Rating: 100% | A+ | ★★★★★
Warnings: + Violence + Sexual Assault Synopsis (from Goodreads): The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways. What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction. Spoiler-Free Section: On one of the first pages of The Bluest Eye, I have an annotation: "This is horrifying, and the first time in a long time that I have ever had to annotate a book to express myself." Little did I know—but much did I suspect—that my words would hold true for the rest of the novel. I would not call The Bluest Eye a "beautiful" novel; such an adjective evokes lightness and pristineness, neither of which accurately describe the novel. The Bluest Eye is not beautiful, and it does not want to be. It is, however, angrily poignant and demanding. It demands of the reader an ability to withstand pain; it demands of the reader a willingness to endure the same tragedies the characters endure. But where the reader might flinch away, the characters remain painfully impervious. This is all to say that never before have I wanted to put a book down more, and never before have I read a book faster. So when the New York Times announced their sixth annual student review contest, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. My review—for which I was fortunate enough to be given an honorable mention—is below: In the Venn diagram of "books that change your life" and "books you'd read again," the overlap in the middle is typically larger than either independent section. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, however, is one of the few books that belongs squarely in the former category. Choosing to re-confront the book in all of its unflinching glory would be akin to Herculus choosing to re-shoulder Atlas's burden. I picked up The Bluest Eye over the summer, acutely aware of the silence in my small town. I didn't want to be naive enough to believe that racial injustice didn't permeate my community. I didn't want to be naive enough to believe that I would never have to confront hate around and within myself. The Bluest Eye needs no introduction. Toni Morrison's first book, it stands proudly among its classic counterparts—all 224 pages of it. "[S]ingular as Pecola's life was, I believed some aspects of her woundability were lodged in all girls," writes Morrison in the 2007 foreword. Certainly so. What girl doesn't struggle with self-image issues, with absurd, paradoxical wishes to be thinner, curvier, shorter, taller—just perfect? Yet for Pecola, consumed by internalized racism, the issue stretches far beyond any human means of "fixing" her "problem." Her problem lies not in the color of her eyes—the heartwrenching non-blueness of her eyes—but in the mere fact that she believes her eyes are a problem. Morrison does not simply focus on Pecola's story. She tells the story of Pecola's neighbor Claudia, who narrates the story with sorrowful wistfulness; of Pecola's parents, who, though cruel, are perversely sympathetic; and even of a local mystic, whom Pecola begs for blue eyes. In Pecola's short life converges decades of mistreatment, inferiority, and above all, pain. Morrison weaves together her myriad subjects with indelible imagery and emotion. She defies all conventional shyness, past and present. In her words echo the words of generations of Black Americans. "How can a fifty-two-year-old white [...] storekeeper [...] his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary [...] see a little black girl?" Ruminates Morrison, intensely, matter-of-fact. "Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary." The Bluest Eye is not for everyone. There is rape. There is murder. There are the worst slurs. But in a world where Black Americans are ceaselessly slaughtered and marginalized, one has to hope that reading the words of a Black author can spur much more than performative activism. What Black Americans endure is far beyond what I, an Asian-American teenager, can imagine. But let us consider The Bluest Eye as universal required reading and as the first step on our collective path to antiracism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |