Morrison also talks about the impact of autobiographical slave narratives, but her scope is broad: from Beowulf to Cinderella to Stein to Faulkner and so on.
This is a collection for dipping in and out of and there is much to think about.
“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,”
“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.”
This is a collection of essays, speeches, lectures, meditations and short pieces by Toni Morrison spanning about four decades. There are also a few question and answer sessions. There are a couple of eulogies (Martin Luther King and James Baldwin), lot of writing about race and an equal amount of writing about writing. Morrison also talks about her own work and the origins of a number of her novels. She also writes about the literary canon (“canon building is empire building”). There is plenty on belonging and exclusion. She lots at gender and violence towards women throughout. There is plenty of insight:
“We will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.”
“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.”
There is some familiarity in some of the pieces and a bit of repetition, which could have been sorted with better editing, but that is a minor point.
Morrison looks to history when she analyses present ills. Looking at the American Revolution she sees not a nascent democracy and an “Age of Enlightenment” but an “Age of Scientific Racism”, pointing out that many the intellectual forefathers (Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin) judged black people as “incapable of intelligence”. Morrison talks about feeling both “native” and “alien” in the US and goes on to ask questions about what a literary canon really is.
Morrison also talks about the impact of autobiographical slave narratives, but her scope is broad: from Beowulf to Cinderella to Stein to Faulkner and so on.
This is a collection for dipping in and out of and there is much to think about.
August 6, 2019
Exquisite with wisdom, grace, vulnerability and compassion, like all of Toni Morrison's work. I am in awe of this writer's mind, her work ethic, the way she brings the intensity and power of jazz into the written word. She is this nation's greatest literary treasure.
Oh. I posted this only an hour or so before learning of her death. My heart just breaks.
Oh. I posted this only an hour or so before learning of her death. My heart just breaks.
March 31, 2022
Toni Morrison was one of the greatest thinkers and writers this world has known. Her fiction, with its poignant precision into human nature–concentrating on Black life in varying time periods in the United States of America, specific to that experience yet universal in feeling, is necessary reading. I think that no one should feel that they must read anything–or much less that they must like it, and that reading and engaging with a writer's work is a very intimate affair and personal matter. At the same time I think that there are writers who enrich our understanding of life with their brilliant art and reading their work does us tremendous good, and that Toni Morrison is certainly one of them.
So I was very excited to start reading this book. With the exception of the Baldwin eulogy and an essay collected here that was part of the author's preface to her book Paradise, I hadn't read Morrison's non-fiction before. There are about forty three works collected here. The politics handled subtly in her fiction are very blatant in the non-fiction. There's a wide range of subjects discussed, from war to immigration and racism and fascism to feminism and many others. There's incredible work done here, especially the exploration of Blackness in pre-World War One American literature. The breadth simply can't be condensed in a review like this one. It's been wonderful engaging with the intellectual sources from which the fiction masterpieces sprung
So I was very excited to start reading this book. With the exception of the Baldwin eulogy and an essay collected here that was part of the author's preface to her book Paradise, I hadn't read Morrison's non-fiction before. There are about forty three works collected here. The politics handled subtly in her fiction are very blatant in the non-fiction. There's a wide range of subjects discussed, from war to immigration and racism and fascism to feminism and many others. There's incredible work done here, especially the exploration of Blackness in pre-World War One American literature. The breadth simply can't be condensed in a review like this one. It's been wonderful engaging with the intellectual sources from which the fiction masterpieces sprung
November 11, 2020
Toni Morrison is one of my favorite writers, one of the select few I wanted to read as soon as a new novel came out. I should’ve read her nonfiction sooner; it was such a pleasure to be among her words again. If I have one quibble about this collection, it’s that there’s one piece almost exactly the same as one that preceded it. But then anything she’s written deserves to be reread.
I was thrilled getting her take on other writers, especially Melville, with her giving credit to Michael Rogin's scholarship on Moby-Dick for a particular idea she’s expounding. It’s a theory I briefly entertained, so of course it made sense to me. I also loved reading her thoughts on her own writing. After her death, my plan was to reread her novels. (I’d only previously reread Beloved.) I still haven’t done so, but with these words still echoing in my mind, I have new impetus.
