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After watching the pieces I am, I feel as though I have a better understanding of Toni Morrison as a person and as a writer. I was initially struck by her recollection of her grandather reading the bible as the the ability for black Americans to read has always been a constrained and therefore deeply political act. Her awareness of the systemic constraints on black literacy- not just limited to their ability to read and write but also to share their writings was definitely a factor that influenced both her writing, which she described as an imperative ("I have to explore, I really have to know") as well as her decisions to work with and promote the writing of other black authors during her time as an editor.

Morrison was also a student and scholar of other writers. These experiences make me intrigued to see how Morrison engages with black literacy through intertextuality in her work.

Morrison, as demonstrated in the film, is beholden to her chosen audience of black people. As she stated, she did "not want to speak for black people" but rather "speak to and be among them". The ideas for her novels come from a multitude of places: her childhood, her daily interactions, history and others. Her deep reverence for the tradition, mysticism and tragedy of the everyday lives of black Americans stems from her deep-rooted belief in the inherent validity of the black American experience without comparisons to that of white America and her acknowledgement that the past and present are connected. With this in mind, I am very interested to see how Beloved situates itself within the black American historical tradition.

Questions:

1. How does Morrison present black literacy in her work, particularly its significance during a time in which it was prohibited?

2. How does Morrison "speak to" her audience in the text?

3. How is the story of Beloved portrayed through the inclusion of other forms of text (intertextuality)? What references does Morrison require us to know to understand her work?

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The Film The Pieces I Am gave me a depth of knowledge of Toni Morrison and her story. I believe it is important to understand the point of view of the artist to truly value his or her art. Toni Morrison is a profound and complex figure. In many ways, she is a trailblazer not just for the Black community but for women too. My overarching takeaway from the film is that Morrisons personal touch is apparent in all of her books and one of the key factors to why her stories were so revolutionary.

Throughout the film, many spoke about the absence of the White gaze in all of her books. One of Morrisons goals was to limit her writing to only writing about Black people. Her books are stories about Black people looking through the gaze of a Black person. So often the story is told from the White perspective. The White author could not fully understand the lives of a Black person. Morrison’s style was revolutionary because she gave Black people stories that they could relate to while simultaneously giving White readers an insight into Black lives. I'm not sure if this is something that has never been done before but many famous Black writers didn't do this. The film gives an example of how Frederick Douglass’s  Narrative of The Life of an American Slave accounted for the White gaze because he was aware of the White abolitionist that he needed to gain support from. One part of the film was when Morrison spoke about one of her White Male counterparts. She concluded her statement by saying that she fully believed that her life was far more interesting than his.

Another part of the film that stood out to me was when Morrison talked about her father and his relationship with White people. She spoke about how, unlike her mother, her father was terrified of White people to the point of not allowing salesmen to enter the house. I have never thought of it this way. I’ve read stories of the fear White people have of the Black population but many stories about blacks speak about their disdain for their White oppressors, not necessarily fear. I can imagine that this fear of White people is present in her books.

Lastly, in the film, people spoke about how Morrison’s books serve as a record. The stories from the Black perspective will be an insight into Black people in the time period forever. Nobody will be able to wash away the feelings from the Morrisons stories and her books will be proof of what Black life was really like.

Q1: How does writing with the intention of avoiding the White Gaze make Beloved such a profound book

Q2: How does experiences from Morrisons life such as being a mother, going to Howard, navigating racism and gender biases among many others effect her stories

Q3: How is generational trauma seen in Beloved

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Watching Toni Morrison’s, The Pieces I am, gives new insights to who we may have thought she was or what we thought she may have stood for. Her outwardly joyful and amiable persona have always seemed to lead in interviews. Yet, as you listen to the stories of her childhood unfold, you start to understand the depths of her storytelling. Her origin story is a web of poignant scenarios that she has had time to process and re-process. Ultimately, they have allowed her to take full ownership of the narrative. The story of her grandmother’s words, a woman her sister and her barely knew, really brings this into focus. “Tampered with.” She recalls she didn’t know what the words meant at first. In part, these words seem to help fuel her experiential writing whether as a story-teller or as an activist.

Morrison’s sense of time and reflection take on familiar tones of the effects of childhood and how we allow it, or the words used against us, to shape us. Colorism can degrade the sense of self. I love how Morrison channels both painful personal engagements and overt historical xenophobic circumstances to engage us. She is resilient and a not just a storyteller but a champion bard. I look forward to seeing what lens she uses in Beloved to confront it. I also look forward to seeing if there is a friction she addresses between us as children versus us in adulthood.

Questions:

How does the emotional effects of colorism oppress us in adulthood?

Does Morrison use themes of psychological cause and effect when exploring her adult characters?

