Introduction

Instructor’s Note

Welcome to the world we have made. You are free to commune with us between our pages. Know though that the ideas held within will only hold meaning to you if you are ready and willing to be moved by them. Nothing here is static or promised; nothing here wishes to obey. Imagination and a keen eye turned inward toward the self are the price of the ticket for admission. The trace of the world we collectively established in my course, “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” can be found here, within this multi-voiced talking book. The chorus formed by the pieces my students submitted to this talking textbook sings in the future anterior tense: what stories and poems will we have read, what emotions will we have felt, what norms will we have abandoned, what art will we have made, what people will we have become in order to experience the ecstatic responsibility of freedom and the vibrant, curious self-awareness of love? The purpose of the class and this book is the same: to o er an alternative narrative of the self, one which may only be accessed through a complete internal transformation. Through the semester-long process of writing, teaching, learning, listening, feeling, and talking together, we have all become strange to ourselves. My hope is that the testimonies recorded in this book will give you the courage to do the same.

I did not expect the class to conclude this way. In the spring of 2020 as I developed the early drafts of this course, I was still allowing myself to be guided by an algorithm of deeply internalized racism and sexism. Though I never would have admitted it at the time, my primary goal in designing “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” was to advocate for her inclusion into a blindingly and stultifyingly white male canon of critical theory and philosophy. I intended to force the broad complexity of her mind’s excursions through the narrow interpretive sieves named by Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and others. I was going to convince my students that Morrison really was a semiotician, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher, a Marxist, and a literary critic. I was pitifully excited to assimilate Morrison into a system of thought that I knew had stifled my own creativity and made me doubt the value of my own experiences as a Black woman writer and intellectual. Why? Why su er and perform in my own classroom, a place where the tyranny of the Father was purportedly absent? At that time, I was aggressively committed to being unaware of the pain of assimilation that was quickly, quietly, and surely killing me.

And then Death came. Not for me, shockingly, but for someone who was a mirror to myself. I say she is my sister, but the stories attached to our skin do not hear my plea. She was white. I am Black. She was called Alexa, but believed that Antigone was her true name. Between us there was communion, the creation of new stories about ourselves that exceeded the narratives of our skin, our names, and our most painful memories. Like communion in the sacred sense, I took her body and blood inside of me in order to be born anew. She took my body

and my blood inside of her to the grave. The Amanda that she knew died with her. Living as if the world was my co n could no longer su ce once I accepted that a piece of me had already experienced the solitary intimacy of burial. She gave me what I thought I wanted in order to show me that I was capable of desiring so much more.

But still, I missed her. Every day. I would lie very still on my couch for hours with my eyes closed, crying. Alone. As if I, too, had been buried, just to hear her voice. I could not give up her ghost any more than she would give up on me. In her absence, there was a profound, spectral presence that urged me to reflect on the piece of me that shared a tomb with Antigone. Why were we so alike? And how were we di erent? I had no language for the indiscriminate intensities which welled up every time I thought about our communion. All I had were pictures, memories—of us laughing at the absurdities of graduate school, of her defending me when I had the audacity to invoke ideas by Black authors in front of our white colleagues, of me being awed by her interpretations of Michel Foucault, Claudia Rankine, Immanuel Kant, Frantz Fanon, and Toni Morrison, of her welcoming me into her home without question and sitting with me for hours when I called her crying over a devastating epiphany about my family. She read my poetry, my stories, and my essays and attended my early attempts at Black feminist reading groups. She believed in the value and the necessity of my voice as a writer, thinker, teacher, and artist. She believed that my words could make people feel things.

I say she is my sister, and the pictures in my mind of the friendship between us do not doubt my Truth. My Truth was that I missed her so terribly because she saw me. She heard me, and was always willing to listen to the needs I expressed as a human being and a person who was fortunate enough to receive her love. On this plane of love that we uniquely forged between each other, our identities were unfixed, unpredictable. We could critique whiteness and blackness within the specific context of how it alienated us from each other. If our goal was to truly know each other as friends and as women, the language that had historically been used to describe identity categories as static monoliths would have to get out of the way. We would have to surrender all that we knew of ourselves and the world in order to be closer to each other. So, when she died, it was inevitable that I would become intimate with ghosts. Both hers and mine, and primarily through the ghostly characters and haunting language within Toni Morrison’s novels. I had already been haunted by Morrison’s passing in the summer of 2019, and in my fresh grief, I clung to Morrison’s work as a medium between myself and all the ghosts which gave me no rest.