Here are some of her words on other topics besides literature:
I was thrilled getting her take on other writers, especially Melville, with her giving credit to Michael Rogin's scholarship on Moby-Dick for a particular idea she’s expounding. It’s a theory I briefly entertained, so of course it made sense to me. I also loved reading her thoughts on her own writing. After her death, my plan was to reread her novels. (I’d only previously reread Beloved.) I still haven’t done so, but with these words still echoing in my mind, I have new impetus.
Here are some of her words on other topics besides literature:
There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms, and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death…There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pâté -producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors…(1993)
You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else.…don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That’s not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving should be. Things of value seldom are.
But in pursuing your highest ambitions, don’t let your personal safety diminish the safety of your stepsister. In wielding the power that is deservedly yours, don’t permit it to enslave your stepsisters. Let your might and your power emanate from that place in you that is nurturing and caring.(1979)
March 15, 2019
I'm not really a fighting person, but I will fight anyone who pretends that Toni Morrison is not the greatest American writer of all time. Seriously, meet me outside.
I read Beloved for the first time the summer after high school and it just stunned me. I had not believed that such craft and poetry were possible. I kept thinking--did she know that she was linking up all these images and words? Did she intend to create this beauty or was it just inspiration? I've never been the same and I've never been so overcome by a book. I have since read everything Morrison has written several times.
So I came to this book not as an objective reader. These essays are varied and have some repetitive themes, but the ones in here that I read twice are the ones where she talks about her craft. Turns out, she knew exactly what she was doing. She even did things that I didn't know she was doing. And she did it all on purpose. She introduces color into the story purposefully, language, she changes the perspective and steps outside the cannon of western lit to do something different. She's just absolutely brilliant.
I read a lot of writing books (Liz GIlbert, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King, Mary Karr, etc come to mind) that give advice for writers and they're like--just show up and pump out words or wait for the muse or whatever. And I'm not writer of fiction, but my thought is always--but your writing is not good. How does a genius write? Like, I want to know how Nabakov wrote Lolita--and in this book, you have a genius explaining the craft and it's sort of just as I suspected it. You have to have a gift. You have to see the color around your characters--whatever that means. I mean, I can't even imagine Morrison's process because it is so many levels above what most people do. But I feel lucky to have been able to read her books all my life.
I read Beloved for the first time the summer after high school and it just stunned me. I had not believed that such craft and poetry were possible. I kept thinking--did she know that she was linking up all these images and words? Did she intend to create this beauty or was it just inspiration? I've never been the same and I've never been so overcome by a book. I have since read everything Morrison has written several times.
So I came to this book not as an objective reader. These essays are varied and have some repetitive themes, but the ones in here that I read twice are the ones where she talks about her craft. Turns out, she knew exactly what she was doing. She even did things that I didn't know she was doing. And she did it all on purpose. She introduces color into the story purposefully, language, she changes the perspective and steps outside the cannon of western lit to do something different. She's just absolutely brilliant.
I read a lot of writing books (Liz GIlbert, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King, Mary Karr, etc come to mind) that give advice for writers and they're like--just show up and pump out words or wait for the muse or whatever. And I'm not writer of fiction, but my thought is always--but your writing is not good. How does a genius write? Like, I want to know how Nabakov wrote Lolita--and in this book, you have a genius explaining the craft and it's sort of just as I suspected it. You have to have a gift. You have to see the color around your characters--whatever that means. I mean, I can't even imagine Morrison's process because it is so many levels above what most people do. But I feel lucky to have been able to read her books all my life.
April 7, 2019
I didn't think I would be reading this book so relatively soon. I've not read as much of her novels as I wanted and I wanted my own copy of this book over a library copy--this will definitely merit a re-read where I can sit with it a little more. So this will be my "abridged" overview.
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).
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).
July 28, 2021
I refuse to embarrass myself trying to review, let alone critique, Toni THEE Morrison. No ma'am.
She is the GOAT. No question, no argument.
She is the GOAT. No question, no argument.
April 17, 2019
You ever read a book that made you feel smart as hell? Hahaha! My vocabulary has expanded, my face is clear and my edges are being so respectful.
