AAVE and Standard English in dialogue in Toni Morrison's "Sula"

Lying alone on her deathbed, Sula Peace in Toni Morrison's Sula ponders the conversation she's just had with her childhood friend Nel Wright: "I didn't mean anything. I never meant anything." Here, she's commenting on the affair she had with Nel's husband Jude, which meant nothing to her, though it meant a lot to Nel, especially after Jude left her. But this also echoes Sula's mother Hannah's earlier comment to her grandmother Eva: "I didn't mean nothing by it, Mamma." Hannah uses AAVE grammar (with negative concord), while in this echo of her mother, Sula, who had once left her hometown for college, speaks standard English to herself when she's alone. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 August)

"Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t": Hair and gender in Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"

In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, twelve-year-old Milkman Dead identifies and interprets a gendered difference: "Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed." If, as Milkman thinks, such concealment reveals women's shame about their appearance, women, as the objects of male gazes, also don't want the production of their appearance to be visible. But the beauty shop with its curtains down also offers women something else: a space of their own beyond the male gaze that they will be subject to as soon as they go outside again. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 August)

"I didn't mean nothing by it, Mamma": Contesting an unstated implication in Toni Morrison's "Sula"

In Toni Morrison's Sula, Hannah Peace asks her mother Eva how she feels about her, her sister Pearl, and her brother Plum: "Mamma, did you ever love us?" After Eva responds testily, Hannah tries to downplay the question: "I didn't mean nothing by it, Mamma." This does not console Eva, who wonders how a question can mean nothing: "How you gone not mean something by it?" But the meaning that they are contesting is not the question's straightforward sense. If Hannah "means nothing", then the question has no further purpose than its sense, but for Eva, the question must have some further purpose, and she takes offense at its unstated implications. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 August)

The six-year-old critic and "The Famous Five"

When my son Miles was about six, we read the entire original series of Enid Blyton's "The Famous Five" out loud to him – and then reread many of the books because he loved them so much. Yet he was also already a critic: he remarked frequently on the books' formulaic quality, especially on how many of them involved going underground. And when he wanted to reread any book, he would ask to skip to the ninth or tenth chapter. When I asked him why, he said that the setup of the stories was always the same, with the kids somehow needing to be separated from their parents and other responsible adults. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 August)

"A bunch of con men": Hannah Arendt on the Nixon administration in 1975

In May 1975, Senator Joe Biden wrote to Hannah Arendt to ask for a copy of a talk she had recently given. Whether or not he received a copy from her, the text was published a month later in the New York Review of Books. As an article on the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam crisis of the United States, it would behoove Vice President Biden to read it now in the current crisis. Here's one of the moments that speaks to 2020 as much as it did to 1975: "[...] it is as though a bunch of con men, rather untalented mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves the [American] government [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 August)

 

The age of actors and characters

In 1999, at 10, Daniel Radcliffe played David Copperfield as a child in a BBC production of the Dickens novel, with Ciarán McMenamin taking over the adult role. When Radcliffe became Harry Potter in 2001, though, he grew older with his character as eight films were made in ten years – which had to be finished before he and his co-stars were too old to play teenagers. With adult characters, this isn't a problem – but it could eventually be one for "The Old Guard", if the sequels are made that are teased at the end of the movie: the performers will age, but the characters are immortals who always look the same. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 August)

Praying for transformation in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and "Sula"

In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, who knows that everyone thinks she is ugly, wishes for one change that she thinks would transform her appearance: "[...] if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. [...] Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes." This desire for miraculous transformation brought about by prayer reappears with Nel Wright early in Morrison's Sula: "Oh, Jesus, make me wonderful." Unlike Pecola, who imagines that she is transformed to escape the trauma of incestuous pregnancy, Nel is later "made wonderful" – not by Jesus, but by the transformative effect of her friendship with Sula Peace. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 August)

Hugh Hewitt and the case for not re-electing President Trump

Hugh Hewitt's recent argument for President Trump's re-election makes clear why he must be defeated. Every "accomplishment" Hewitt lists is abhorrent. For example, he celebrates Trump's nomination of judges – the scale of which is only possible because hearings weren't held on President Obama's nominations. Or he praises Trump's withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear treaty, which appalled the world, and from the Paris climate accords, which endangers the survival of the human race. Or he mentions Trump's response to the pandemic merely to blame the coronavirus on China. If you feel unenthusiastic about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, read Hewitt's hymn to Trump as a reminder of what voting for them means. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 August)

 

Charlotta Bass: The first woman of color to run for Vice President

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post are careful and correct in their headlines about Joe Biden's choice of Kamala Harris as a candidate for Vice President: she is "first woman of color on major ticket" or "major party's ticket". The "major" qualifier is necessary, as the first woman of color to run for Vice President was Charlotta Bass of the Progressive Party in 1952 (which I learned from a tweet by historian Martha S. Jones). Her acceptance speech is full of points that sadly still need to be made today, including the problem of police brutality: "I will continue to cry out against police brutality against any people." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 August)

