Book Recommendation

Our Book Club read for March was Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard . I was really eager to get into it because of everyone’s reaction when she passed away in 2019, there was such sadness at the loss of a great literary mind YET, I had struggled to really get into her writing. Prior to this read, I had only read God Help The Child and I quite enjoyed it.

General thoughts

• Her command of language and how she uses it to say what she says. I felt like I was in primary school turning to my dictionary for every second word but it was worth it. As a wordsmith she contorts language to do and say exactly what she needs to do and impart the feeling she needs.
• Her writing confirmed that you can’t be such an accomplished writer and not read widely. Girl reads. Widely.
• How she talks about language and what it can and can’t achieve. You feel it and you enjoy the experience of it all.
• What IS African American literature? Is it a separate thing and/or what actually defines it. Also the hoops it has to jump through to be understood or taken seriously. Gave me twice as good as them to get half of what they have vybes. But we the readers are so much richer for this because the writing is so much better.
• I enjoyed her talking about her writing process and how she thinks of it / approaches it. 

Now to some specific themes and quotes that I loved from each of them.

The Foreign / Being Foreign

• In the second essay she talks through Camara Laye’s book of how a white man would migrate back to Africa and how he prepares himself.  Even then, there is still some caucasity.
• The idea of home and how layered it is. No one knows this more than me, what is home and what makes it home?
• She refers to James Baldwin in her tribute to him as follows: “your life refuses summation … and invites contemplation.”
• Frederick Douglass talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life. And that is so true, we understand ourselves best by looking at our families and those nearest and dearest to us.
• Writers, like water, have perfect memory. 
• But writing is not simply recollecting or reminiscing or even epiphany. It is doing, creating a narrative infused [ …] with legitimate and authentic characteristics of the culture. 

the Afro-American presence in American literature

• The so called every day life of black people is certainly lovely to live, but whoever is living it must know that each day of his “everyday” black life is a triumph of matter over mind and sentiment over common sense. And if he doesn’t know that, then he doesn’t know anything at all.  
• I simply wanted to write literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black not because its characters were, or because I was, but because it took as its creative task and sought as it’s credentials those recognised and verifiable principles of black art. 
• Others are “raced” – whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth of course, is that we are all “raced”. 

Language

• … when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, and abuse of esteem, indifference or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. 

Other themes, she covers but I did not get any specific quotes on, include, female empowerment, the press, money, human rights, and the artist in society, 

Best chapters 

1. Racism and Fascism
2. Home
3. Wartalk
4. The Slavebody and the blackbody
5. Hard, True and Lasting

It is not an easy read at all but certainly worth the time and energy (and dictionary checking). Get it, this is a 5* from me.