What I liked - Toni Morrison just knows how to make you feel lost in her words. If I ever took one of her classes, I would never be bored. She speaks about art and language (and many other topics of course) in such an informative and riveting way. There were some essays in this book that made me want to photocopy them and hand them out to people to read just so we could discuss it. Some of my favourites included A Race in Mind, Moral Inhabitants, The Slavebody & the Blackbody, Women, Race & Memory & Cinderella's Stepsisters to name a few.
I also liked the essays that gave me insight into Toni Morrison's novels. One of the main reasons I even bought this book was because with the exception of Beloved, I found myself not really getting into the rest of her work. I wasn't understanding it, wasn't connecting with it. I figured if I read her non-fiction, I'd be better able to understand her as a person, as a writer, what her motivations are and what her writing is about beyond the surface layer I wasn't getting past. There were essays where she broke down why she started her books the way she did, what certain lines meant, what inspired the stories, her writing process etc. It was very informative, almost like a reader's guide which I think will be very helpful when I read her work going forward (except A Mercy, she didn't explain that one so I guess I'll stay lost with that one).
There were some downsides. Some of the essays/speeches were very long and sometimes tedious to read. There were a few where I did catch myself losing focus. Also, because this is a collection of Toni Morrison's writings spanning over decades, there were instances where things were repeated verbatim, like whole paragraphs that reappeared four-five times in various sections.
Another thing to note is that not everything in this book is for everybody. I am not African American and I don't pretend to claim the struggle. I couldn't always follow along with the cultural and historical references but to me that's okay. Toni Morrison herself said in one of the included speeches, Goodbye to All That. Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell, "From the beginning, I claimed a territory by insisting on being identified as a black woman writer exclusively interested in facets of African American Culture. I made these unambiguous assertions to impose on all readers the visibility in and the necessity of African American culture to my work precisely in order to encourage a wider critical vocabulary than the one in which I was educated." Can't be mad at that.
If you're interested in Toni Morrison outside of her fiction work, I highly recommend this book. The more you know. Also, have a dictionary handy :)
What I liked - Toni Morrison just knows how to make you feel lost in her words. If I ever took one of her classes, I would never be bored. She speaks about art and language (and many other topics of course) in such an informative and riveting way. There were some essays in this book that made me want to photocopy them and hand them out to people to read just so we could discuss it. Some of my favourites included A Race in Mind, Moral Inhabitants, The Slavebody & the Blackbody, Women, Race & Memory & Cinderella's Stepsisters to name a few.
I also liked the essays that gave me insight into Toni Morrison's novels. One of the main reasons I even bought this book was because with the exception of Beloved, I found myself not really getting into the rest of her work. I wasn't understanding it, wasn't connecting with it. I figured if I read her non-fiction, I'd be better able to understand her as a person, as a writer, what her motivations are and what her writing is about beyond the surface layer I wasn't getting past. There were essays where she broke down why she started her books the way she did, what certain lines meant, what inspired the stories, her writing process etc. It was very informative, almost like a reader's guide which I think will be very helpful when I read her work going forward (except A Mercy, she didn't explain that one so I guess I'll stay lost with that one).
There were some downsides. Some of the essays/speeches were very long and sometimes tedious to read. There were a few where I did catch myself losing focus. Also, because this is a collection of Toni Morrison's writings spanning over decades, there were instances where things were repeated verbatim, like whole paragraphs that reappeared four-five times in various sections.
Another thing to note is that not everything in this book is for everybody. I am not African American and I don't pretend to claim the struggle. I couldn't always follow along with the cultural and historical references but to me that's okay. Toni Morrison herself said in one of the included speeches, Goodbye to All That. Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell, "From the beginning, I claimed a territory by insisting on being identified as a black woman writer exclusively interested in facets of African American Culture. I made these unambiguous assertions to impose on all readers the visibility in and the necessity of African American culture to my work precisely in order to encourage a wider critical vocabulary than the one in which I was educated." Can't be mad at that.
If you're interested in Toni Morrison outside of her fiction work, I highly recommend this book. The more you know. Also, have a dictionary handy :)
May 28, 2023
EDIT z drugiego czytania w tłumaczeniu: Proszę czytać tę książkę, cudownie, że mądrość i przenikliwe spojrzenie, jakie w esejach stosuje Toni Morrison są dostępne po polsku.
