NEED OF THE HOUR
IN MOUTH FULL OF BLOOD, TONI MORRISON SPEAKS ABOUT SOCIETY ON THE BRINK OF A MELTDOWN
Toni Morrison is a writer’s writer, and Mouth Full of Blood is a writer’s book: that much is clear from the outset. Chaucer, Beowulf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Chinua Achebe, Mark Twain — these are just a handful of the sources cited in the Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection of “essays, speeches (and) meditations.”
It is unashamedly ambitious, divided into three sections (Part I, Part II and an “Interlude”). One deals with “black matters;” another with language; another is a mishmash of what one might call Morrison’s “greatest hits;” her Nobel lecture, her commencement address to Sarah Lawrence College, her discussion of the “Slavebody and the Blackbody” and her deinitive essay on racism and fascism. These essays span four decades of the writer’s work and a diverse range of subjects. They don’t make for light reading — nor should they.
If all this gives the impression that Morrison’s non-iction might be dry, it’s anything but. Her provocations and anecdotes keep the subject matter very much alive. She shares with us the thought process that led to her writing Beloved. And she recounts tales of churchgoing in her childhood, the velvetlined collection plate making its way down the pews, the experience of growing up as an African-american child with a “huge needy homeland to which we were said to belong but that none of us had seen or cared to see.”
Morrison also gives us a glimpse into the life of a successful writer, or rather a successful writer who is a black woman.
Morrison speaks of a society dangerously close to breaking point. “Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources,” she says in Peril, her prologue.
Ultimately, this is a collection much needed in our current climate. Though it will no doubt sell well, it isn’t a commercial book, nor one illed with catchy quotes or lip asides. Instead, it is serious, heartfelt and generous, an antidote to apathy in challenging times.