The Bluest Eye

Nederlands (English below)

Winter tightened our heads with a band of cold and melted our eyes. We put pepper in the feet of our stockings, Vaseline on our faces, and stared through dark icebox mornings at four stewed prunes, slippery lumps of oatmeal, and cocoa with a roof of skin.

Hoewel Toni Morrison (1931-2019) haar debuutroman The Bluest Eye deels schreef vanuit de ogen van de negenjarige Claudia, is het beeld dat zij schetst van een zwarte gemeenschap toch behoorlijk ongepolijst. Centraal staat Pecola, een meisje dat als pleegkind terechtkomt in de familie van Claudia nadat ze door haar vader is verkracht. Morrison omschrijft Pecola als het lelijke eendje, dat mede onder invloed van haar omgeving zelf is gaan geloven dat ze ‘ugly’ is. Het meisje is ervan overtuigd dat haar leven anders zou zijn als ze blauwe ogen had, een eigenschap die voor haar overeenkomt met ‘wit zijn’.

De keuze om het verhaal deels vanuit het wereldbeeld van een jong zwart meisje te schrijven pakt goed uit. Morrison gebruikt daarbij ogenschijnlijk absurde kopjes die uit de Amerikaanse kinderserie Dick and Jane blijken te komen. Verder schrijft Morrison vanuit de alwetende verteller en gaat ze mede in op de levenswandel van Pecola's ouders. Dat leidt ertoe dat de lezer zich ondanks alles toch kan inleven in vader Cholly, zelf immers ook een kind van de rekening. Ten slotte ontsluit Morrison de pikorden binnen de gemeenschap, waarin een wittere huid voor meer beschaving lijkt te staan.

Ik vond het een indrukwekkend boek, al was het verhaal af en toe wat warrig en had het soms zelfs wat weg van een ‘tafereel’ zonder specifiek doel.

English

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison intertwines the view of a nine-year-old black girl with the harsh daily life of her community, creating an abrasive contrast. The story about Pecola – the least enviable girl in town – is sad, but not to be missed, because Morrison’s writing is worth reading. Still, I did miss a punchline.

This is my third Toni Morrison, and Beloved is still my favorite so far, but it’s clearly always going to be a good book when I pick hers up.

The main thing I’d say I didn’t enjoy as much about this book is the fact that we explore multiple character perspectives and stories. It’s almost more a collection of related short stories than a novel. I prefer sticking with a smaller cast, BUT, I will say she does a lot with each of them all the same. It’s not a shallow dip into multiple characters, you are getting right into their deepest secrets and shames.

The use of the Dick and Jane type story was striking. I don’t think I have to be all that insightful to see the contrast she’s drawing between the children’s story with the perfect little white suburban family and the lives of the Black people in the novel.

I guess in the end, Pecola’s really the protagonist even though you don’t get her perspective until the end. It feels like a lot of the story ultimately revolves around her even though she not the viewpoint most of the time.

There’s a lot of humor in this book when the focus is on the little girls. Morrison captures kid talk well. But it’s far outweighed by the really dark passages. There are a few nearer the end of the book that are pretty repulsive. It’s bizarre to read such expressive, beautiful writing describing such awful things.

Given the title, I was a little worried someone was going to poke their own eyes out. I don’t think that’s too far fetched for Morrison to write.

“Public fact becomes private reality, and the seasons of a Midwestern town become the Moirai of our small lives.”

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a clever novel that from the outset makes its intentions clear: its purpose is not to tell you what happened or how it happened—though it does this as well—but to explore the explosive question: why? Apparently this book has been controversial and on numerous banned books lists, and I can see why; despite being required reading for schoolchildren, Morrison does not shy away from heavy topics and ‘adult’ themes. More than a few times I was surprised by the details she had included in the text. Yet nothing is done gratuitously or to shock the reader; everything follows seamlessly from what has been established, and the reader can do nothing but nod along sympathetically as the story unfolds before them.

The novel’s primary concern is Pecola Breedlove, though we see her primarily through the perspective of others—the MacTeer sisters, her parents, neighbors, strangers, etc. Of course, race is a huge theme of the novel, with Pecola’s insecurities lying not only with her apparent ugliness but also her blackness. Hence the title—she wishes she could have ‘blue eyes’, what would then become a panacea for all of her social ills. There are a lot of metaphors in this book, both heavy-handed and subtle ones, but the blue eyes are of course the most significant. I particularly loved how Morrison framed the novel; usually, having multiple perspectives can bog down a story, resulting in a weaker plot. But the novel already told the reader that the plot is not of consequence here, since we know it in its entirety from the outset. Rather, the novel introduces characters slowly, or in the background; then, it gradually takes us through their perspectives and histories, without immediately making it clear whom the book is referring to. This kind of storytelling is brilliantly done, as it beguiles the reader into feeling sympathy and understanding for a certain character before revealing the inner moral complexity of the character, and what role they play in Pecola’s grievances.

However, some of the more literary aspects of the novel were difficult to get through. I am primarily plot-oriented when I go through novels, and I knew it would be an uphill battle for me reading this; but I also appreciate philosophically heavy themes, and Morrison does not shy away from that. However, she does at times cloak these thoughts in repetitive inner monologues or seemingly abrupt textual insertions. Other times, she spends a great deal of the page describing the setting or how a character looks; having aphantasia, I find such passages utterly dull in any book. I can appreciate the lyrical and picturesque language that Morrison employs with such ease, but my brain wanted to speed through to find out what actually happens.

This book is certainly a classic for a reason, and I am glad this was my introduction to Morrison’s corpus. Hopefully, it is the first but not the last!

Trickle-down works — just not in the way the plutocrats would have you think. It works through the countless daily cruelties, microaggressions to monstrous ones, cascading down from each wounded person down to whomever is ever-so-slightly lower on the status ladder, from the weak to the weaker because you can’t lash back up so violence is displaced down to the smaller and more vulnerable. It works because there’s always someone smaller and more vulnerable, all the way down until the lowest bottommost child, and who but Morrison really cares about her anyway? It works by fostering an atmosphere so thick with resentment and bitterness that there's scarcely room for anything else, or even the awareness that there could be anything else.

This is a haunting book. Morrison writes with such tenderness; with understanding for her characters and how they got that way. No cookie-cutter heroes or villains, and it’s so much harder to judge or dismiss people with backstories. Morrison also writes so beautifully, such powerful sentences and images. It took me a long time to read because so many paragraphs begged me to read them again.