Powiem tak: ja rozumiem, że każdy ma swoje własne preferencje, że albo się coś/kogoś lubi albo nie, książka przemawia lub nie przemawia, ale naprawdę nie mogę zrozumieć ludzi, którym nie podoba się pisarstwo Toni Morrison. Jej powieści to dla mnie doskonałość warsztatu, języka i wrażliwości, a w tych esejach autorka pozwala nam zajrzeć nie tylko na swój warsztat, ale też zapoznać się z bardziej osobistymi przemyśleniami, pisząc o rasie i literaturze, o kulturze i o tym, kto ją tworzy, o języku i o tym, kto go dominuje i jak można go wykorzystać i stworzyć od nowa. Po tej książce doceniam jej twórczość jeszcze bardziej, chcę do niej wrócić i znów się zachwycać.
Powiem tak: ja rozumiem, że każdy ma swoje własne preferencje, że albo się coś/kogoś lubi albo nie, książka przemawia lub nie przemawia, ale naprawdę nie mogę zrozumieć ludzi, którym nie podoba się pisarstwo Toni Morrison. Jej powieści to dla mnie doskonałość warsztatu, języka i wrażliwości, a w tych esejach autorka pozwala nam zajrzeć nie tylko na swój warsztat, ale też zapoznać się z bardziej osobistymi przemyśleniami, pisząc o rasie i literaturze, o kulturze i o tym, kto ją tworzy, o języku i o tym, kto go dominuje i jak można go wykorzystać i stworzyć od nowa. Po tej książce doceniam jej twórczość jeszcze bardziej, chcę do niej wrócić i znów się zachwycać.
November 27, 2025
Toni Morrison was an incredible writer. This collection brings together essays, speeches and meditations that reveal the depth of Morrison’s intellect and the sharpness of her insight. I firmly believe that everyone can take something meaningful away from this book. I was and still am in absolute awe of her mind: her clarity, her intellect and her ability to put complex thoughts into words.
I can't stress enough how incredible of a woman she was. I truly miss her.
I can't stress enough how incredible of a woman she was. I truly miss her.
July 9, 2022
Collection of Toni Morrison’s essays and speeches that sheds light on Morrison’s worldviews. For me the most impactful and emotionally evocative pieces are her eulogies and meditations, those written to and about people she desires to honor. She also closely examines her own novels, and I found several nuggets that helped me understand her body of work better. This book was much more academic and philosophical than expected, with her objectives sometimes obscured beneath elaborate language. Several essays are detailed examinations of literary writing and criticism. She explores themes in works of other authors. She comments on society. I was not really expecting or seeking an academic treatise. I can, however, strongly recommend her fiction, especially Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. I enjoyed this book, but I think her messages come through beautifully, and more powerfully, in her fiction.
April 6, 2019
as i was reading this book of essays i kept coming back to the fact that toni Morrison is a true intellectual. i had not read or heard her eulogy for james baldwin. SO GOOD. i might have done some crying.
recommended.
recommended.
March 9, 2020
This has to be one of the most inspiring books I have ever read.
“I claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a rhetorical history an imaginistic one; to read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics.”
Just look at what Toni Morrison is doing with the above paragraph.
She is claiming.
She is interrupting.
She is imposing.
She is enacting.
And check out the result: a fusion of art and morality.
If you’ve enjoyed Morrison’s novels, you know that she isn’t blowing smoke here. This is exactly what she does with her fiction. And the astonishing thing to me is that in this collection of her non-fiction, she tells us how she does it, and why.
These essays, spanning from 1976 to 2013, come in a range of formats, from academic lectures to writer’s conference keynote speeches; from commencement addresses to eulogies. She discusses racism, individual artists, the writing process and her own novels. Some common threads I noticed throughout this variety of approaches were
our political/social reality--
“In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.”
how art fits into that political/social reality--
“I do not want to go into my old age without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot face is living without my art.”
and how she addresses that reality in her writing--
“…the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”
What a gift this collection is—an opportunity to sit at the feet of this wise woman and soak up as much as you can. I can’t recommend it highly enough for everyone, but if you are or aspire to be a fiction writer, and particularly if you have admired Morrison’s style, then you need to read this. The generosity and clarity with which she shares her insights … well it’s just astounding.
