Snug and Wide Open

This week in North Philly Notes, Marilyn Sanders Mobley, author of Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, writes about the spaces Toni Morrison created for her readers.

Reading Toni Morrison was never easy, and I think to a certain extent, she liked it like that. She wanted her readers to take their time, savor the word here, a phrase there, and think about what else was being said. Over the years, I have encountered readers, students, and even colleagues who relished that very arduous feature of her books while others simply closed her novels after a few pages and abandoned the effort. I wrote Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Race, Place, and Be/longing for the ones who did not give up and for those who could be persuaded to try again. I wanted to encourage readers to appreciate her statement from her 1993 Nobel Lecture that “word-work is sublime.” I knew it was worth the effort to stay inside the pages of a Morrison novel, so that they could discover what Baby Suggs meant when she told the enslaved community in Beloved—that “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.” I knew it was worth the effort because Morrison had a heart for readers, and she brought a brilliant mind to the cultural work she identified as leaving “spaces for the reader” to come into the text.

The word-work she referenced was not only for the readers, but for herself as a writer. She even acknowledged in 1996, in a lecture at the “Race Matters” conference at Princeton University, that she had given herself a new task for the novel she was working on at the time. She wanted to see if she could write in such a way as to reveal that race simultaneously matters and that it does not matter. She was not in denial of her identity as a Black woman, nor was she encouraging anyone else to do so, but she wanted to imagine a space beyond white supremacy, racism, sexism, and the ongoing marginalization of all kinds. Having identified the very function of racism as early as 1975 as a “distraction,” she imagined a space where on any given night, a Black woman could walk down the road and nothing and no one for miles around would consider her to be prey. To her way of thinking, that would be a new definition of home, a space that was both “snug and wide open.” When I heard those words that day, I got goose bumps for two reasons. First, I realized Professor Morrison had just given us a sneak preview of her forthcoming novel.  When the novel Paradise appeared in 1998, I experienced the joy of seeing the words “snug and wide open” again in the context of a complicated story at the intersection of race and gender, where Morrison withheld information even as she methodically and strategically doled it out.

Three years later in 2001, in my role as president of the Toni Morrison Society, I helped organize her 70^th birthday party at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. It was a grand 500-person black-tie affair, but when Morrison came to the microphone to thank everyone for the tributes, the accolades, and the sheer fellowship of readers and writers, she used the occasion not just to express gratitude, but also to tell us what she had been doing all along with her shift from editing to writing. She confessed her earliest goal was selfish—to write the book she wanted to read that had not yet been written—The Bluest Eye. She added that she discovered over time that she also wanted readers, and then reviewers. And later she realized she wanted something else–scholarship—that is, a group of readers who would engage in the cultural work of literary criticism, to take her to task, to illuminate what even she may not have seen, and to share those insights with others. I don’t know whether anyone else in that gilded dining hall felt as I did that glorious night, but I recall thinking, “Okay, I have my assignment.” My task as a reader/scholar/critic is to read and reread her work, walk alongside other readers to illuminate what I can, and encourage them to discover what others may never have seen in her work.

Though I experienced numerous personal and professional setbacks and detours away from this project, when I announced my retirement and went on sabbatical in 2019, I did not find the earlier version of the manuscript for this book until the night Morrison died. I wept at the news that this author/teacher/public intellectual/woman, who had become, not just “a friend of my mind” (as her character Paul D said of Sethe in Beloved) but a friend in my lived life, had joined the ancestors. I knew immediately, that I had better get back to work on my book. The cultural work of helping readers navigate the spaces of her writing was waiting and I was more eager than ever to begin again. I wanted to move beyond the whatof her writing to the how of it, in the hopes that readers would join me in reading and rereading her work to discover just how sublime word-work in her hands had been and could be each time we returned to her words.

Shifting to the spaces of her writing to focus more on the how without abandoning the what of her novels was a challenge, but that challenge led me to discover four stylistic patterns I refer to as her geopoetics in my book. Walking alongside Toni Morrison’s readers after 40 years of reading, teaching, analyzing, and interpreting her work is still worth the effort, “quiet as its kept,” to quote the opening lines of the novel that began the whole journey. From Lorain, Ohio to Paris, France and all the other spaces in between where she took her brilliant, layered, textured writing and imagination to readers all over the world, she gave us narratives that were radical enough to create new memories and meaning beyond our wildest dreams. More than that, by tapping into both our storied past and other ways of imagining our future, she gave us a bold, unapologetic new sense of freedom beyond what others said was possible.