February 10th, 2013
Dear Language and Literature Students,
As your
English teacher, I want to start a discussion to a question received from a student: ““As a teacher, why
do you think this book should be read and discussed in school? Why did you pick
this book for us to read?” at a practical level before turning my attention to the deeper,
literary value of studying a text as shocking as "The Bluest Eye."
As an English Department, we are given a choice
to select texts we believe will fire students’ imaginations from the IB’s
Prescribed List of Authors/ Prescribed List in Translation for the English A:
Language and Literature course. Toni Morrison, as a Nobel Prize-winning author,
is on this list. What she provides is a black, female voice from America who
has lived/written throughout the course of the Civil Rights Movement. For
someone like me--from a white, middle-class background, who is a teacher at an
international school-- it is of crucial importance that there is a balance of
male/female voices from different ethnicities available to students. Of course,
we are also somewhat limited to the class texts that are in the book cupboard
too!
I admit to feeling discomfort with the topics presented within the novel and had to debate whether I thought
it would be suitable for Grade 11 students. I decided that it would be, as although
this is an text with some very adult issues, it offers us a chance to
understand the power of language and the function of literature as a vehicle
for conveying deep-rooted, upsetting, sociological problems. As a Diploma level
class, I believe, we have to challenge ourselves to become aware of the
gross-inequalities/abuses that can exist within societies and “give a voice to
the voiceless.” Literature offers us a point of access from a fictional
perspective to address issues that may otherwise be left 'swept under the
carpet'. In writing this novel, Morrison discomforts the reader and makes them
sit up and take notice, potentially to take action, against moral wrongs that
have been allowed to occur in society due to hatred or indifference.
To understand Morrison’s motivation for writing
as a black, female author, we must first understand the extent of exploitation
that occurred within American Society (the setting of this novel is America,
the theme of exploitation is global) with regard to slavery. In her Nobel Prize
for Literature acceptance speech in 1993, Morrison refers to the words of
Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address, when he states that, “"The world will little note nor
long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here." Morrison admires his simple words as “exhilarating
in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the
reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war.” The 600,000 dead in
this case are the soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies (although the
actual figure is hard to know for certain). Morrison is making a link that the
legacy of slavery, which was responsible for the deaths of countless more (we
cannot be sure of the exact number as they were considered sub-human) is a sore
on the conscience of society which must be confronted, and cannot be run away
from.
I believe she writes this text as an allegory of
the horrifying oppression that black people suffered, and especially black
females, as they occupied an even lower place within society. While Lincoln’s
1863 “Emancipation Proclamation” may seem like ancient history, it really is
not so long ago that slavery existed within the 'first world'. To a greater extent we should also
recognize that Morrison is documenting a time, in the 1950s, which was a decade
ahead of Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement and black people were
subjected to terrible inequalities and abuses, some of which are mentioned
within the text and are reason for Cholly’s descent from someone who wins the
reader’s sympathy (this is a contestable point) to someone who later rapes his
daughter.
My regret is that students reading this text for a
summer assignment are confronted first with the vulgar, upsetting sequence of
events, without having the support of activities such as class discussions,
which would allow for a deeper connection to the allegorical nature of the text.
Unfortunately, that is the nature of setting a text to read over the summer
break—a necessity due to the structure of the school year—and I would certainly
welcome a discussion in class upon our return to understand how best to
introduce this text to both minimize discomfort, but also to ensure that
engagement is not lost by giving away the content of the work beforehand.
If the issues as they have been presented in this
letter are of interest, then for further study I would highly recommend you to
watch Professor Hungerford’s Yale University lecture within the following clip.
It is 50 minutes long but well worth the time and would be very interesting for
you to see how literature is analyzed at university level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NUCOLCcXCY.
Additionally, I would
recommend you listening to Toni Morrison herself speaking to the Nobel
Committee as she accepted her award for “The Bluest Eye.” Here are the links to
the text/audio of that speech. Listen very carefully and I think her moral of
‘The bird-in-the-hand’ could stimulate your perception of language, literature,
education and moral responsibility.
I look forward to developing
these ideas as a class in a couple of weeks. Wishing you all a pleasant end to your summer vacation, and remember to ensure that all summer tasks are up-to-date upon your return (check Moodle for details).
Regards,
Mr.
Rees
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