Just before dying, Alexa told me that she had always felt like Pecola Breedlove from The Bluest Eye, and that Morrison’s gift was her courage to speak truth to power. I compulsively replayed every story Alexa told me in my mind for months, terrified that I would lose her a second time in the act of forgetting. Her feeling of kinship with Pecola and with me completely arrested me. I could not move on until I understood this strange, passionate closeness which defied the narratives we had been taught to ascribe to whiteness and femininity. The feelings between us were forbidden, incoherent, and made secret through the dual discipline of language and biopower. I sought communion with the dead, initially to feel her love, then to feel myself, then to feel around for the words, ideas, and texts that did not necessarily capture our friendship, but rather sought to explain the process of self-transformation that cultivated the

intimacy, creativity, bravery, and joy between us. In death, as in life, she made me braver. In crouching down to the grave to listen to her ghostly voice encouraging and challenging me, I

began to hear my own more clearly than I ever had before. I re-started my Black feminist theory reading group with new fervor, thinking with my group interlocutors through a Black feminist theoretical tradition that was capacious and compassionate enough to include not only the work of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Angela Davis, but also Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Andrea Dworkin, Erica Jong, Gayatri Spivak, and Alexa’s own undergraduate thesis, Poiesis and Death: Foucault’s Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Volume 1. I was angry and despondent at the loss of a beloved friend, and those feelings hardened into the knife of resentment when I compared the version of feminist genealogy that I had created in the reading group and through my friendship with Alexa to the version we had learned during our formal education.

The story of feminism usually went like this: “White women are fragile, naive, selfish, and duplicitous spoiled princesses who seek to use feminism as a site to finally wield the power that they have been denied under white patriarchy. Black women are angry, defensive, magical, and endlessly giving mammies whose only purpose is to facilitate white women’s existential crises.” I was resentful of the resentment that had (often justifiably) accrued between Black and white women and, subsequently, the canons of Black and white feminist literature. The way that Alexa and I wished to know each other as friends and women was so far removed from the interracial antagonisms outlined by Barbara Christian in “The Race for Theory” or bell hooks in “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women.” The antagonisms we inherited from previous generations of feminists did nothing to help deepen the bond of our friendship. Our inheritance as women felt inherently tragic, as if the transgressions, fears, and shortcomings of our feminist “mothers” were fated to be our own. The genealogy of feminism that we knew then demanded a fate in which di erence was not to be trusted and that there could not be shared experiences, feelings, beliefs, and dreams between Black and white women. And yet I missed Alexa so intensely because she understood me and believed in my dreams.

As I re-designed my course during the summer, it was Alexa’s voice that gave me the courage to craft a syllabus which was overwhelmingly populated by women, with James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and “Down at the Cross” forming the only exceptions. She made me feel reckless and vulnerable enough to include my own fiction, poetry, and essays in the syllabus too. Initially, I felt anxious. I had only recently begun writing creatively again in secret, and I worried that sharing such a strange, imaginative, and vulnerable part of myself with my students would undermine the negligible “authority” I had as a professor who was both Black and a woman. I eventually realized that it was imperative for me to introduce myself to my students as an author and an artist in order to honor Morrison’s demand that her readers embark on their own journeys of radical self-transformation through the artwork they create in response to her writing. I wanted to be an example of Black feminist scholarship and Black feminist life imagined otherwise. Yes, Morrison’s staggering genius enabled her to create in multiple genres, including plays, novels, poetry, critical essays, operas, and the many texts she edited during her tenure at Random House. However, it was also her refusal to ever be anyone

other than who she believed she was that gave her the courage to defy easy categorization in all areas of her life and career. To teach this class, I would have to be the one-and-multiple thing that I and Alexa had always wanted from me: myself.

But “being myself” seemed to be no easy task, as the self I had grown accustomed to had been undone by grief. My life had become strange to me. Upon realizing the deep fulfillment and love I experienced through being seen and understood by Alexa, I could not go back to relationships and spaces in which I felt devalued, unseen, and written o as “crazy” for expressing long-repressed emotional needs. The life that I had been living made me forget that I was a human being and not just a Black stock character in the melodramas of other (white) people’s lives. I could not continue living unless I began to demand more for myself, both from myself and the people around me. Most of the people to whom I initially expressed my emotional needs in the wake of Alexa’s death and my subsequent time of crisis were taken aback. They could not come to terms with the violence they had been inflicting upon me by assuming that I did not have a complex interior life. They assumed that I would not need to receive the same quality and consistency of support that I had been conditioned to give endlessly and to my own psychological detriment. The racial politics we had been taught did not hold everyone accountable for the same level of emotional labor and compassion that often becomes the sole responsibility of Black women.