“I claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a rhetorical history an imaginistic one; to read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics.”
Just look at what Toni Morrison is doing with the above paragraph.
She is claiming.
She is interrupting.
She is imposing.
She is enacting.
And check out the result: a fusion of art and morality.
If you’ve enjoyed Morrison’s novels, you know that she isn’t blowing smoke here. This is exactly what she does with her fiction. And the astonishing thing to me is that in this collection of her non-fiction, she tells us how she does it, and why.
These essays, spanning from 1976 to 2013, come in a range of formats, from academic lectures to writer’s conference keynote speeches; from commencement addresses to eulogies. She discusses racism, individual artists, the writing process and her own novels. Some common threads I noticed throughout this variety of approaches were
our political/social reality--
“In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.”
how art fits into that political/social reality--
“I do not want to go into my old age without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot face is living without my art.”
and how she addresses that reality in her writing--
“…the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”
What a gift this collection is—an opportunity to sit at the feet of this wise woman and soak up as much as you can. I can’t recommend it highly enough for everyone, but if you are or aspire to be a fiction writer, and particularly if you have admired Morrison’s style, then you need to read this. The generosity and clarity with which she shares her insights … well it’s just astounding.
March 4, 2019
A collection spanning forty years that has either been ill-edited or not edited at all. Editing Morrison might be intimidating–she won the Novel Prize, ffs–but that, particularly with established authors, is what publishers are for. The collection has been arranged so as to make it embarrassingly obvious that Morrison often recycles whole paragraphs from one public speaking engagement to the next–and you know what, everyone does that, it’s neither unexpected nor a crime–but when at least three essays in the first section, none of which are long, all feature a paragraph that starts “Excluding the height of the slave trade, the mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has ever been”, you can forgive a reader for feeling mildly insulted. There are also no citations for most of the texts Morrison quotes. Up your game, Chatto & Windus.
March 19, 2024
Excellent, it’s Toni after all. I do think how much you enjoy this collection will depend on how engaged you are with the criticism of her work, and the subjects these essays and speeches are about. Lots of range in here, but plenty to love — and I was kind of knocked over by some of the early essays. Also a delight to hear her discuss her own books, now having read them all.
I love Toni.
I love Toni.
February 12, 2019
This can be considered the Summa theologica of Toni Morrison's opinion about almost everything, from politic, to racism, feminism, and so on. I would only recommend, as it is a collection of essays, not to read them all together, because sometimes, of course , there are repetitions, but I think it can be a very enlightening book.
Questo volume potrebbe essere considerato la Summa theologica del pensiero di Toni Morrison, anche perché, essendo una collezione di saggi, lei parla a largo raggio praticamente di tutto, dal razzismo alla politica e al femminismo. Consiglierei soltanto di non leggerlo tutto di seguito, perché puó sembrare a tratti ripetitivo, ma é sicuramente un libro profondo ed illuminante.
THANKS EDELWEISS FOR THE PREVIEW!
Questo volume potrebbe essere considerato la Summa theologica del pensiero di Toni Morrison, anche perché, essendo una collezione di saggi, lei parla a largo raggio praticamente di tutto, dal razzismo alla politica e al femminismo. Consiglierei soltanto di non leggerlo tutto di seguito, perché puó sembrare a tratti ripetitivo, ma é sicuramente un libro profondo ed illuminante.
THANKS EDELWEISS FOR THE PREVIEW!
March 2, 2019
Toni Morrison is obviously a brilliant writer, and I have loved many of her novels, but this compendium of essays and speeches isn’t great. She, not unexpectedly, reuses parts of speeches over and over again, and so it can get really repetitive and confusing (wait, did I read this before?). I love hearing her talk about her writing, and enjoyed her critiques of other literature, but I think her political essays are less effective. But overall it just felt like a disorganized jumble, not this writer at her best.
February 15, 2020
I loved this book.
LOVED it.
But y'all.
Toni makes my head hurt. Like. She kicked my aaaahhhh. Smh, I learned so much I may need a new reading journal.
