Via Jezebel

Check out my review of the Nnedi Okorafor’s newest book, the sci-fi/speculative/fantasy work Who Fears Death, over at Carleen Brice’s White Readers Meet Black Authors.

Spoiler: I liked it, mostly.

• 56 pages into @nnedi's 'Who Fears Death,' and so far riveted. #
• Via @claudia_m, Frederick Douglass on "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?". http://bit.ly/cj3BV2 #

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• RT @claudia_m Guest Post: Human Rights and THE BLUEST EYE'S Global Reach: http://wp.me/pjzwn-16N #
• RT @ claudia_m Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE – 40 years later: Blogger's Roundtable begins June 28 http://wp.me/pjzwn-13g (Please RT!) #

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This post is part of a continuing series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. See a complete list of participating bloggers at The Bottom of Heaven.

My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is woolly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
Inflicted again and again
- Nina Simone

If I may be so bold: Beyond her contributions to the world of magical realism, in my world the enduring legacy of Toni Morrison will be her poetic destruction of the notion that black American women bear all sufferings quietly, without complaint and without negative result. Although Zora Neale Hurston and others kicked open the door, it was Morrison who got in the room and detonated a neutron bomb on, in and around that stereotype and made people wonder about the effects of the larger culture on black women and girls.

And it started with The Bluest Eye, which was published 40 years ago.

What The Bluest Eye as a work of fiction showed was that the ills of pre-Civil-Rights-Act era racism brutalized the psyches of black women as much as it had the psyches of black men (think Richard Wright) — and to make matters worse, for some of those girls, their own families couldn’t be a refuge from the problems of the larger world.

Then there was a whole generation of writers, black and white, who took the themes of The Bluest Eye and ran with them. Thanks to the invitation of The Bottom of Heaven’s Claudia, I re-read The Bluest Eye for the first time in about 12 years (on Kindle for iPhone!). I was reminded of one of Morrison’s own inspirations and struck by how many elements from this story had been borrowed later by some other works. Although several nonblack authors dug in similar trenches in the years after The Bluest Eye‘s publication (I think of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur right away), I’ll focus on black authors here. Obviously, I can’t get to everything.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy

• Plot: The relationship of two sisters helps them understand a complicated world where dark-skinned black girls seem of little value and a father impregnates his daughter. Book: The Bluest Eye? No. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which was first published in 1976. Although Morrison’s Claudia and Frieda MacTeer aren’t as brutalized as their friend Pecola Breedlove, they bounce thoughts and ideas off each other, much like Alice Walker’s Celie and Nettie. Both sets of sisters experience members of their community or family turning their own self-hatred outward. Would we ever have known Celie and Nettie if we hadn’t first connected with Claudia and Frieda?
• There’s also Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie (1991), a soupy book with a gothic, Morrison-esque family complicated by an uncomfortable attraction between a father and daughter (“…the fondling, probing, interconnecting arms and bodies you saw playing in a circle in the snow. Why had they never treated you like that?”), incest and an unthinkable, inconvenient pregnancy.
• Not least among these was Push, by Sapphire. Like Pecola Breedlove, who desires blue eyes, the dark-skinned, overweight Precious Jones also is plagued by insecurities about her looks, and like Pecola, she is impregnated by her own father. Strangely, although I have few problems with The Bluest Eye, I’ve been able to make it through Push just once, because it struck me as, mostly, a gross-out exercise in pathology. Push read as though Sapphire had been given some of the plots points of The Bluest Eye in no particular order and told, “write something like this.” As you know, Push was made into the Oscar-nominated movie Precious in 2009. After the jump, a clip.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bernice McFadden’s piece in the Washington Post (which I had to have pointed out to me, because I no longer read the Post, which is a shell of its former self) about where black authors stand in the publishing industry is a must-read.

It’s here, for your reading pleasure.

• From @racialicious: On dismissing one type of narrative for another http://bit.ly/d2sOYF #
• President Obama is writing the foreword to Nelson Mandela's book. http://yhoo.it/9LWqpe #

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• RT @jbouie New Post: Why Can’t Peter Parker Be Black? http://dlvr.it/1H0jj #
• RT @rawsistaz James Fogle, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ Author, Arrested http://ow.ly/17wQQ6 #
• Heh. RT @BlowTheTrumpet So true! RT @seanpadilla If you can watch "Diary of a Tired Black Man" and… relate, the problem is you. #
• Of course, my reading schedule is so tight that I don't know when I'll get around to reading that book. #
• I must say that I am quite impressed with the marketing campaign for the new Due/Barnes/Underwood Tennyson Hardwick book. #

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• Yay! RT @calreid RT @rilnj: RT @mathitak Junot Diaz elected to Pulitzer Prize board. http://bit.ly/bapUJY #

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• I always say I'll remember Children's Book Week. Each year, I forget. http://bit.ly/btMlVJ I'll put it on my calendar for next year. #

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