sixteen

“But those books I had stopped opening accused me anyway. They had been my guides and I had abandoned them. At eighteen, I found in them a political language that enabled me to express what I saw around me, but which I had struggled to name. At twenty-six, I had strayed –been led astray- by my female body and its desires and its conditioning, despite Simone de Beauvoir showing me how woman are made and not born. Dog-eared copies of classics like The Myth of Motherhood and Fat is a Feminist Issue had unshackled a schoolgirl mind that encountered feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis and literature.

I did not like how the Prozac made me feel, nauseous, numb, outside of myself, set apart from other people, muffled. I was told I needed to give the body time to adjust, but months passed and the despair was no different, even though I took those pills exactly as prescribed, because I wanted to inhabit life, not drift through it like an angry ghost. Like the ghost who’d haunted me at boarding school, the ghost of a girl who, in the 1920s, had burned to death in the dormitory where I slept. A boarder from far away, she and two companions had stayed an extra night after the end of term because of the timing of their trains.

I found a diary I had kept one summer ten years earlier; it contained information that I knew I could use. I opened the diary eagerly but soon turned away from it, stricken. The writing was soaked in a kind of girlish self-pity—“alone again!”—that I found odious. More than odious, threatening. As I read on, I felt myself being sucked back into its atmosphere, unable to hold on to the speaking voice I was working hard to develop. I threw the diary down in a panic, then felt confused and defeated. A few days later I tried again, but again felt myself going under. At last, I put it away.

One day—when I had been looking over an accumulation of pages possessed of what seemed to me the sufficiently right tone, syntax, and perspective—I opened the diary again, read in it a bit, laughed, got interested, even absorbed, and within minutes was making notes. With relief I thought, I’m not losing myself. Suddenly I realized there was no myself to lose. I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me. The narrator was the me who could not leave her mother because she had become her mother. She was not intimidated by “alone again.” Nor, come to think of it, was she much influenced by the me who was a walker in the city, or a divorced middle-aged feminist, or a financially insecure writer. She was, apparently, only her solid, limited self—and she was in control. I saw what I had done: I had created a persona.

Virginia Woolf sets out the scope of illness in her brief essay “On Being Ill”: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness . . . it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

4. Escaping the Chrysalis

“Whatever these African writers were talking about,” she told Black Issues Book Review founding editor Susan McHenry, “it wasn’t about color.”

They weren’t explaining anything to white people, though they may have commented on social conditions under colonialism. In one of Chinua Achebe’s stories for example: A man leaves his home and saying goodbye to his wife, he touches her hair— a very small subtle gesture you’d never see in Black writing in America back then. I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers— men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by— I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellisons’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?

Morrison had begun to execute this project of dismissing the white gaze in her own fiction. But taking up this work in her editorship required far more nuance. Publishers wanted books that appealed to general audiences, and textbooks were the most conservative in this regard. Teaching some and reminding others that African literature was a long, rich tradition that far exceeded the stereotypical ways Africans had their literature presented was delicate work.