#toni morrison

[mutantoftomorrow]

In the safe harbor of each other's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[mutantoftomorrow]

In the safe harbor of each other's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[mutantoftomorrow]

'Oh, Jesus make me wonderful.'

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[mutantoftomorrow]

'A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing: more tranquil than the curve of eggs.'

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[babygirlcinema]

The Bluest Eye

[tahitiaa]

Recitatif by Toni Morrison

Format: 📖 Physical Book

[improvisedliturgy]

Can you imagine what it would have been like if they had left that continent untampered with? It’s not simply that human life originated in Africa in anthropological terms, but that modern life begins with slavery…From a woman’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with “post-modern” problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people a long time ago. Certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and the need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad in order, as one of the characters says in the book, ‘in order not to lose your mind.’ These strategies for survival made the truly modern person. They’re a response to predatory Western phenomena. You can call it an ideology and an economy, what it is is a pathology. Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They have had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true.

Toni Morrison, qtd. in Paul Gilroy, "Living memory: a meeting with Toni Morrison" in Small Acts

[arachnesmuses]

Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)