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Contemplating Morrison in the Ongoing: On Fragmentation, Mourning, and Survival

2020; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lit.2020.0042

1542-4286

Stacie McCormick,

Homelessness and Social Issues

Contemplating Morrison in the Ongoing: On Fragmentation, Mourning, and Survival Stacie McCormick Loss has no edges. The aches pause the heart, disrupt its beating at a simple thought. A held desire. A rememory. Of a past moment that exists just beyond recovery but still there showing up in ways that surprise and sometimes undo. The year 2020 has placed us up close with the many textures of loss—loss of life, loss of jobs, loss of gatherings, loss of the marking of occasions, loss of clarity, loss of care, community, continuity, hope, and on. When histories are written on this year, grief will inevitably be a guiding framework. In many respects, 2020 can be understood as a year of grieving—a kind of grief that has no bottom or top, just circles and circles of sorrow to echo Nel’s contemplation on the loss of her friend Sula Peace. How to comprehend it all? This question feels especially desperate in light of the fact that Toni Morrison passed away in August 2019 just before this particular onslaught and before we concluded the editing of this special issue surveying her tremendous literary career. Reflecting now on our early visions for this project (what we were trying to get after and where the conversations enclosed here have taken us) undeniably an operating force for this work was our attempt to explore Morrison’s incomparable capacity to help us [End Page 868] comprehend the incomprehensible. Through her powerful meditations on Black life across form, Morrison offers a kind of sense-making in the contemplation of Black survival in the face of so much loss—histories, familial relations, time, and more. More than sense-making, however, she gave us a way of reimagining that which was taken—the copious amounts of stolen Black life—and helped us locate new narratives amidst the rubble. Although we don’t have Morrison here to aid us in making sense of our troubling present, I am thankful that we have her words—fifty years worth of methodology that can help us live through this moment and beyond it. One thing about Black people is that we are deft at deriving wholeness from our fragmentation. A people of mysterious blood-lines, chosen and given names, obscure histories because our lives were deemed as not worth saving both in terms of the record and physical care, we have become accustomed to reimagining and re-making ourselves. That was the constant thought I held while watching The Pieces I Am, the 2019 documentary directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and narrated by a host of luminaries from Sonia Sanchez to Farah Jasmine Griffin, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, and Hilton Als. The documentary is deeply comprehensive and revealing. Most compellingly, I was taken by Morrison’s refusal to place borders on her identity. She affirmed that she was a teacher at heart, an editor, a mother, a writer and so much more all at once; or, as Als declares in the film, “she’s the architect, and the midwife and the artist.” Morrison’s resistance to placing limits on her life functions as its own kind of art. Much like the reparative practice of quilt-making, a tradition Black women utilized profoundly by working within the medium to both make art and document histories, Morrison’s life was (and is) a patchwork of care, creativity, and collectivity. I think of it as a calling that she nurtured with tremendous skill, always all the time teaching us how to be in this world. Her projects like The Black Book (a collection of artifacts of Black life from that of her own family’s to newspaper clippings, found items, etc.) evince her refusal of neat packaging. This eclectic spirit made her open to the world in ways many aren’t. It is why she took seriously the woman who walked out of the water and sat down on a bench near her home, who, in addition to Margaret Garner, became the foundational inspiration for her novel Beloved. It is why she communed with that woman and developed a whole world inspired by those who have passed on and into other worlds. This imagining is instructive...