How do themes of childhood trauma shape her narrative?

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"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."

1. How does Beloved subvert the ‘master narrative’?

2. How might Beloved be read through a lens of psychology and trauma?

3. How does our understanding of the novel change as we change our reading approaches?

4. How does Morrison address colorism in Beloved, and how does it shape the identities and experiences of her characters?

5. How might Morrison’s own identity as a light-skinned Black woman have influenced her portrayal of colorism in her works?

6. How might have Morrison’s portrayal of sexuality influenced her Black, female audience and the ways they view their own bodies and sexual desire?

7. How did Toni Morrison's writing inspire other Black writers and artists to reject literary and cultural expectations in their own work?

8. If we lose the ability to write fluidly by hand, do we also lose a certain intimacy with language?

9. Is there a real difference between printing and cursive when writing? Is it possible that cursive allows you to generate and explicate your thoughts well while writing?

10. Is the use of cursive a vital tool for creative thought?

11. How many first drafts of writers are done through writing by hand? Do they use cursive or print, and do they notice a difference? Are writers usually doing their writing on computers these days?

12. How do biblical allusions shape the themes and characters in Morrison's work?

13. How does Morrison challenge conventional ideas of history and truth through her writing.

14. How does Morrison's self-assurance emerge in her writing? What does her work/career model for young black women writers or for communities whose words/stories have been left out of the historical master narrative?

15. What qualities in her writing allow readers to connect with her characters at varying times and ages and do different readings of her books shift depending on one's perspective (such as age)?

16. How does Morrison's use of language, words, and narratives highlight the cultural perspectives that are often invisible to the white (male) gaze?

17. How does the narrative structure in Beloved echo or represent the practice of (oral) storytelling?

18. How can Beloved be understood as a form of activism?

19. How and where are the psychological scars left by systemic oppression depicted in Beloved?

20. How does the emotional effects of colorism oppress us in adulthood?

21. Does Morrison use themes of psychological cause and effect when exploring her adult characters?

22. How do themes of childhood trauma shape her narrative?

23. How does Morrison present black literacy in her work, particularly its significance during a time in which it was prohibited?

24. How does Morrison "speak to" her audience in the text?

25. How is the story of Beloved portrayed through the inclusion of other forms of text (intertextuality)? What references does Morrison require us to know to understand her work?

26. How does writing with the intention of avoiding the White Gaze make Beloved such a profound book?

27. How does experiences from Morrisons life such as being a mother, going to Howard, navigating racism and gender biases among many others effect her stories?

28. How is (inter)generational trauma seen in Beloved?

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Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993
Listen to an audio recording of Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."

She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"

Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."

Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

"Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.

"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

"The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."

It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

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To cite this section
MLA style: Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Tue. 12 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/>

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 was awarded to Toni Morrison "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality"

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After watching The Pieces I Am, I was especially drawn to Morrison’s relationship with her grandfather. As someone who is also very close to my own grandfather, it warmed my heart to see. Her grandfather was a musician, and I am excited to see how that influenced her writing style. I also wonder how the influence of music shapes the way her stories are told and experienced, not only from the reader’s perspective but also in how characters navigate and interact within their worlds.

I was also particularly interested in Morrison’s connection to biblical texts. She notes in the film that the Bible was the only book her ancestors were allowed to read, and her curious nature and familial structure made it a foundational text in her early life. While she did not explicitly frame herself as a religious person, I would not be surprised to find biblical themes and imagery throughout her works. She seems to be heavily influenced by her personal experiences, family, and surroundings. Many of her works engage with ideas of suffering and can be read as mirroring biblical stories while reimagining them through the lens of Black history and experience. I am interested to see if she views the Bible primarily as a source of faith or was it more of a literary and cultural influence. How do biblical allusions shape the themes and characters in her work?

Similarly, it was interesting to see Morrison use imagination not just as an artistic tool but as an act of resistance. Her grandfather lived in a time when literacy was illegal for Black people in America. You can see that Morrison took education seriously because of it, using her writing to challenge dominant historical narratives and reclaim violently erased histories. In The Pieces I Am, she speaks about the importance of doing what you can with what you have, showing the importance and revolutionary nature of thinking beyond the status quo. Her novels engage in radical reimaginings of history, from the horrors of slavery to the private sphere of Black women, offering perspectives that mainstream literature intentionally chose to ignore. For this idea, I am excited to engage with how Morrison uses fiction to reclaim violently erased histories. Seeing what ways her storytelling serves as an act of rebellion against dominant cultural narratives. How she challenges conventional ideas of history and truth through her writing.

