Day 29: Representation

My daughter recently reminded me of a Toni Morrison quote that she found her junior year when doing an oral report on Morrison's essays:

"There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no room for fear.  We speak, we write, we do language.  That is how civilizations heal."

I love that.  We do language.  Yes, we do.  And when we do it right, civilizations can, indeed heal.

Of course, as we are reminded every single day right now, when we do language wrong, we do incalculable harm.  Language is powerful stuff.

Since Toni Morrison's death, like so many others, I've been thinking again about what her writing meant to me.  (It's well worth reading what other folks are writing about this, for example, this wonderful column by Roxane Gay.)  I was introduced to her in college, when I took an African-American literature class as part of my English and Comp Lit major.  I remember that class as a turning point for me, for a lot of reasons.  All of them, though, boil down to representation and to the way that representation can de-center a dominant perspective, making space not only for other ways of seeing the world but, more importantly, I think, for understanding that there are other ways of being in the world, other ways of seeing the world, other experiences to be centered.

I spent ten weeks during which the only fiction I read was by Black authors.  And what I think is especially important about reading Toni Morrison's work in that context is this: she didn't write for me.  She didn't write for white folks, nor about the experiences of Black folks' relationships with white folks.  Her work centers the perspectives, narratives, ideas, and lives of African-Americans.  Period, full stop.  I love that about her writing.

Those ten weeks quite literally changed my dreams.  As in, the people in my dreams weren't white. Sometimes I wasn't, either.  Because every character of every book I read was, unless stated otherwise, Black, my baseline for "person" in my reading changed.  I didn't even realize what was happening until the next semester, when I sat down to read the first book for that term's lit class.  I sat there, scratching my head - for the life of me, I could not make the main character make any sense.  I couldn't figure out why he was doing or thinking the things that he was.  Had the acronym been in circulation then, I would have been thinking, WTF? 

And then it hit me.  I was reading Hemingway.  But I had picked up the book and visualized the main character as African-American.  Of course what I was reading didn't make sense!  If there was ever an author whose work assumes a white male perspective (largely by not even considering that there might be another one), it's Hemingway. 

And this is why representation matters.  Our baseline for "person" is determined in no small part by which people we are exposed to, not only in real life, but in all the other places where people are represented in our lives: in art, in television, in movies, in literature.  And also, in the academic literature that we assign and read.  When we only read work by men, or by white folks, or by white men, we reinforce the idea that those are the people who have good ideas.  We allow people's baseline assumptions about who a person is (in writing: white and male unless otherwise stated) to stand without question.  In my language and gender class, nearly all of the readings are by women, and I am working to diversify that list further.  By the end of the semester, in their essays, my students begin to make the mistake of referring to all authors as "she" (whereas, at the beginning, they are likely to make the opposite mistake, and refer to them all as "he"; the first names of these authors are stated clearly and are largely very gendered names).  Of course, what I'd love to see is an even deeper shift - that they make a point of figuring out who each author is, before reading or writing about them.  But it's a start.

To my mind, this is one of the ways in which language can help civilizations heal - by realizing that our civilization includes a tremendous, vital, and beautiful range of ways of languaging, and of voices speaking those ways of languaging into being every day.  And the only way we can realize that is not to know it at some intellectual level, removed from experience, but instead to get down into the rich, loamy earth of that writing.  To perhaps be uncomfortable with it.  To feel what it is to read writing not written for us, but nevertheless rich with potential meaning for us.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find Morrison's The Source of Self-Regard and get a little more of that beautiful language.