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.

I’m a survivor, I’m not gonna give up. – Destiny’s Child

In other later works, Morrison’s prescience in creating black female characters with rich inner lives who had opinions about what happened in their communities also was echoed — sometimes for good and sometimes for bad.

• Though its form is now a stylistic cliche and the prospect of a Tyler Perry-helmed adaptation fills me with dread, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, is inspired by The Bluest Eye in telling what others would prefer to keep quiet or ignore, presenting black women as both the authors and subjects of their own life stories and obliterating “the line between colored and nigger.”
• Another less-skilled adaptation of similar themes comes in fellow journalist Karen Quinones Miller’s I’m Telling, which also explores what happens to a family after one of a set of twin sisters is abused by their stepfather.
• Finally, what’s less obvious is the way The Bluest Eye affected non-fiction. Who was seriously talking about black people and incest before 1970? Where were the major discussions of black folks and depression? Black folks and mental illness? If there’s any doubt that Morrison’s work cleared the way for more academic texts such as Constructing Incest Stories, by Dorothy and Anthony Hurley, there shouldn’t be. And for that, I am grateful.

Blessings on Ms. Morrison for her work and her legacy.

This is all just one woman’s opinion, of course. So, go ahead. Tell me. What’d I miss?