Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 207: Toni Morrison and The Transformation Power of the Arts

In our ongoing quest for information and perspective, Burke and I recently watched a PBS documentary on the celebrated American author, Toni Morrison. Wow! What an incredible powerhouse! Not only was she a brilliant writer but she was an inspiring activist, provocative thought leader and above all a talented teacher. Her writing skillfully transports the reader from their current existence to the complex, vulnerable and beyond courageous hearts and heads of Black Americans living through and after slavery.

In my early twenties, I read her novel, The Bluest Eye, while on a quick trip to California with a girl friend. This book broke me. I mean it stopped me completely in my tracks and my paperback copy took flight several times as reading it conjured so much emotion and so many big big feelings. I literally hucked it across the room...a few times and picked it up again and again and again. This book addresses deep themes and big issues connected to body image, the female identify, the power and perception of beauty, incest, abuse, neglect, racial prejudice, bias, class and discrimination. GULP! Toni Morrison does not mess around and this text is a must read... especially now. In this book, her compelling writing explores the life of Pecola, a young Black girl who believes beauty and worthiness can only be obtained should her dark eyes magically turn...blue. This book details not just the complications of the female experience but unpacks the lifelong negotiations of womanhood and racism and poverty. This story provides a careful cross examination of intersectionality and the rippling effects racism has within a family experiencing poverty in 1940 in middle America. Harrowing is the only word to describe this masterpiece.

Last week, inspired by the PBS documentary, I watched the 1998 film based on Morrison's award winning and controversial book, Beloved. Once again, her masterful storytelling broke me. It hollowed...me ...out. The premises of this story reveals the tragic reality of an escaped slave woman named Sethe as she experiences marriage, motherhood, a faith crisis, grief, poverty and family life in and out of a slave plantation called, Sweet Home. It's incredible. It's devastating. It's so enlightening. It's a critical piece of literature and cinema and I can't stop thinking about the characters, the plot, the arc, the pain, the perspective.

Grateful for how this art form is inspiring, informing and transforming me. These stories...while fiction...have brought to life for me...a pasty white girl of great privilege raised in mostly white conservative Utah...an ever so tiny glimpse into the Black experience and the lasting impacts of slavery. Through these words and through this film, I have been literally carried and cornered. I have been triggered and taught. I have been reminded and reprimanded. I have been broken and blessed with a slow to grow late blooming sense of empathy and understanding of what Black Americans may have and maybe currently experiencing….just a tiny tiny glimpse...and I could not be more grateful for this information and for these insights. I keep thinking about these two literary characters...Pecola and Sethe..and I keep thinking about Toni Morrison. These characters have become real to me. I think about them…and about their children and their grandchildren and all of the generations that could have followed from their bloodlines. I keep thinking about brave, broken, and branded Sethe. And the power and leadership of Baby Suggs. And the complicated, compromised but hopeful Paul D. And the courageous transformational yet forever questioning, Denver. And then of course....Beloved. The dynamic mystical complicated restorative and damaging, Beloved. And the little boys. The mighty army of church ladies. And of course the white slave owners. These characters leave me broken. I keep thinking about the forever adult child sweet Pecola. Her tricky counterparts, Claudia and Frieda. The conflicted Cholly and Polly...and on...and on...It's all of them. Through Toni Morrison's writing, I feel like I know part of their story and I wonder how their posterity would respond in 2020? Knowing what I now understand about them...how am I responding now? Did Ms. Morrison have someone like me in mind when she penned these important stories? Could she have anticipated how they would impact my thinking? I'll never know for sure but oh how I am grateful for her words, for her craft, for her heart and honestly and for her hope in me to hear and learn and let these texts transform me. Oh, how I am grateful.

Grateful for Toni Morrison's writing as its providing a framework for me to better understanding both the personal and the systemized harm, violence, oppression and hardship stemming from slavery and 400+ years of racisms and oppression. Inside these stories and in my professional training, I am making new and powerful connections about how the rippling effects of the abuse, neglect, and violence of slavery results in absolute horrific generational pain. This kind of pain seeps deeply into the DNA and remains present far past the moment the initial violence ends. I'm learning that with abuse and slavery and racism... It's never just the nature and it's never just the nurture because none of it is ever easily isolated. This kind of pain is generational and goes bone deep. I'm learning that the effects of slavery are long lasting and institutionally imbedded in a culture and country ripe with practices and traditions of white supremacy. I'm learning that so many structures and practices and policies create a continuous and complimentary sucker punch of pain triggered by nature and then reinforced with a second helping of pain found in the carefully scripted nurture...and with every passing generation increased oppression and discrimination each new swing is amped up on steroids. I'm learning that because of my whiteness, my education and my overall privilege, I have been and will be protected and isolated from much of this painful interchange. I am identifying...seeing...and realizing more and more each day, that within our country and within our community racial inequalities and injustices have been and are strategically woven into both simple and complex structures that intentionally trigger deep molecular pain...both generational pain and modern day pain. I will never condone violence as a response to violence but the more I learn about all of these complex uncomfortable realities the more convinced I am that burning a few things down to the ground is not too crazy of a response.

Today, I am grateful for not just the beautiful language and masterful storytelling of Toni Morrison but I am grateful for the specific and sacred details of each character who have quickly become my teachers, my guides and my reminders. I'm learning that these negative impacts are felt not just acutely by those who were enslaved but for multiple generations to come.

I am grateful to be learning. I am humbled to be sure....and I have so much more work to do…