The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,87

or even whipped like a child, but the serious study of art forms that have much work to do, and which are already legitimatized by their own cultural sources and predecessors—in or out of the canon—I owe much.

For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty, a hundred, or more years his or her work may be relished for its beauty or its insight or its power, or it may be condemned for its vacuousness and pretension—and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed at for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power—and junked. It’s possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or that both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.

NOTES

1. See “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

2. Among many examples, They Came Before Columbus, The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima (New York: Random House, 1976), xvi–xvii.

3. Tzvetan Todorov, “ ‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture,” translated by Loulou Mack, in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 370–80.

4. Terrence Rafferty, “Articles of Faith,” New Yorker, May 16, 1988, 110–18.

5. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 2.

6. Ibid., 310.

7. Ibid., 337.

8. See Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 15.

9. Ibid., 107 and 142.

10. Ibid., 112.

* Author’s note: Older America is not always distinguishable from its infancy. We may pardon Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 but it should have occurred to Kenneth Lynn in 1986 that some young Native American might read his Hemingway biography and see herself described as a “squaw” by this respected scholar, and that some young men might shudder reading the words “buck” and “half-breed” so casually included in his scholarly speculations.

Academic Whispers

AT SOME TIME in the late eighties, I began to feel an uneasiness about what seemed to me a whispered conversation taking place within the study of African American literature, between students and masters of its scholarship; it appeared to be a private agreement about the true purpose of the discourse. My unease about this sotto dialogue was exacerbated by another blatant one that attacked and suborned the legitimacy of African American literature as a field of study. Both dialogues—the covert one and the blatant one—drove the debates on canon formation.

Back in the eighties I was not eager to think through my anxiety about the shape the debate was taking—the politics of identity versus the politics of identitylessness, sometimes known as “universality”—because I was not willing to be distracted into that old and sad routine that African American artists and scholars so often believe themselves forced to undertake: the routine of defending, forever defending, their right to exist. It was such a tedious battle, so unoriginal, so enervating it left no time and no strength for the real work of artists and scholars, which is to refine its own creation and go about their own business. I did not want to watch the billow of another toreador’s red cape designed to provoke and thereby trick a force from knowing its own power. I chose rather to focus on how to create nonracist, yet race-specific literature within an already race-inflected language for readers who have been forced to deal with the assumptions of racial hierarchy. I chose to write as though there was nothing to prove or disprove, as though an unraced world already existed. Not to transcend race, or to aspire to some fraudulent “universalism”—a code word that had come to mean “nonblack”—but to claim the liberty of my own imagination. For I have never lived, nor has anyone, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape, Edenesque, utopian—so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. In hopeful language it has been posited as ideal, a condition possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or located in a protected preserve, rather like a wilderness park, or in the forests of Faulkner’s imagination, where hunting prowess trumps race and class. As an already and always raced writer I knew that I would not, could