Morrison, Toni: General Commentary

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TONI MORRISON: GENERAL COMMENTARY

GURLEEN GREWAL (ESSAY DATE 1998)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

FROM THE AUTHOR

TONI MORRISON ON BLACK FEMINISM

I think black women are in a very special position regarding black feminism, an advantageous one. White women generally define black women's role as the most repressed because they are both black and female, and these two categories invite a kind of repression that is pernicious. But in an interesting way, black women are much more suited to aggressiveness in the mode that feminists are recommending, because they have always been both mother and laborer, mother and worker, and the history of black women in the States is an extremely painful and unattractive one, but there are parts of that history that were conducive to doing more, rather than less, in the days of slavery. We think of slave women as women in the house, but they were not, most of them worked in the fields along with the men. They were required to do physical labor in competition with them, so that their relations with each other turned out to be more comradeship than male dominance/female subordination. When they were in the field plowing or collecting cotton or doing whatever, the owner of the slaves didn't care whether they were women or men—the punishment may have varied: they could beat both, and rape one, so that women could receive dual punishment, but the requirements were the same, the physical work requirements. So I have noticed among a certain generation of black men and women—older black men and women—the relationship is more one of comradeship than the you-do-this-and-I-do-this; and it's not very separate. In addition, even after slavery, all of us knew in my generation, that we always had to work, whether we were married or not. We anticipated it, so we did not have the luxury that I see certain middle class white women have, of whether to work OR to have a house. Work was always going to be part of it. When we feel that work and the house are mutually exclusive, then we have serious emotional or psychological problems, and we feel oppressed. But if we regard it as just one more thing you do, it's an enhancement. Black women are both ship and safe harbor.

Lester, Rosemarie K. Excerpt from "An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt West Germany" (1983) in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1988, pp. 47-54.

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Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion