The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,88

not, reproduce the master’s voice along with its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate, mutate, and control imagistic, metaphoric language (and its syntax) in order to produce something that could be called literature that is free of the imaginative restraints that the racially inflected language at my disposal imposes on me. I don’t mean, of course, simply the avoidance of racial slurs, name-calling, or stereotyping. I mean first to recognize these linguistic strategies, then either to employ or deploy them to achieve a counter effect; to deactivate their lazy, unearned power, to summon other oppositional powers, and liberate what I am able to invent, record, describe, and transform from the straitjacket a racialized society can and does buckle us into. I insisted on writing outside the white gaze, not against it but in a space where I could postulate the humanity writers were always being asked to enunciate. Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on. As I mentioned earlier, imagining a world minus racial dominance or hierarchy appears in literature as an impossible Eden or unreachable utopia, but it has also been described as “barbarism,” as “the end of history,” “futureless,” or doomed to a future of rubbish and declared an already damaged, valueless experience. In other words catastrophe. A naïve, corrupt Jonestown culminating in ignorance, murder, insanity.

Perhaps I was nursing an incipient paranoia, the origin of which I traced to the unusually large number of inquiries to speak to university populations on the issue of racism, and even to address campuses on which some specific and especially craven racial incidents had taken place. I was not simply annoyed by the assumptions of these requests, I was angered to be asked to clarify an area (one of many) about which I know nothing. Of course, I have been a victim of such treatment, but why, I wondered, would anybody ask the victim to explain his torturer? Isn’t such insight best sought from those familiar with its rationale? (Does a rape victim know best how to calm a rapist?) It seemed to me the problem of racism ought to be addressed first by those who know its ins and outs from the privileged seat of its origin. Being asked to spend my time that way (to heal and to be sick) may have disturbed me unduly, but it connected somehow to my perception that the study of African American literature had become, in several quarters (if high school and certain college curricula, syllabi, anthologies, prefaces, headnotes, afterwords, and forewords were an indication) an exercise in the achievement of neighborliness or tolerance through the study of its special kind of pathology, in which the survivor is assumed to be both patient and physician. And this was where the whispered discourse took place.

With the best intentions in the world, the encounter between African American art and students of literature had developed these subtexts (The Bluest Eye, read in elementary schools, was a case in point, as was its banning). And it was easy to see how two messages—African American art as explications of pathology; African American art as restorative balms to rashes of racism—had been formulated and why. First, the history of black people in the United States has been a brutal one, and its consequences still shake and inform contemporary life. Examining and acknowledging that brutality can and does lend itself to the interpretation of black presence in that history as our pathology and only ours; it can and did lead to the notion that, as a people, we are a problem (the “negro problem” that every black writer from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston had to comment on—not to mention the verification of literacy that Phillis Wheatley and the authors of slave narratives were required to provide) and it was our job to solve ourselves.

Countering that interpretation of African American studies as vaccination against incipient white racism is another one: African American studies as a field naturally immune from racism. That black life was a cornucopia of treasures, contributions, and constructive indigenous mechanisms beneficial to its community and that these social mechanisms operated as an innocent alternative to the race-bound society surrounding it. It is an interpretation that captures the sense that most African Americans