😒 I'm reading something raunchy in secret to get over this situation.
... That is all.
(must read if you are writer though. She really deserved her Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew she was writing art but I didn't know-know. Now I know. 🤷🏾♀️💪🏾🚀)
LOVED it.
But y'all.
Toni makes my head hurt. Like. She kicked my aaaahhhh. Smh, I learned so much I may need a new reading journal.
😒 I'm reading something raunchy in secret to get over this situation.
... That is all.
(must read if you are writer though. She really deserved her Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew she was writing art but I didn't know-know. Now I know. 🤷🏾♀️💪🏾🚀)
February 29, 2020
I marked down almost every chapter as a reading that should be included into a syllabus or recommended to certain people. I am already planning on rereading this book within the month. Toni Morrison is a goddess and deserves all of the praise in the world for her graceful and honest words. Please put this book on the top of your reading list. You will not regret it.
March 31, 2019
It took me nearly a month to read this collection of essays. It's not an easy book to read, as there is no timeline to follow. And many of the observations are repetitive, but are explored in different aspects. There are lots of subjects that Toni delves deep into: writing, race, politics, feminism...... Some more jarring than others, but it goes without saying that she tackles them with style and grace. Toni Morrison is one of the GOAT writers. I think ever person on this earth can learn a lot from this book, or any of her novels, really. Definitely recommend.
March 4, 2019
I wish an editor or someone else had persuaded Toni Morrison to change the title of her selected essays, speeches and meditations: The Source of Self-Regard. Occasionally reading it in public places, I was embarrassed to think that anyone might assume I was reading the latest book intended for the bloated New Age and self-help section of an airport bookstore. That title isn’t helped by the boring front cover of the dust jacket, for which a designer is unaccountably credited even though the “design” features nothing but undistinguished typography.
But, as our early teachers advised us, it would be a mistake to judge the book by its cover. If you can navigate Morrison’s unexpectedly academic and too often leaden style as an essayist, this volume does contain some gold and is distinguished by an uncommon moral seriousness in which nothing is exempt from questioning.
In “The Price of Wealth, The Cost of Care,” a speech delivered at Vanderbilt University in 2013, Morrison takes on the holiest of holies:
“I want to talk about the subject that is companion to each graduate just as it is on all campuses as well as communities all over the country, indeed the world. A subject that is an appropriate theme of a speech delivered to students during these provocative times of uncertainty.
“The subject is money.
“Whether we have the obligation to protect and stabilize what we already have and, perhaps, to increase it, or whether we have the task of reducing our debt in order to live a productive, fairly comfortable life, or whether our goal is to earn as much as possible — whatever our situation, money is the not-so-secret mistress of our lives. And like all mistresses, you certainly know, if she has not already seduced you, she is nevertheless on your mind. None of us can read a newspaper, watch a television show, or follow political debates without being inundated with the subject of wealth.”
Morrison is just getting started, and by the time she’s finished, she has set a tall challenge for her young audience. She also does this in a 1988 commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, breaking all the rules, steering clear of the customary commencement platitudes, and probably annoying some platitude-comfortable parents in her audience. (A truncated and rather lame 1979 commencement address at Barnard College, centering on the Cinderella fairy tale, must have left most of her audience feeling shortchanged.)
In “WarTalk,” she asserts “a fundamental change in the concept of war — a not-so-secret conviction among various and sundry populations, both oppressed and privileged, that war is finally out of date; that it is truly the most inefficient method of achieving one’s (long-term) aims.” (“Not-so-secret” is somewhat of a tic with Morrison, and “various and sundry” is a tired expression, but the essay is strong enough to withstand minor shortcomings, and its firm dismissal of war is welcome.)
The collection reprints Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature, in which she ably laments forces debasing language in our time: “Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of the mindless media, whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy, or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.” Shortly after that comes this: “stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death.”
If I were teaching a first-year college English course, I would assign Morrison’s essay “The Future of Time” and Wendell Berry’s essay “The Loss of the Future” and set young students to the trusty old exercise of comparing and contrasting, and I would look forward to hearing what they would have to say.
