I can remember the exact time when I was introduced to Toni Morrison...it was AP English, my senior(grade 12) year. That class was exceptionally amazing for me, right around then my Faulkner cherry was popped as well, and everyone knows how much I admire Faulkner.:) The class read Morrison's Beloved, a work I've read at least 2 times since, which is incredible for me, given my "there's too many books on the planet I want to read, so it's rare I'll read a novel more than once" rule. Beloved has to be my favorite Morrison novel, perhaps because it is so close to my heart since it was my first, and also since it is rich with food and religious imagery, both of which are wrapped up together so heartily...I can remember reading Beloved, and at first being like "What the fuck?" and then like a lightbulb turning on, I saw. Like Faulkner, I find that Toni Morrison is a master of language and displaying its inadequacies in describing basic human emotions. I don't read Toni Morrison, I feel her. Her descriptions of scenery, of weather, of us, makes me want to write, and be a damn good writer. There are many authors that make me feel this way, including Faulkner, Winterson, even Atwood, definitely Allende, but Morrison's female and American voice is so unique. And the topics she conquers...I wrote a paper in college comparing Beloved and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, discussing the idea of death or even murder as it were, as liberation and demonstrative of love. It was risky, and nearly got me in trouble, but also got me the highest grade in the class on a final paper. As a I am a writer, both critically and creatively, of somewhat unconventional topics at times, I find Morrison to be a downright inspiration. I've also read Song of Solomon and Jazz, in which one of the protagonists kills his lover because he can't stand living with so much love crushing his soul...interesting, eh? Many people, men especially that I discovered via my lit program, don't care for Toni Morrison very much and are surprised when I rave about her...One man told me once that he can't stand reading her because he feels awash with an overwhelming sense of guilt every time he reads her, like she's making him feel guilty because he's white. I don't know...I don't get that from her, but perhaps I'm just looking for different things when I read. Anyway...I just finished The Bluest Eye today, Morrison's first published novel. It was different then I expected, at least from the description on the back of the book. I was expecting, given the description, a straightforward narrative, told from a young girl's point of view, describing in great detail an overwhelming wish/desire to be beautiful, to be rid of a chronically sexually abusive father, possibly I was expecting something slightly more stylistically similar to The Color Purple. This would not have been surprising, given the fact that it was Morrison's first novel, I thought perhaps her disjointed narrative voice(one of her writing qualities that I adore) was something that developed over her later novels; but here it was in all of its glory. What an amazing first novel. One sees a very sad child, who just wants desperately to be beautiful, because that is what she thinks she needs to be loved, through the eyes of two young girls equally confused at the world and what it holds for them both as black children and as human beings. You also see this child and the world around her through the eyes of her parents, including the father who will eventually impregnate her, and a few outsiders of the town, not to mention the child's own thoughts. What I got out of the book was a sense of confusion and disappointment...not on behalf of myself, but on behalf of the characters in the work. There is confusion regarding the world in which they(the characters) live, and disappointment when faced with the bleakness of their life situation when the confusion is clarified. We all cart around a lot of personal/mental baggage...some of us have it in an easy backpack, some of us need our own U-Haul(you know, the 2-bedroom+ kind). I was expecting a much more brutal rape scene, but what came finally towards the end was not brutal, just as sad as I expected it to be. Morrison makes the dad into a person too, with his own awful upbringing, lack of love and sense of familial belonging, that he is no monster, just mentally lost. This book reminded me quite a bit of Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Bluest Eye, like Heart, is not just about one person, it is about a human experience, the desire to love, to be loved, to belong. The sense of belonging is different for a black person, I think, and is probably something I will never ever be able to fully relate to, but I can make an effort through reading Morrison. Morrison writes beyond that, though, it's not just about being black, it's still ultimately, I think, about being human. The final page just blew me away: "She however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end. [paragraph break] Oh, some of us 'loved' her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye. [double paragraph break] And now when I see her searching the garbage--for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim has no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (Morrison 206). Wow, wow wow. This is why I read and read and read. For words, statements, paragraphs like this. Ironically enough, Morrison is hard on her own novel in the afterword, self-critical if you will, and also contextualizes it in terms of the time. But, she also acknowleges how much it was dismissed at the initial publication...It, like all of Morrison's oeuvre, should not be dismissed at all.