"Just like you."Ĭoncentrating primarily on Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved and The Black Book (a compilation of newspaper clippings, drawings and photographs from black American life), the documentary itself is also a formative work of literary criticism, because it takes Morrison's earliest critics to task. "I am head of household," she recalls telling him.
#THE BLUEST EYE CLIFF NOTES PROFESSIONAL#
Morrison recalls her shock, as an undergrad at Howard University, at discovering separate sororities for light-skinned and dark-skinned women, foreshadowing her works like Eye, in which a young black girl wishes she were white so that she could be "beautiful." Later, as a single parent and professional editor largely responsible for ushering many influential black voices into the public sphere, Morrison nevertheless had to march into her boss's office to demand a raise equivalent to her male counterparts'. And like the lives of her characters, there's nothing little about it. But as it turns out in the lovely new documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Morrison herself has the kind of life we do very much want to hear about. This simple piece of advice from one of the 20th century's most potent forces in American letters feels downright radical in 2019, as it requires us to acknowledge that maybe some kinds of "cultural appropriation" aren't so bad after all.
#THE BLUEST EYE CLIFF NOTES HOW TO#
So what Morrison meant, she says now, was that good writers learn how to escape the prison of themselves, that it's OK to write fiction from perspectives and cultures that are entirely new to you. It is by training her gaze on the dramatic weight of their existence that Morrison grants the literary "bigness" society has denied them. Her own characters, also, often think of their lives as "little," because they are black and they've been driven into self-loathing by the racist framework of the country and time period in which they live.
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It's not as brash as all that, because anyone who has heard Morrison speak over the years knows she's someone who shares compassion and love easily with her readers and peers. Toni Morrison had advice for the students in her Princeton University creative writing class: "I don't want to hear about your little life."
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Timothy Greenfield-Sanders/Magnolia Pictures The work and impact of iconic writer Toni Morrison is surveyed in a new documentary directed by filmmaker and portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.