The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,89

have, that their real life, their nurturing life, their interior life is someplace else—outside its deforming history. And that obstacle-ridden as that life may be, it was clearly one they would choose, if the choice were presented to them. That while many (perhaps even most) African Americans valued the perceived privilege and license of white Americans, very few wanted to trade places if it meant becoming them.

Yet articulating this valued and revered difference seldom failed to come across as anything but self-serving, defensive patterns of denial: the “prideful” rhetoric typical of the weakened. Taking the position that history is not the determining factor, that stability, beauty, creativity, brilliance are the real characteristics of black life, seemed to weight (and in some circumstances, sully) the study of black culture with an ennobling program, an agenda, that broke its back in its attempt to enforce it.

These postures: (1) African American culture as examination and diagnoses of the patient, (2) African American culture as inoculation against intolerance, and (3) African American culture as an insistent celebration and recognition of cultural health and beauty (which could, by association or osmosis, heal others) clashed, and in the debris that resulted the literature itself was often buried. It appeared to me, as a writer participating in and inhabiting the world of that literature, that the work itself had become another kind of houseboy, opening doors for guests to enter a party to which it had not been invited.

Well, that was what was on my mind in the late eighties. Yet I determined not to be distracted from creative work into defense work and remained silent on the employment of my work as social healer. But there was still another problem. I understood and indeed preferred the role of writer committed to the work and not its explication. I believed anything and everything I had to say on the subject of African American literature was in the books I had written. Participating in their critique was antithetical to what I wanted my work to do, which was to arrive without tags, labels, or final meanings identified by me and pinned to its lapel. I wanted it owned by whomever wanted to take possession of it. Requests by diligent, earnest scholars for a conversation or interview to accompany their research seemed inappropriate, somehow, a kind of journalistic glue to hold together conclusions already drawn from primary and secondary sources. In addition, nobody was really interested in my thoughts about my books. They were, naturally and correctly, more interested in their own thoughts about them. I was just there in the conversation to provide confirmation or, in some cases, to be wrong, to be unable to understand what I had actually written. It was a long time, I confess, before I took these interviews seriously, because I associated them, unfairly, with journalism, not scholarship.

Finally I found myself forced to step up to the problem. My intense interest in the development of African American literary criticism and pedagogy and my refusal to participate in that criticism except as amicus curiae were incompatible once I understood that at the heart of my problem was a question at the heart of my work: that informing all of these kinds of approaches to the study of African American culture (pathology, tolerance, celebrated difference, erased difference; the writer as his or her best explicator, worse explicator, or friend of the court—or in my case an idle mixture) was the question, What constitutes African American literature? Is it the writing of Americans who “happen” to be Afro? Has it rather some cultural characteristics that surface, inform, and would surface and inform even if the literature had been shaped in Mexico City, London, Istanbul? Is there a difference? And if so, is the difference different from all other differences?

It does not “go without saying” that a work written by an African American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing black presence. There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of African American literature. In some there is an antagonistic duel with blackness. And in other cases, as they say, you’d never know. If I were to participate in the critical discourse, I would need to clarify the question of what, other than melanin and subject matter, made me an African American writer. I didn’t expect to arrive at some quintessential moment when the search was ended, even if that were possible. But I did want to be counted among those for whom