7/3/2023 0 Comments Toni morrison on beloved![]() ![]() Yet in spite of my wariness, my skepticism, there is a dependence, solid and continuous, that I have on history, partly for the data available to me there, but mostly for precisely those gaps, those erasures, that censure. While I maintain a cool eye while reading historical texts, it is an eye no cooler than the one historians maintain, and ought to maintain when reading fiction. Not just in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain’s unconscionable humiliation of a grown man at the hands of children there was no respite in those years even in the encyclopedia or in history texts. ![]() And if I or someone representative of myself ever were mentioned in fiction, it was usually something I wished I had skipped. It was a caution based on my early years as a student, during which time I was keenly aware of erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to me - silences that I took for censure. A relationship that was wary, alert, but ready to be persuaded away from doubt. As it had been since the beginning of my writing years, I was drawn to it by my complicated relationship with history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |