randomWalks

I'm reading Conversations with Toni Morrison, transcripts of interviews from 1974 to 1993. I just finished her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I'm also reading a book of Sonia Sanchez poems--although I am actually reading the poems :). I'm taking a poetry workshop so I have a vested interest sitting with the poems to help me in my work. I think part of the difficulty I have with reading poems, and I love them, is that each word is like a paragraph, but I forget that all the time. I want quicker gratification, an experiential understanding that reading the same amount of words in prose would give me. But the poem's words laugh in my face about that. So I'm reading slower. And damn does she get to the core and passion of things. Her haikus are amazing; i'll post one or two up soon.

Re: Morrison, thinking about a Joyce Chalfen or a Rachel Price (Poisonwood Bible) makes me question the literary imagination used to create them...I guess Smith's characters weren't intended to be full complex people anyway, so stereotyping and its comedic effect may have more place. Even then, I question: Is Joyce a stereotype? Or is she like a clown portraying an ominous truth? Rachel seems less easy to excuse as a stereotype since she lives within a family of much more complex characters. I am trying to think about Morrison's message that white writers have created these white characters that actually don't make sense in reality but the authors (Cather, Hemingway, etc) are so stuck in the illogic of whiteness that they did not write outside of it. Is awareness of Rachel's cluelessness enough? I guess I wish Kingsolver implicated white readers more. Maybe she implicates white readers by showing Leah as an alternative. I get the feeling though that most white women who could relate to Rachel would be able to distance themselves because she is such a blatant social climber and her setting (Africa) is so distant.

Just thinkin'.

originally posted by hcog