New Yorker Fiction 2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Io non odio persona alcuna, ma vi son uomini ch'io ho bisogno di vedere soltanto da lontano.

I do not hate any person, but there are men that I need only see from a distance.
Ugo Foscolo, Playwright
Born February 6, 1778

Morrison Makes One Think

Van Sarki

February 9, 2015, Toni Morrison, “Sweetness”: A sixty-three-year-old African-American woman with “light skin” narrates the story of the daughter she bears, one who is “midnight black, Sudanese black”—something that is quite a shock to her and her husband both. ¶ Morrison is such a master of language, weaving back and forth between the distant past, the past, and present as if all three are one tense. The story seems to explore, or at least hint at, the self-hatred that some so-called light skinned blacks have had for themselves in the past, yet also the self-hatred of the narrator, who can’t seem to decide what her place in the raising of her daughter is: “I wasn’t a bad mother, you have to know that, but I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her.” The narrator sounds as if she, abandoned by her husband and then her daughter, has one foot in the last century and one in this century—can’t decide whether she loves her “blue-black”-skinned daughter or merely tolerates her. Morrison’s writing is always a wild ride you must trust as you jump aboard. This story is a fragment from her novel, God Help the Child, which is forthcoming in April.
Van Sarki, Photographer

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD (I promise.)

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