Toni Morisson and 1,001 Nights
Image courtesy of The Atlantic
By NARA MOHYEDDIN ‘21
For a while I was afraid that anything I wrote would be inherently unimaginative and uncreative. Why? Because my writing would be by me, and my feelings are so specific, so dependent on pieces of my identity. Thus what I wrote would lack a.) universality, b.) relatability, and c.) insight. On the verge of resignation, I realized my delusion, for I had been cheated into buying some very moldy, very squishy, slightly pungent wisdom. I’m going to take a 180° now; just bear with me:
Toni Morrison, a black writer whose novels (Beloved and Sula in particular) we read in several junior and senior English classes at Milton. In 1981, having already published Sula and a couple other novels, Morrison released Tar Baby. In response, novelist John Irving wrote in The New York Times a review claiming that “Toni Morrison's greatest accomplishment is that she has raised her novel above the social realism that too many black novels and women's novels are trapped in.” Not being a tape recorder was supposedly high praise.
Toni Morrison would go on to win a Pulitzer for Beloved in 1988; get recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; land the cover of Time Magazine in 1998, the second black or female fiction writer to do so; be honored with the presidential medal of freedom in 2012; and have Beloved included on BBC’s 100 most inspiring English language novels. Despite his prolificacy, writer John Irving fell considerably short accolade-wise.
Yet, back in 1981, he felt qualified to judge Morisson’s greatest accomplishment as surpassing her cohorts, as reaching a standard that he, as a white male, was born above—he perceived womanhood and blackness as barriers to, not reflections of, the human condition (incidentally, Human Conditions is one of the classes that reads Morisson’s writing). As Irving exemplified, writers with marginalized identities are perceived as being too preoccupied with their own contexts to knock into timeless, colorless, boundless, universal human truths. Meanwhile, the white man, of which the world actually (comparatively) has very few (if you search up specifically how many, Google just coughs up a bunch of whites only dating sites), manages to be man.
Only Morisson’s most renowned book, Beloved, is categorized by Wikipedia (a more accurate reference source than Encyclopedia Britannica) as broader ‘fiction;’ all her other works are considered African American literature. This is despite Beloved’s being explicitly about African Americans. As if Beloved was exceptional enough to transcend cultural categorization, as if African American literature is a step below, from which qualifying works can be raised. Meanwhile, Irving’s books are categorized as fiction and bildungsromans—genres that transcend identity. He doesn’t have to explain his community before tackling his subject matter—whiteness never defines any white writer. Irving’s stories are default, neutral, relatable across lines. We disregard that his identity is defined by a lack of racial and gendered complexity as much as others are defined by its presence.
Meanwhile, I fear that no one will listen to me for much more than insight from ‘the other.’ That if I write something set in Iran, a bulk of my Western audience would only read it to look cultured at dinner parties. That even if I was a good writer, not only would I have to jump the hurdle (a very, very high hurdle; and I am very, very short) of writing something original after the English language’s last few centuries of frenzied experimentation, but I’d have to spend my time explaining something. Tedious. Morrison, an icon, focused relentlessly on the black female experience and refused to explain her characters or community. She later said “the point is” to write without “having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.” Irving clearly missed the memo. But I fear explanation may be inherent to my writing; half the things I’m preoccupied with and passionate about are alien and inaccessible to the people around me—I want to change this, to share my cultures, my views, myself! Does this mean I’m doomed to masquerade as a native tour guide with Western habits? To translate and document all the small bits that make a human, a culture, a world, and add nothing new? Does that mean I am, in Irving’s words, “trapped”?
In 1,001 Nights, a king discovered his wife’s adulterous affair; he killed her and her lover in rage, yet the blood wasn’t enough for his newfound hatred for womankind. Since then, one by one, he had been marrying virgins at night and slaughtering them in the morning. The Grand Vizier’s daughter, Shahrezad, was determined to save her fellow countrywomen. She married the king, taking but her stories as her only defense. Weaving imaginative, captivating stories from one night through the next, Shahrezad not only saved herself, but she made the king realize humanity-- hers, his own, and that of other women. She teaches us that storytelling is not discounted by its purpose, that its artfulness isn’t negated by its impact. Storytellers, whether Persian like herself (and I) or black like Toni Morisson, are not “trapped” at all; they define freedom.