The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the summer of 1941.” Now that is an alluring first sentence – conspirital, with just the right hint of mystery. And this is a story of secrets, of innermost desires that people don’t even admit to themselves. The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, when it didn’t cause much of a stir (Oprah fame being still a couple decades away). The Bluest Eye is the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, declared ugly and shunned by the whole town, who believes everything would change for the better if she simply had blue eyes.

The story has many narrators – each of Pecola’s parents, the girls down the lane, even the town pedophile, all of whom share the same anger and self-loathing at their blackness, at their inability to conform with the ideal pale-skinned blue-eyed beauty of baby dolls and film stars. Pecola does not get her own narrative voice, she is passively blown about by the others, subject to their cruelties, their judgments, victim to their own self-hatred. She is denied the cohesive simplicity of the Dick and Jane narrative which forces its way into the story. And while Pecola does suffer extreme violence – raped at age 12 by her own father and then impregnated, this violence results from that long repressed self-hatred, and is the worst violence of all – insidious and self-perpetuating. Pecola is not only given no love, but she is unable to love herself, and consequently has no voice until she is “given” blue eyes by a pedophile, and then she collapses into delusion, creating another self who must constantly reassure her that she has in fact the bluest eye.  As the central image – the eye/I is of the utmost importance, and sadly the characters do not so much gaze out and become their own “I”s, as feel the ceasless blue eye of society gazing in at them.

Pecola is the victim of a crime without an identifiable perpetrator, and the last paragraph of the book points a finger toward society, returning to the marigolds with which she opened the book:

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own initiative, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We were wrong of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.

This novel has all of the aural, evocative and vivid qualities that endear me to Morrison’s writing, though certainly it is not her best. The novel was perhaps too fractured for me to become as involved as I have in her other work, and it seemed the central tenet of the book (which is unmissable) sometimes replaced Pecola herself. As a character without a voice, she risks disspearing, and while that is Morrison’s aim, it becomes less moving that she is gone. Perhaps there is an even more important social critique in how easily she is dismissed, even after Morrison tries to rescue her. In an afterword written in 1993 (Plume edition), Morrison admits that the novel did fail in some ways, notably in regards to Pecola’s absence. She set herself a difficult task for a first novelist of course, “to shape a silence without breaking it”.

I am not black (though I do lack the essential blue eyes for white girl), so I can’t say whether Toni is successful in her longtime attempt to “transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of that culture,” but her anxiety speaks to her profound understanding of the delicacy of the situation. Morrison may not know the answers, but will bear witness with narrative, who will look this complex, heartbreaking situation and conclude as the narrator does  in the opening:

“There is nothing more to say – except why. But since why is so difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

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Whylah Falls, by George Elliott Clarke

My first exposure to George Elliott Clarke was when I saw him read from George & Rue at Acadia during my fourth year. But of course “read” is far too mundane a term – he performed. He breathed life into the words on the page – they jived, grooved, and swam through the auditorium. As a case in point, Whylah Falls has been released as an audio book with an original jazz score, and the book’s introduction also includes a discography of what Clarke was listening to as he wrote (everything from John Coltrane to Bob Dylan to Blue Rodeo).

Normally when I read poetry I dabble in it before bed – it takes me weeks (or sometimes months) to get through a whole book. I read Whylah Falls in two days. Part of the motivation to keep reading was that Clarke has resurrected the epic poem (with a generous tip of his hat to one of my other favourite poets, Walt Whitman). All the poems of Whylah Falls become part of a greater story – of X and Shelley’s romance, of the murder of Othello and his family’s attempt to recover. Clarke offers a dramatis personae at the beginning of the work to set up the book not as a collection of poems, but rather a family saga. In keeping with the musicality of the book, Clarke calls the epic an attempt by poets “to compose a song for their age.” And I would like to think that’s what Clarke has here for early 20th century Acadia.

Rooted in pleasure and pain, in nature and in the body, Clarke’s language is always effusive and enthusiastic. It is often colloquial in expression but lofty in sentiment. It writhes, it pulsates, it ripples and undulates. It takes many poetic forms – from tiny crystaline haikus, to prose poetry, to sonnets, to songs,  to free verse – and it makes many forms poetic – recipes, lists and letters. As much as it draws poetry out of the everyday, it also makes the everyday poetic.

Take this short poem, that so clearly illustrates the way I felt about poetry in high school:

To Pablo

In school, I hated poetry – those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in.

Rather than being something pretentious and inaccessible, poetry is naturalized. It does not simply represent nature in the traditional style, but rather becomes a natural refuge. Too often poetry leaves the reader outside in the cold, offering only glimpses of something brighter within, but Clarke’s poetry invites the reader right in to a kitchen gathering full of scents, flavours and stories long forgotten. That’s not to say these are all simple poems, these poetic fields offer many strata and substrata for the ambitious to mine. Yet, the real beauty of these poems is that to read them feels like standing in a warm summer rain and letting the words wash over you.

A couple final notes: Whylah Falls was the winner of the Archibald Lampman award for poetry and a pick from the initial year of Canada Reads, whose picks for this year are announced on Tuesday.

Also, if you’d like to check it out, Whylah Falls is available as a google book, but if you like it, I encourage you to go out and buy a copy, for I think it’s something you’ll find yourself going back to for a long time.

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Sula, by Toni Morrison

What struck me most about Sula is the idea that loneliness is our most fundamental state, and that friendship and love can only offer distraction for a while. Worse, these brief periods of joy only make loneliness that much more unbearable when it comes rushing back in. As we can only understand that loneliness in relation to joy, Morrison seems to imply that generally we can only understand our selves through comparison with others – hence the need for a scapegoat like Sula, someone to be othered, despised, feared. Consequently, it’s all the more tragic when Nel realizes she had a truer understanding of herself in her friendship with Sula, than in any attempts to distance herself from her. As the other townfolk fail to realize, the good and the bad are much closer than we think.

Though things certainly don’t go well for the women of the story (the only men who stick around are the damaged ones), you have to admire Sula’s conviction on her deathbed:

“Is that what I’m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?”
“They worth keeping, Sula.”
“They ain’t worth more than me.”

I definitely prefer Beloved, but I was still happy to return to Morrison”s everyday poetry. The soothing rhythms and striking imagery make it feel like she’s telling me the story out loud, like a grandmother before bedtime, though her stories certainly contain the stuff of nightmares.

I’ll confess, there’s still a lot I haven’t figured out yet about Sula. I’m longing for the days of class discussion. If someone can enlighten me about the meaning of National Suicide Day and the deaths (or lack thereof) in the story, I’d be much obliged.

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