𖦹 bisexual wizardry 𖦹

HOLD YOUR HEART IN YOUR HANDS LIKE A WOUNDED BIRD

DRINK MORE TEA AND LET YOURSELF GET BURNT A LITTLE

REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE JUST A LITTLE FISH; YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONTROL THE WHOLE RIVER

HAVE FUN WITH YOUR BODY

SING LOUDLY

WALK INTO THE FOREST AND PRESENT YOURSELF TO ALL WHO LIVE THERE; DO NOT FLINCH WHEN THEY OPEN THEIR EYES AND GLIMPSE INTO YOUR SOUL

TALK TO PLANTS MORE OFTEN

FIND THE OLD GODS IN EVERY MUNDANE FORM

CLIMB TO THE TOP OF THE TREE EVEN IF YOU'RE SHAKING

ALLOW YOURSELF TO PICK UP THE SHELLS YOU THINK ARE PRETTY

PLAY THE PREVIOUS SONG ONCE MORE AND SING IT EVEN LOUDER

GIVE AWAY WHAT YOU DO NOT NEED. YOU ARE NOT AN EVIL DRAGON

WRITE LOVE LETTERS TO THE OCEAN AND HER BOATS

LEARN SEA SHANTIES AND ESPECIALLY POEMS BY HEART ("THEY HAVE TO BECOME THE MARROW IN YOUR BONES")

NETWORK, YES THIS INCLUDES WITH OLD GODS

ALLOW FOREIGN TONGUES TO PLAY IN YOUR MOUTH LIKE A CHILD ON A GRAND PIANO

TELL EVERYONE YOU LOVE THAT YOU LOVE THEM

FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR OWN BODY AND DO NOT BE AFRAID TO SHOW IT. ALSO SET IT ON FIRE AND SPOIL IT WITH OFFERINGS— THE SACRIFICIAL KIND

SIT AND BELONG TO THE WORLD. ALSO WALK LIKE EVERY DAY IS A PILGRIMAGE OF BEAUTY

LEARN ABOUT NEW BIRDS AND GREET YOUR NOW-FRIENDS BY NAME

TAKE THE PATH LESS-TRAVELLED

INTRODUCE YOURSELF BY YOUR TRUE NAME. STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER THIS IS CREATING SOME EVIL PACT. IT PROBABLY IS NOT.

CONTINUE SINGING

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE IT OUT OF THE NEST, TRUST IN THE FEATHERS ON YOUR BACK

LET WHAT HAS DIED REST

TRUST IN THOSE WHO WILL CARRY WHAT IS TOO HEAVY FOR YOU. TRUST IN THOSE WHO WILL HOLD YOU AS YOU TREAD WATER

DWELL ON WONDER

DO NOT STEW IN DESPAIR

WALTZ INTO FRIENDSHIPS

READ AND READ AND READ UNTIL YOU ARE FLYING UPON THE DRAGON'S BACK

EAT MORE

FERMENT IF YOU MUST BUT DO NOT ROT

PLAY GOD AND CREATE ALWAYS

Many continue to believe that the novel is, at heart, a sorrowful meditation on the effects of white beauty standards on a black child, like a literary version of the doll study in Brown v. Board of Education. This reputation has always irritated me. I find it reductive. It ignores the novel’s aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison’s justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it’s about, why you wrote it) is no more important than its effects (how we experience it).

To write the novel from the black female child’s point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: “The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void.” Morrison’s “solution—break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader”—was a formal one, too: “an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it.” As she put it in a later essay, “the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye.”

[...] Given the novel’s reputation as the piteous tale of the little black girl who yearns for blue eyes, it may come as a surprise to new readers that The Bluest Eye is narrated not by Pecola Breedlove herself, but by a woman named Claudia MacTeer, from Lorain, OH [...] These external “rejections” cumulatively fracture Pecola’s psyche by the novel’s end, where she finally speaks in the first person, but in a disturbing dialogue with herself. Why approach this broken child through this complex structure and sundry cast of characters? Why not let Pecola tell her own story straight? Why not simply give the voiceless a voice?

Morrison explained that she felt “centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.” Further, to avoid both sentimentality and “complicity in the demonization process,” it was necessary to treat “racism as a cause, consequence, and manifestation of individual and social psychosis.”

Disdaining straightforward storytelling or a personal account from the victim’s point of view, Morrison instead broke “the narrative into parts” that then have to “be reassembled by the reader,” who must piece together the myriad overdetermined forces that have obliterated this young girl. The novel in essence enacts structural racism while refusing to villainize individual culprits: “I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.”