I have to confess that when Morrison’s writing became too turgid, I occasionally found myself skimming. If you haven’t yet read any Morrison, I don’t recommend that you begin with the essays. Turn instead to her durable fiction, which is eminently worthy of that Nobel Prize. The five works from her 1973 second novel Sula through her 1987 novel Beloved are all richly imagined, exquisitely wrought and deeply affecting. It is as a creator of fiction that Morrison most fully realizes her intentions and, through the alchemy and cookery of art, ultimately transcends her intentions.
But, as our early teachers advised us, it would be a mistake to judge the book by its cover. If you can navigate Morrison’s unexpectedly academic and too often leaden style as an essayist, this volume does contain some gold and is distinguished by an uncommon moral seriousness in which nothing is exempt from questioning.
In “The Price of Wealth, The Cost of Care,” a speech delivered at Vanderbilt University in 2013, Morrison takes on the holiest of holies:
“I want to talk about the subject that is companion to each graduate just as it is on all campuses as well as communities all over the country, indeed the world. A subject that is an appropriate theme of a speech delivered to students during these provocative times of uncertainty.
“The subject is money.
“Whether we have the obligation to protect and stabilize what we already have and, perhaps, to increase it, or whether we have the task of reducing our debt in order to live a productive, fairly comfortable life, or whether our goal is to earn as much as possible — whatever our situation, money is the not-so-secret mistress of our lives. And like all mistresses, you certainly know, if she has not already seduced you, she is nevertheless on your mind. None of us can read a newspaper, watch a television show, or follow political debates without being inundated with the subject of wealth.”
Morrison is just getting started, and by the time she’s finished, she has set a tall challenge for her young audience. She also does this in a 1988 commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, breaking all the rules, steering clear of the customary commencement platitudes, and probably annoying some platitude-comfortable parents in her audience. (A truncated and rather lame 1979 commencement address at Barnard College, centering on the Cinderella fairy tale, must have left most of her audience feeling shortchanged.)
In “WarTalk,” she asserts “a fundamental change in the concept of war — a not-so-secret conviction among various and sundry populations, both oppressed and privileged, that war is finally out of date; that it is truly the most inefficient method of achieving one’s (long-term) aims.” (“Not-so-secret” is somewhat of a tic with Morrison, and “various and sundry” is a tired expression, but the essay is strong enough to withstand minor shortcomings, and its firm dismissal of war is welcome.)
The collection reprints Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature, in which she ably laments forces debasing language in our time: “Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of the mindless media, whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy, or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.” Shortly after that comes this: “stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death.”
If I were teaching a first-year college English course, I would assign Morrison’s essay “The Future of Time” and Wendell Berry’s essay “The Loss of the Future” and set young students to the trusty old exercise of comparing and contrasting, and I would look forward to hearing what they would have to say.
I have to confess that when Morrison’s writing became too turgid, I occasionally found myself skimming. If you haven’t yet read any Morrison, I don’t recommend that you begin with the essays. Turn instead to her durable fiction, which is eminently worthy of that Nobel Prize. The five works from her 1973 second novel Sula through her 1987 novel Beloved are all richly imagined, exquisitely wrought and deeply affecting. It is as a creator of fiction that Morrison most fully realizes her intentions and, through the alchemy and cookery of art, ultimately transcends her intentions.
Read
April 6, 2019As a devoted fiction reader, I found these incisive, short non-fiction pieces to be pretty much over my head. So I took this one back to the library and brought home Pam Houston's new memoir, Deep Creek, which is much more in my non-fiction comfort zone.
This is not to say that I didn't find The Source of Self-Regard to be most excellent - just that it was much more work than I care to do, now that my grad school days are well behand me. Perfect book - for the right reader.
This is not to say that I didn't find The Source of Self-Regard to be most excellent - just that it was much more work than I care to do, now that my grad school days are well behand me. Perfect book - for the right reader.
February 27, 2019
This book requires, necessitates multiple readings.
January 2, 2023
"We can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas."
I have spent a long while moving through Toni's nonfiction collection, my last work from her not counting that one short story. Perhaps too long even though December has indeed been a very hectic month. I instinctively wanted to slow my pace, to take every word in, giving time for every word to be completely digested. Granted, there are pieces which contain identical paragraphs, or even identical sections, but that is expected of this bibliographic edition. Morrison's critical insight, bountiful vision, and expert grasp of human relations continue to impress and exalt.
