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.

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• WriteBlack favorite Junot Diaz has a piece in The New Yorker
• Banned words
• On the importance of reading
• Books. About food. By Southerners.
• In praise of (Breeze Harper’s) Sistah Vegan
• And finally:

The author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks speaks (to Stephen Colbert):

I’ve been puzzling over how I feel about what radio shock-jock Howard Stern said about Precious star Gabourey Sidibe.

Yeah, it was a terrible thing to say. Yeah, Stern is all about ginning up controversy. Yeah, he’s said equally disagreeable things about other people. Yeah, it would be nice if a more diverse selection of body types were presented as desirable to American women and young people.

And yeah, I’m someone who falls in the weird sartorial world between single-digit sizes and the  so-called average American woman’s size.

But you know what? I’m not filled with crazy joy when I look at Sidibe.

She is amazingly confident and seems to be quite secure about her size. Good for her. But as has been said before  (I knew I hadn’t invented the description ‘pathology porn’!), Precious the character and the woman who portrayed her are metaphorically and literally unhealthy.

I’m well aware that it’s possible to be obese and fit, but even so, obesity itself correlates long term with risk of diabetes, arthritis and heart problems, so I wouldn’t describe it as anywhere near an ideal state.

And overweight problems and obesity affect far too many black women. Four out of five! That’s ridiculous! Even the most fat-positive among us have to be aware of a problem there.

So as happy as I am for Sidibe — she gives great interview, doesn’t she? — I wince when I look at her. And I’m not convinced that Stern is 100 percent wrong, despite that fact that from what I’ve heard, Sidibe is a natural, possibly even great actress.

It would be unfortunate for her to be relegated to smart-aleck-y fat black chick roles. Leaving the success of my beloved Queen Latifah (who was spokesperson for a weight-loss program) aside, aren’t there enough of those?

All this is to say that I’m beginning to be troubled by the blase references and celebration of black women as “curvy” and “big boned.”

And did I mention that I hate the word “thick” when used as a euphemism for “fat”?

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the book. Eventually.

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I haven’t been able to finish Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name.

Each time I pick it up, it makes me angrier.

That is all.

Memoirist, must-read blogger and contributing editor to The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about what the American Dream means to him.

Happy Mother’s Day to all!

Today is a particularly special day for me because I am spending it with my beloved mother…and because my husband and I are expecting our first child early this fall.

Although I’ve basically spent all of 2009 in an exhausted haze due to the pregnancy, I’ve also been searching for — and in some cases, reintroducing myself to — some books about black mothers and children.

Here are a couple of the new-to-me things I’ve found, with quick ratings:

• The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy, Kimberly Seals Allers. Although I appreciated that it emphasized some of the issues affecting black pregnant women more than non-black pregnant women (preeclampsia comes to mind), it felt too short, and I actually had to buy one of those big-name pregnancy guides as a supplement. Grade: B-.
• Nine Months with Thomas, Shirley Hailstock. The hero was rendered infertile in a car accident (just go with me here), and the heroine has agreed to be a gestational surrogate for an embryo produced by the hero and his late wife. Since this is a romance, they fall in love. Although the book did give short shrift to some of the pain-in-the-ass details of assisted reproductive technology and the heroine’s complicated pregnancy and delivery, I was really pleased to see that this book existed at all. Problem: The hero, who is rich as Croesus, is boring as all get-out. Grade: C.

Since my parents found my name in a book of African names, I’m really eager to get a book of names. Among the ones I’m considering: African Names: Names from the African Continent for Children and Adults, by Julia Stewart, or Proud Heritage: 11001 Names for Your African-American Baby, by Elza Dunwiddle-Boyd.

And hey, if you’ve got any other recommendations on this subject or others that might be of interest to a more-than-slightly-anxious-(gulp! I can’t believe I’m saying this)-mom-to-be, I’m eagerly accepting suggestions.

*Photo from Black Soils. Eden Now.

If you’re in Harlem (sigh. I miss living in Harlem) on June 7, head to the AALBC.com Brownstone Gallery for wine, food and art for a good cause — Mosaic Literary Magazine and its programs.

The event is from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at 64 West 119 St.

More details from Mosaic.

Today was Valentine’s Day (and also my birthday, which is one of multiple reasons I haven’t been around much this week), and my original plan, long in the making, was to highlight some excellent love stories/romances in a post to go up today.

But the publicity surrounding the possible violent situation involving the singers Rihanna and Chris Brown made me think twice about that.

Because other people have already done it and done it well, I’m not going to lecture you about how terrible domestic violence is, what a particular danger it is to women of color, how stupid it is to blame the victim, or even how ridiculous it is to use someone’s nationality as a reason why bad things happen to them.

What I will do is point you to — you guessed it — some books detailing the particular pain domestic abuse can cause:

• The Batterer As Parent, Lundy Bancroft
• Violence in the Lives of Black Women, Tom M. Stevenson
• When Violence Begins at Home, K J Wilson
• Battle Cries: Black Women and Intimate Partner Abuse, Hillary Potter
• Black Women’s Lives, Kristal Brent Zook

If you know someone who needs to read these, please pass this list to them, together with a list of more immediate places they can find help.

Also, if you’ve got some time, please watch Jay Smooth‘s excellent video about domestic abuse in black and Latino communities.