I was a dry well, and for the first time, I had to reckon with the fact that the life I had neatly slipped into was incapable of satisfying me when I lived as myself. I had to project a new version of myself into the world and blindly hope that it would attract the kinds of people and ways of thinking that would guide me toward a more meaningful and less self-destructive life. I realized that I was destroying myself because I had never been taught—by society, feminism, race politics, my relationships—to value myself. And based on the stories of Alexa’s that I keep, I don’t think she was taught to value herself either. Even as I write this, I feel a powerful wave of shame cresting over my shoulder. And even worse, I feel that I am betraying Alexa by telling this shared Truth. But why? Why shame? Why betrayal? Her death is trying to teach me that I can no longer allow shame to guide my hands or my life.

I am twenty-six, which means I am closer to thirty and should therefore have my shit together sooner rather than later. At this point in time, I’ve determined that “getting my shit together” means excavating the bones of my shame, peering upon them closely in the light, listening to the rhythm of the sounds they make, and giving them back to the earth so they may finally rest. Because I still live, I cannot rest. But I can find peace. And in designing this class and communing with my students, I am finding peace within the confrontation and rejection of shame. To do this, I ask very simple questions that quickly produce complicated answers: What happened to me? Why? In what ways does my past continue to limit my potential in the present? Who am I, especially without this pain?

In academic jargon, the practice of asking myself these questions and then reading and writing texts that seek to answer them might be called autotheory. I would also call it healing or becoming self-aware. My decision to grow older means that healing and becoming self-aware

are both a necessity and a responsibility. Necessity in the sense that I have outgrown my “old” voice as a writer, and I must go underwater again to find the treasure of my new voice that has been marked by loss, rebirth, and the recognition of a dynamic self which has inherent value. Responsibility in the sense that as a person who holds a (minimal) position of authority within the tradition of feminist thought, it is my duty to prevent younger feminists from inheriting the same toxic narratives and interpersonal dynamics that made Alexa and me feel isolated, alienated, ashamed, misunderstood, and worthless. As a teacher and a writer, I have the opportunity to break intergenerational cycles of abuse and help my students and readers imagine their own narratives of who they would like to become. The vulnerability necessary to admit that I need to heal and become self-aware is the source of my power and the motivation for my work. If I do not take responsibility for healing my own pain, I will never be able to help others do the same.

Thus, I realize retroactively that I designed the syllabus of “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” to re-trace my experience of confronting the sources of my shame, taking responsibility for healing my pain, and beginning the di cult and fulfilling work of imagining a new life for myself after attaining an initial level of self-awareness. I am eternally grateful to my students for their brave willingness to seriously engage with my unconventional textual pairings and assignments. I am also deeply grateful for their earnestness. They shared of themselves with me and their classmates in ways that made me feel as if my desire to bring people together through collective healing was not so “crazy” after all. They made me feel more confident about discussing the ways we can use Morrison’s novels to identify and stop everyday violence within relationships, families, friendships, workplaces, communities, and political movements. We talked about how to use literature and art to address real-life issues like codependency, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, intergenerational trauma, the legacy of slavery, toxic masculinity, (internalized) racism, (internalized) homophobia, (internalized) sexism, suicide, child abuse, manipulation, sexual harassment, gaslighting, xenophobia, the hidden evil of the white suburbs, and a panoply of other topics which will appear in the works within this collection.

The syllabus I have included in this collection o ers rudimentary coordinates toward the vast and dazzling emotional landscapes my students have formed within themselves and with their classmates through their artwork. My hope is that they will cherish the rich inner worlds they have cultivated in this course. My dream is that they will continue to share the beauty, distinctiveness, and intensity of their ever-unfolding selves with many, many people who will love, value, respect, and see them. Each of their lives is profoundly significant, and it is their inalienable right to live and express themselves in ways that encourage healing, self-transformation, and self-awareness. Look upon the world they have made and be forever changed. I certainly was.

Amanda Bennett Durham, NC November 2020