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I thoroughly enjoyed The Pieces I am. I thought that it was a comprehensive look at Morrison’s craft and personal life. The film said that In her father’s lifetime, it was illegal for Black people to read or be taught to read anything other than the Bible. I think that this likely had a profound impact on Morrison. Writing is an opportunity that her ancestors never had—a means of reconciling the past or perhaps healing her own generational trauma. Morrison holds that words truly have power. For her, writing is an epistemological approach to understanding herself and the world. People often criticized Morrison in her early career for only writing about Black people. However, this is a very intentional choice that Morrison makes. She doesn’t want the White Gaze to dominate or even be considered in her stories. So often before Morrison representation of Black people in literature was limited, or caricaturized, or stereotyped, or geared towards white audiences. I thought a particularly striking part of the film was, referencing The Invisible Man, the question “invisible to whom?” Morrison said that she was, in writing Beloved, representing enslaved Black women as realistic, historical figures, figures that weren’t reduced to their victimhood.

Questions

1. How does Beloved subvert the ‘master narrative’?

2. How might Beloved be read through a lens of psychology and trauma?

3. How does our understanding of the novel change as we change our reading approaches?

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The Pieces I Am provided my first in-depth introduction to Toni Morrison’s character and the cultural imprint she left on the world. Her frankness was especially compelling as we watched her navigate academia and writing, fields where Black women remain underrepresented. Her confidence and unwavering belief in herself and her work stood out to me. At one point, she stated bluntly that white men simply aren’t as interesting as she is, so there’s no reason to feel intimidated by them. I wonder if this self-assurance is reflected in her characters. For any young Black woman or girl watching her speak, especially those aspiring to write on a large scale, she really embodies a vision of success.

Her writing’s timelessness also stood out to me. As the documentary reflected, Black readers can see themselves in her stories and reimagine their place in America. I want to explore what qualities in her writing allow readers to connect with her characters at varying times and ages. An older woman in the film remarked that re-reading Morrison’s work every few years allows for re-imagining oneself, rather than reinventing. I’m additionally curious about this distinction and whether different readings of her books shift depending on this perspective.

I want to further explore the "master narrative", the ideological script that upholds whiteness as the most prized identity, as presented in her writing. It seems that Morrison counters this by centering Black women as constant leads, adding a gendered resistance to dominant narratives. Although I haven't read much of her work, the film suggests that her books deliberately challenge this narrative additionally by prioritizing Black readers, particularly Black women as the target audience. Doing so by intentionally withholds context that might make her writing more accessible to white audiences, who are already overwhelmingly catered to, further reinforcing who her work is for.

Morrison spoke about the value of words, something she learned from her parents. Her reflections on their exclusion from the literary world gave me a deeper understanding of how writing became a way to reclaim what they were denied. I’d like to explore if the precision and intentionality of her language contribute to the success and power of her books, and whether readers can feel the deliberateness through her stories.

1. How does Morrisons self-assurance and confidence show through her writing and characters?

2. What qualities in her writing allow for readers at varying times and ages connect to her work?

3. How greatly does the influence of outside opinions, from family and friends, shape her writing style and messages?

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After viewing The Pieces I am, I am interested in the theme of colorism as Toni Morrison was a Black woman with a lighter skin complexion. In her documentary, she refers to skin tone and complexion several times; once when recalling a childhood friend who she described as very dark and very beautiful. Despite her beauty, she still experienced immense self-loathing due to colorism, and I would like to explore this topic more through reading Beloved.

Q: How does Morrison address colorism in Beloved, and how does it shape the identities and experiences of her characters?

Q: How might Morrison’s own identity as a light-skinned Black woman have influenced her portrayal of colorism in her works?

Another theme I am interested in is sexual freedom. In this film, Morrison describes herself as "loose" after arriving at college. This description, along with the sexual exploration and taboos present in Sula, makes me interested in what Morrison has to say about sex, promiscuity, lust, stigmas, and shame surrounding sex, particularly how these dynamics impact Black girls and women throughout their sexual journeys. From what I have read by Morrison, she doesn’t approach sex from a purely moralistic lens, but instead, she explores its complexity and how it can be liberating, pleasurable, or destructive, depending on the context. She acknowledges its duality as sex can be a source of liberation (a way for women to assert ownership of their bodies and desires) but it can also be weaponized as a means of control or oppression- especially surrounding Black women.

Q: How might have Morrison’s portrayal of sexuality influenced her Black, female audience and the ways they view their own bodies and sexual desire?

Another theme I am interested in exploring is the connection between art and activism. Morrison states that during the Civil Rights and Black Power movement, everyone had a role. Some folks protested, some rioted, and she felt her place was to write. She used her words to make people feel things, and her words often inspired people to take action (which explains why Beloved was banned in schools- it made ignited feelings so strong, it caused people to act). I believe art and activism work hand and hand, and I'm interested to learn more about how literature could have been used as a tool of resistance.

