40 years of Morrison’s essays, speeches in one book

Awriter’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” says Toni Morrison ( in “Peril”, the brief, remarkable introduction to her newest book, “Mouth Full of Blood” (2019).

In this collection by the Nobel Prize winning author widely, ardently considered to be one of the world’s best writers there are 40 years of her essays, speeches and meditations, including her thoughts and arguments about politics, art and writing.

The book contains exhortations and transcribed question-and-answer sessions, reflections and analyses, exegeses and commencement talks. In other words, it’s a large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah.

Organised into three parts titled “The Foreigner’s Home”, “Black Matter(s)”, and “God’s Language”, each section begins with a moving address to the dead: respectively, to those who died on September 11, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin.

“The Foreigner’s Home” is centred on politics, particularly on questions of otherness, foreignness, citizenship and nationalism. Of who, especially in the US, gets to belong? Morrison makes plain that racism, tribalism and bigotry are nothing new are, in fact, inherent to the broken foundation on which the nation was formed.

For instance, in “Moral Inhabitants”, she runs through a harrowing list of the things “our conquerors (our forefathers), our men of vision and power in America” have said about marginalised people.

Morrison quotes Theodore Roosevelt on

Native people, Ulysses

S Grant on Jewish immigrants, the New York Tribune on Chinese people, Benjamin Franklin on black people, and on and on, ending with a deeply sickening diary selection from William Byrd, the founder of Richmond, Virginia, in which he catalogues who whipped and brutalised which of his slaves.

That history is terrible; the present is, of course, hardly wonderful.

Reviewing the history of genocide, she posits that “nation-states, governments seeking legitimacy and identity, seem able and determined to shape themselves by the destruction of a collective ‘other’”, and that “for an assumed safety, hegemony, or pure land grabs, foreigners were constructed as the sum total of the putative nation’s ills”.

This is from a lecture given at Oberlin College, Ohio, in 2009, but until I checked the index, I thought it might be from 2019.

“Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution,” she says. “It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times.”

With this book, one is tempted to quote at length from her words: her acuity and moral clarity are dazzling, but so is her vision for how we might find our way towards a less unjust, less hateful future. Race bias, she notes, “is not absolute, inevitable, or immutable”.

What’s more, “it has a beginning, a life, a history in scholarship, and it can have an end.”

◆ Read the full review on www.herald. co.zw