We can probably all agree that Toni Morrison is pretty awesome. Her awesome is turned up to eleven in her new book The Origin of Others. The book is a slim volume that packs a huge punch. Originally delivered as a series of talks at Harvard in 2016 on the topic “the literature of belonging,” they have been revised a little to make them work as a serious of connected essays. These pieces take a look at race and identity and as Ta-Nehisi Coates says in the introduction, “the psychological work of Othering — of convincing oneself that there is some sort of natural and divine delineation between the enslaver and the enslaved.”
Morrison is so expert at weaving together past and present and making connections between the personal, political, historical and cultural that I can’t begin to even pick out one or two pieces of her argument without completely summarizing everything. A few broad themes then?
The first essay in the book, “Romancing Slavery,” talks about just that. Whites have turned logic inside out in order to make themselves feel better about the whole thing, putting some shine and gloss on it all. One slave owner even noted all the times he had sex with his slaves, what time, where, and how satisfying it was! This was ownership romance that as an owner you could do whatever you wanted with your property. Morrison then turns to a discussion on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book in which slavery is “sexually and romantically sanitized” and “profoundly sentimentalized.”
Othering is all about belonging, about keeping the “stranger” out, of creating an in group and an out group, of defining what or who you are by what or who you are not. It is thrilling to belong to something bigger than oneself; it makes us feel powerful. But of course history shows us that who the Other is shifts over time. It is one reason we have to work so hard to keep enforcing it. And the teaching begins early. Morrison uses a Flannery O’Connor story, “The Artificial Nigger,” to show how this is done.
In one of the essays Morrison talks in detail about Othering and her novel Beloved. Her discussion made me not only want to immediately sit down and read every single one of her books, but also made me wide-eyed with wonder over her brilliance as a writer and a thinker. She also makes it clear why reading, and in particular reading fiction from a diversity of perspectives is so gosh darn important:
Narrative fiction provides a controlled wildenrness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.
When it comes down to it, the concept of race itself is immediately Othering because “race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period.”
There is nothing else I can say except read this book.
This is truly awesomeness redefined! I love Ms. Morrison’s work and I must read this one soon!
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It sounds such a necessary book as all the gains in social consciousness of the last century come under backlash threat. In Europe. In the 1990s appeared a study of European nationalisms by Michael Ignatieff called Blood And Belonging…what seemed so dangerous in the Balkans and in the ex Soviet Union now afflicts much of the world and we don’t know how this storm will work out. I really like Morrison’s idea of fiction as a controlled wilderness!
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I couldn’t agree more, Ian! At a time when we’re going backwards on both sides of the Atlantic to toxic ideologies that have proved disastrous in the past, “necessary” is the word to describe a book like this. And “awesome” too, of course, Stefanie 🙂
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This sounds like a very worthwhile book. I need to give Toni Morrison a read/ I really like that quote about narrative fiction.
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This sounds like a must read! Hope you are having a wonderful holiday weekend, Stefanie!
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This is definitely on my TBR. “Othering” came up in a discussion on a recent episode of BBC’s “A Good Read” too, in which Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made was recommended, as a means of getting inside thought patterns that seem so unthinkable to us. I’m sure I should have noted Carol Tavris previously, but her work intrigues me now. Back to Morrison, I read Jazz earlier this year and just loved it. Sometimes I think that her fiction is going to be so impenetrable that I am afraid to pick it up unless I am in a “certain mood” but, then, when I do, I just fall into the stories.
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Wow, this sounds fascinating Stefanie. I have thought quite a bit about the fact that “othering” changes over time and the implications of this – ie the fact that it seems to indicate that we feel a need, for whatever, reason to create others. It came to me when me when my kids were still at school, and “other” tended to be racially based, eg Asian. When I was at school it was often religion-based, eg Protestants versus Roman Catholics. The fact that we just change who the “other” is, rather than learn, when we stop “othering” one group, that we are really all just human beings, is profoundly depressing.
Love that quote about narrative fiction and the “controlled wilderness”.
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