“If you are true to the history, then one would have to see it as an ongoing experiment, a work in progress—two steps forward, three steps backwards.” —FJasmineG
Well, anywhere Toni Morrison spent time, to me, is sacred ground, and so coming here is like a pilgrimage because it was a very important place for her.
Getting back to Toni Morrison, it reminds me of “rememory,” where she talks about the lingering past that is not here but is still here—that’s what a haunting is. You can’t quite get away from the past; you keep bumping up against it, and I saw that as a useful metaphor, as well as literally because I also am coming from an Afro-Caribbean family where we tell stories about jumbies and hauntings all the time.
I find it interesting that it was a goddess who was there, inspiring her children, so to speak, to claim their freedom. But later, during the revolutionary war, the same goddess gets her tongue cut out because she was too strong of a woman. Of course, there are many stories, many myths, of goddesses losing their tongues.
My father was my first teacher—he taught me how to read, he taught me how to write before I started school, and he instilled in me a love of learning, because it was a chance to be with my dad. And then, when my father died, he left a house full of books. I started reading them primarily because they were his. It was a way to get to know him. I had no idea that I would end up being a professor of literature, but I think I became one because of that early grounding.
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