The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad” at her instead. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a childhood friend. They could not save their friend from the world. So I invented friends, classmates, who understood, even sympathized, with her plight, but had the benefit of supportive parents and a feistiness all their own. Begun as a bleak narrative of psychological murder, the main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void.
The project, then, for this, my first book, was to enter the life of the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race.
Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed. The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has “legs,” so to speak. But there are some who collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it. Others surrender their identity melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack. I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over. Not resistance to the contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident. When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human. And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the dislike or hatred is unjustified-that you don’t deserve it. It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated-hated for things we have no control over and cannot change. Perhaps the feeling is merely indifference, mild annoyance, but it may also be hurt. That's why she told her stories.There can’t be anyone, I am sure, who doesn’t know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily or for sustained periods of time. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. 'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction 'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben Okri 'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.
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