There is of course a lot of her writing that is on her own books, the early novels especially crop up repeatedly. Apart from all this reflection, she sharply comments on art and music; on history, memory, and archive; on the figure of the Black American, the woman, and especially the Black woman; on the importance of writers in society, on the practice of reading, writing, and meaning-making; on the uses and misuses of language. I was particularly affected by her James Baldwin eulogy. Here is a display of the innate power of words, a window into the mind of a visionary.
January 9, 2022
My favourite essays/speeches in this collection include:
The Foreigner's Home
The Habit of Art
The Individual Artist
Unspeakable Things Unspoken
The Source of Self-Regard
Goodbye to All That
The Foreigner's Home
The Habit of Art
The Individual Artist
Unspeakable Things Unspoken
The Source of Self-Regard
Goodbye to All That
October 21, 2019
The Source of Self-Regard is a wonderful collection of essays by Toni Morrison. The articles are organized chronologically, some written 30 years ago, some recently before her passing, yet equally sharp, relevant and powerful, the essays on race, Black American culture, American history (slavery), and female liberation especially so.
Toni Morrison also discusses the role of the artist in society, the making and remaking of the so-called American Literature Canon. I confess I haven't read Toni Morrison's fictions. Reading her thoughts and analysis on Afro-American literature, slave narratives of 19th century and modern Black American literature is an education to me.
She also writes about her own works (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise), her comments insightful, a free lesson from a literature master for anyone interested in writing.
In Goodbye to All That, Toni Morrison discusses race identity in literature and what means to be a black writer. A lot of nuances in this article. Being black while universal, or being universal while black(slash yellow, brown, red, as well as woman, trans etc.. outside the traditional white male literature canon) is not only possible but necessary.
I especially enjoyed following: the Nobel Literature Prize speech, the eulogy for James Baldwin, Faulkner and Women, The Source of Self Regards, Rememory, and Goodbye to All That.
“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
“How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and politically unresolved.”
Toni Morrison also discusses the role of the artist in society, the making and remaking of the so-called American Literature Canon. I confess I haven't read Toni Morrison's fictions. Reading her thoughts and analysis on Afro-American literature, slave narratives of 19th century and modern Black American literature is an education to me.
She also writes about her own works (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise), her comments insightful, a free lesson from a literature master for anyone interested in writing.
In Goodbye to All That, Toni Morrison discusses race identity in literature and what means to be a black writer. A lot of nuances in this article. Being black while universal, or being universal while black(slash yellow, brown, red, as well as woman, trans etc.. outside the traditional white male literature canon) is not only possible but necessary.
I especially enjoyed following: the Nobel Literature Prize speech, the eulogy for James Baldwin, Faulkner and Women, The Source of Self Regards, Rememory, and Goodbye to All That.
“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
“How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and politically unresolved.”
June 9, 2021
In un mondo dominato da slogan ed emoticon, la parola si fa carico, portavoce di quanto accade. L'importanza della parola è una sorta di lascito che la scrittrice ha regalato ai suoi tanti lettori. Un omaggio che, introdotto da testi che sono una preghiera ai morti dell'11 settembre, una riflessione su Martin Luther King e un elogio funebre a Baldwin, grande amico, parla di tematiche a lei molto care. Dalla questione della razza passando per il femminismo, il razzismo, ma anche i bianchi e i neri. Un testo che fa riflettere sul linguaggio, la sua importanza e sul fatto che la parola sia in grado di fare in verità raccontando il mondo da ieri a oggi.
L'ultima parte è maggiormente intimista e racconta dell'essere scrittrice, del suo lavoro, ma anche della letteratura afroamericana che dovrebbe essere più considerata e cui lei è la massima esponente. Con questa sua opera, conferma il suo talento dando alla parola il senso di verità e libertà.
L'ultima parte è maggiormente intimista e racconta dell'essere scrittrice, del suo lavoro, ma anche della letteratura afroamericana che dovrebbe essere più considerata e cui lei è la massima esponente. Con questa sua opera, conferma il suo talento dando alla parola il senso di verità e libertà.
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