Q: How did Toni Morrison's writing inspire other Black writers and artists to reject literary and cultural expectations in their own work?

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I found The Pieces I Am to be incredibly thought-provoking and inspiring. One of the things that stood out to me was a short scene in which Toni Morrison is captured writing on a notepad. She uses cursive script while writing. There was another scene of a chalkboard at a school with the alphabet on it, and those letters were also written in cursive. Although these scenes were quick and seemingly insignificant, it made me reflect very fondly on the use of cursive and how it seems to be obsolete. There was a time when learning cursive was considered vital in society—not just as a skill, but as a fundamental part of education and communication. That fact is very telling, especially in the scene of the chalkboard with cursive alphabetical lettering. Cursive proves itself to be important even for young, kindergarten-aged children. I've learned that cursive was once seen as essential for literacy, professionalism, and personal expression. It allows for quick, fluid writing, which was especially useful for thinkers and vivid writers like Morrison, whose creative process seemed almost like sketching ideas into existence. This made me think deeply about how cursive is no longer widely taught or used, and what that means for writers and the creative process. The film made clear that for Morrison, writing was not just about communication—it was an art form, a way of thinking and bringing ideas to life. In the scene where she was writing, her handwriting had a fluidity that mirrored her creative process, almost as if she were sketching her thoughts rather than simply writing them down. This speaks to the way cursive allows thoughts to flow seamlessly onto the page, capturing a stream of consciousness without the interruptions of lifting the pen or pausing to print each letter. In many ways, writing is an act of channeling. Ideas move from the mind to the hand, materializing into words. Cursive enhances this process by maintaining momentum, allowing a writer to stay immersed in thought rather than getting caught up in the mechanics of forming each letter separately. I have noticed that writing in print causes me to focus too much on the neatness and legibility of my words. I spend too much time carefully forming each letter instead of allowing my thoughts to flow freely onto the page. For someone like Morrison, whose writing was deeply intuitive and rhythmically precise, cursive seems to likely be an asset that supported her craft. The decline of cursive in education signals a shift in how we engage with writing itself.

Questions:

If we lose the ability to write fluidly by hand, do we also lose a certain intimacy with language?

Is there a real difference between printing and cursive when writing? Is it possible that cursive allows you to generate and explicate your thoughts well while writing?

Is the use of cursive a vital tool for creative thought?

How many first drafts of writers are done through writing by hand? Do they use cursive or print, and do they notice a difference? Are writers usually doing their writing on computers these days?

I believe that cursive writing is important and should be utilized in creative writing because it allows for a seamless flow of thoughts onto the page, fostering a more intuitive and uninterrupted writing process. Unlike print, cursive enables writers to maintain momentum, capturing ideas in real time without the mechanical pauses of lifting the pen between letters. Morrison’s work is an exceptional example of the power of cursive as both an art and a means of channeling ideas into existence.

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Since it was illegal for blacks to learn how to read, Toni Morrison mentioned that there were no other books at home but the Bible and that it was a central text in the African American experience. This leads me to believe that the stories she consumed as a child were transmitted orally. This is reflected in how her book Beloved is written, miming oral tradition. “She is the emancipation proclamation of the English language,” said one of the participants in the film.

Her love for language, her parents’ determination for her to learn to read and write, and her curiosity about the power of words were, I believe, the pillars of her successful career as a writer. Toni says when she worked at a library, she could spend hours reading all the books available and was fascinated by the different ways to say the same thing. I think working at a library and, later on, as an editor at Random House strengthened her as a writer. Furthermore, her time as an editor at Random House exposed her to black voices, amplifying her advocacy toward her community.

Being a mother and learning the incommensurable love one feels towards one's children made her relate to the true story of Margaret Garner, which inspired her book Beloved. In the film, it is also mentioned that she raised two children on her own after her divorce. I think this experience gave her the depth and insight reflected in Beloved, where she explores themes such as motherhood and sacrifice.

Toni made sure the white gaze wasn't dominant in her work. She went beyond the common assumption that the reader was a white person. Reading the work of Frederick Douglas, Morrison realized that even though he wasn't talking to her, a colored woman, he held back.  "I didn't want to speak for black people; I wanted to speak through, among us," she said. So, in her book Beloved, she writes freely, without seeking approval from her oppressors, giving voice to silenced histories and exploring the psychological scars left by systemic oppression.

So, Toni Morrison's work was powerful, to such a degree that her book "Paradise" was banned from Texas prisons because they said it could incite a riot. "How powerful is that?" Morrison said.

QUESTIONS:

1. Beloved’s narrative structure and resemblance to a storytelling session.

2. Beloved as a form of activism.

3. The psychological scars left by systemic oppression depicted in Beloved.