To create fiction is to deal, first and foremost, with identity—of the characters within it more obviously, of herself, the author, less obviously (though more crucially, because therein lies the motive for creating). Authoring shares its dual concerns—self-discoveries and self-creations—with readers, being generous by nature, that they may make use of them in their own ways. Self-ness must be its own therefore and because, a product then of evolution and in Homo sapiens then most apparent (at least to us within Homo sapiens). In human terms, Erik Erikson was surely correct: self-creation and self-discovery go on for a lifetime.
These thoughts take hold for me in the aftermath of having just read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, her meditation based on three lectures she delivered at Harvard and published in 1992, on the role—compulsory and ineradicable—of race in American literature, requisite for its being American. I should have known about this book years ago (I came across a mention of it in the July 17, 2019 edition of The New York Times, in a piece by Claudia Rankine; my not-knowing earlier is most likely a sign in itself of racist privileging, my own).
Morrison’s argument is that blackness has been for American authors a sine qua non for the creation of whiteness, obligatory, that is, in the creation of an American identity. An unhappy fact: but that’s not Morrison’s purpose, she seeks to understand in this book, not to critique. I find her persuasive. My sole reservation has to do with her use of the term “othering,” one borrowed, I’d guess, from her reading of Edward Said. I don’t like this term because it reduces the force of its useful application to a fundamental of human affairs, namely the distinction of self v. other. This fundamental distinction is one required for a description, even definition, of individual growth, the origination of healthy autonomy. To appropriate from it for speaking of populations is for me distasteful. Yes, a word, a verb, is needed for application to populations, as persons might define by race, for example; I’m on board with that. “Unwelcoming” is too ensconced already as an adjective. Why not “estranging”? Isn’t that what we do when we make people different than we are as a people? We exclude them; we make them strangers.
