The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,55

am thinking of it as home. For three reasons.

First, making a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home helps me clarify my thinking on racial construction. Second, it moves the concept of unmattering race away from yearning and desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent past to a manageable, doable human activity. Third because eliminating the potency of racial constructs in language is the work I can do. I can’t wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work. Also matters of race and matters of home are priorities in my work and both have in one way or another initiated my search for sovereignty as well as my abandonment of that search once I recognized its disguise.

As an already and always raced writer, I knew at once, from the very beginning, that I could not, would not reproduce the master’s voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father. Nor would I substitute his voice with that of his fawning mistress or his worthy opponent, for both of those positions (mistress or opponent) seemed to confine me to his terrain, in his arena, accepting the house rules in the dominance game. If I have to live in a racial house, it was important at the least to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, a thick-walled, impenetrable container from which no sound could be heard, but rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors. Or at the most, it became imperative for me to transform this house completely. I was tempted to convert it into a palace where racism didn’t hurt so much; to crouch in one of its many rooms where coexistence offered the delusion of agency. At some point I tried to use the race house as a scaffolding from which to launch a movable feast that could operate, be celebrated on any number of chosen sites. That was the authority, the glossy comfort, the redemptive quality, the freedom writing at first seemed to promise. Yet in that freedom, as in all freedoms (especially stolen ones), lay danger. Could I redecorate, redesign, even reconceive the racial house without forfeiting a home of my own? Would this forged, willed freedom demand an equally forged homelessness? Would it condemn me to eternal bouts of nostalgia for the home I have never had and would never know? Or would it require intolerable circumspection, a self-censoring bond to the original locus of racial architecture? In short, wasn’t I (wouldn’t I always be) tethered to a death-dealing ideology even (and especially) when I honed all my intelligence toward subverting it?

These questions, which have engaged so many, have troubled all of my work. 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. Frankly, I look to readers for literary and extraliterary analyses for much of what can be better understood. I believe, however, that my literary excursions, and my use of a house/home antagonism, are related to the matters under discussion during the course of the next two days, because so much of what seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, belonging—is, in fact, about home. An intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters.

There was a moment of some significance to me that followed the publication of Beloved and was a part of my reflection on the process of doing it. It is a moment that telescopes part of the territory to be mapped during this conference. This moment concerns the complexity inherent in creating narrative language both racially referential and figuratively