It is hard not to read Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others in the light of recent disturbing political developments in the US. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in his introduction, the central concerns of this slim book, based on Morrison’s 2016 Norton lectures at Harvard on “the literature of belonging”, may seem to have a new resonance after the election of Trump and given the increasing visibility of white supremacist groups.
Morrison considers the fetishisation of skin colour and the questions posed by our era of mass migration, and offers elegant reminders of some well-known but still unpalatable facts. One is that human beings invent and reinforce dehumanising categories of otherness in order to justify economic exploitation and to shore up our sense of security and belonging. That process of self-justification requires and encourages an extraordinary level of sadism.
Another is that in the US, “creating a coherent nation out of immigrants” has often involved the assimilation of a wide variety of peoples into a wholly illusory whiteness. A third is that this constructed whiteness has also been a convenient way to give poor, working-class Americans “the illusion of power” – a shared racism can seem to align their interests with those of the rich and dominant, offering them a false sense of social status and a safe set of scapegoats for their grievances.
This is a book not about racial difference (there is, after all, as Morrison notes, only one human race) but about the possibilities and responsibilities of literature. And what linger in the mind longer than Morrison’s arguments are her bold and delicate literary juxtapositions. The point about the role of racism in the lives and psyches of working-class whites, for instance, is made economically via a reading of a Flannery O’Connor story. Though only slightly more than 100 pages, the book makes room for long quotations from other works, including Morrison’s novels, which she revisits with a characteristic sensitivity to how things are said, to what is left out of a work of art, and why. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.”
It shouldn’t go unnoticed that, in one of the possible readings of that last sentence, there is only the risk of self-examination for a writer – never any guarantee. Morrison will not let herself or anyone else off the hook, and the autobiographical moments in this book are among the most interesting and ambiguous. She opens with a memory, from the early 1930s, of her introduction to notions of racial impurity by a formidable visiting great-grandmother, who frowned and pointed her cane at the relatively light-skinned Morrison and her sister, saying: “These children have been tampered with.”
She also recalls an encounter, as an adult, with another black woman, poorer than herself and oddly picturesque in dress and manner; gradually, Morrison realises that she herself has inappropriately projected her own needs and essentialist fantasies on to this unknown woman – we needn’t be a white racist, in other words, to fall into such a trap with a stranger, to “deny her personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon for ourselves”.
One of the more striking textual juxtapositions Morrison makes is between the cloying excess of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – its abolitionist intent accompanied by extreme efforts to soothe and reassure a white readership who “needed, wanted, or could relish the romance” of slavery – and the unnerving, unapologetic plainness of the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, the 18th-century British owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica. These diaries log Thistlewood’s regular rapes of slave women, recording the time and place and satisfactoriness or otherwise of each incident without any other reflections, “a mere notation among others about the price of sugarcane or a successful negotiation for flour”. The only distinguishing mark given to rape over other economic transactions is his use of Latin phrases: Sup. Terr., Sup. Lect., In Silva; “on the ground”, “on the bed”, “in the woods”.
Morrison’s analyses of fictional works, of course, cannot be nearly so horrifying for the reader, but in their sheer precision they are nonetheless often unsettling. She shows how a single word choice in a Hemingway novel can exploit and fortify any number of racialised fetishes and revulsions, and she also explains, with a dispassionate attention to technique, why and how Hemingway made such choices as a writer, the useful short cuts they allowed him to take for the purposes of narrative and character and mood.
Morrison gives an unusually concise demonstration of how truth in fiction works, or doesn’t, of where the line is between a self-serving distortion or reduction of someone else and an imaginative leap in service of a different and important form of truth. These are questions she has been considering for decades now. In “The Site of Memory” – a non fiction piece written during the composition of her 1987 Pulitzer prize-winning novel Beloved – she wrote, describing part of her driving impulse as a novelist, that in the US, “the print origins of black literature (as opposed to the oral origins) were slave narratives” such as those of Harriet Jacobs or Frederick Douglass, in which, for the most part, “there was no mention of their interior life”. Here, in a chapter called “Narrating the Other”, she places passages from Beloved alongside the 1856 newspaper article from which it sprang, about Margaret Garner (the real-life Sethe in Beloved), a woman who, with slave-hunters at the door, killed her child in an effort to protect it from what she had endured.
This chapter offers a valuable account of the novelist’s task as Morrison sees it. Partly because the full humanity and interiority of slaves had been largely obscured even in their own writings, Morrison’s interest was in imagining a mind and voice for several figures in this story, including the murdered daughter. To do so, she deliberately left out or avoided discovering many of the material facts surrounding the historical event that had inspired the novel. Some of these were revealed in a biography of Garner by Steven Weisenburger, published 10 years after Beloved. As Morrison now relates, several of Garner’s children were mixed-race, suggesting she had been raped by a slave-owner; she also includes details from Garner’s trial, in which the Fugitive Slave Act eventually trumped the murder laws, so that Garner was judged in legal terms to be not a killer but “a piece of property, as were her offspring”.
The most arresting detail for those of us whose memory of Beloved is of a book as devastating as it is exquisite is the ending of Garner’s story: she was sent back to the south where, unlike Sethe, she remained a slave until her death from typhoid soon after. It’s clear that Beloved would in many ways have been a lesser novel had it hewn closer to the fate of its real-life model. And yet to read the two side by side is a complex and moving experience.
Given that racial prejudice is an unnatural and learned phenomenon, the attempt to understand the mechanisms through which literature shapes and is shaped by it is an important one. Quoting the first two sentences of her novel Paradise – “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time” – Morrison recalls that, while many readers over the years have offered her guesses as to which of the female characters is the “white girl”, “only one of them was ever correct”.
As in several of her works, she withholds any identifiable racial markers for most of Paradise: the one reader who figured it out did so, Morrison tells us, based only on “behaviour – something she identified as a gesture or assumption no black girl would make or have – no matter where she came from or whatever her past”. In other words, here is yet more confirmation that race is solely and entirely (in the words of political theorist Bruce Baum) “an effect of power”. It makes sense that our best novelists should be concerned, among other things, with examining how this most damaging of illusions is developed and sustained. Morrison notes in passing that she is now at work on a novel about “the education of a racist”. That project almost certainly shouldn’t sound more urgent now than at any other time. Still, The Origin of Others is a reminder that that next book may well be a gift we all need.
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