"A threnody of nostalgia about pain" in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"

When Cholly Breedlove's Aunt Jimmy in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" seems to be recovering from an illness after the midwife M'Dear has treated her, Aunt Jimmy and her friends Miss Alice and Mrs. Gaines talk about "miseries they had had": "Their voices blended into a threnody of nostalgia about pain. Rising and falling, complex in harmony, uncertain in pitch, but constant in the recitative of pain." Out of their "fond remembrance of pains they had endured", these women create a veritable celebration of their lives. The harmony of their voices is a figure for Morrison's writing; the multiple perspectives "blend together" into a "threnody" made out of her characters' experiences. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 August)

"I hurt just like them white women": Black maternity in "The Bluest Eye"

When Pauline in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is pregnant with her second child, a doctor discusses her with residents: "[...] now these here women you don't have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses." In this medical myth, Black people are treated like animals who don't feel pain like whites do. In labor, Pauline challenges that myth: "The pains wasn't as bad as I let on, but I had to let them people know [...] I hurt just like them white women." Morrison's 1970 novel thus depicts private resistance to discrimination around 1930. The history of oppression is always a history of resistance. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 August)

"It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses"

In the 1914 chapter of Virginia Woolf's 1937 novel "The Years", Martin Pargiter walks across London with his niece Sara. Between the Law Courts and Charing Cross, they cannot hear each other because of "the roar of the traffic", and Martin looks closely at an automobile: "It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous." By the time Woolf wrote the novel in the 1930s, cars would have been a natural part of the landscape to most Londoners. But Martin, like Woolf herself, lived through the automobile's invention, and in 1914, he still remembers how unnatural the "horseless carriage" once looked. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 August)

"None of us feel anything at all, she thought; we're all pretending": Delia Pargiter in Virginia Woolf's "The Years"

In Virginia Woolf's "The Years", the teenage Delia Pargiter can't feel what she's supposed to feel at her mother's funeral: "None of us feel anything at all, she thought; we're all pretending." And at the grave, she's still at a loss: "She hesitated – she did not know what she ought to do next." This might be shock, as with Septimus Smith in Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway", but given Delia's previous longing for her mother to finally die of her long illness, her uncertainty about feelings and appropriate behavior is less about that experience and more a matter of characterization – with Delia perhaps being on the autism spectrum before that terminology was coined. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 August)

The closed coffin in Toni Morrison and Patricia Smith

Like Emmett Till's, Chicken Little's body in Toni Morrison's Sula is found three days after his death, "unrecognizable to almost everybody who once knew him," but at his funeral, "the coffin [is] closed." As Patricia Smith notes in one of her "Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure" poems, "Mamie Till insisted on an open casket so that the world could see her son's mutilated body." In Smith's poem, though, Emmett's coffin is closed, so people imagine his body with only "perhaps a scrape or two / beneath his laundered shirt." In Smith and Morrison, the black child's "unrecognizable" body is hidden, so the imagination can deny the violence done to it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 August)

 

The Smith poem is quoted in this review of her book Incendiary Art.

"Something else to be" for Sula and Nel in Toni Morrison's "Sula"

As children, Sula Peace and Nel Wright in Toni Morrison's Sula find common ground in their self-knowledge: "Because [...] they were neither white nor male, and [...] all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be." White and male individuality may enable the positive goals of "freedom and triumph", but the generic conventionality of such stories limits such individuality. In turn, the social conventions preventing black women in Morrison from realizing conventional individuality force them to "create something else" that, in its namelessness, makes them more singular than those otherwise enabled by the white and male privilege created by structural racism and misogyny. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 August)

"Because we have more tests, we have more cases": President Trump's absurd touchstone

"Because we have more tests, we have more cases": it runs like a touchstone through Jonathan Swan's interview with President Donald Trump. As so many already have, I could point out the absurdity of the statement: the cases are there whether or not one tests for them; testing for them is a way to determine how serious the situation is; more cases means that the situation is more serious and that further measures need to be taken to bring it under control. But none of that seems to matter as for as President Trump is concerned; he'll just keep repeating his touchstone: "Because we have more tests, we have more cases." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 August)

 

More points of contact between "The Old Guard" and "Harry Potter"

The other day I wrote about the image of two opponents falling from on high together that appears in both "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" and in "The Old Guard". The Harry Potter series also shares at least one actor with "The Old Guard": Harry Melling, who plays Dudley Dursley in the Potter films and Merrick in "The Old Guard" – which puts him in the Voldemort position in the latter film as he falls from the window. Voldemort wishes for immortality – and so does Merrick, who seeks a kind of "philosopher's stone" in the immortal bodies of Andy (Charlize Theron) and the other members of "The Old Guard". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 4 August)

Suitcases and toiletry bags

When I stayed in hotels when I was younger, I'd live out of my suitcase, rummaging through my clothes to find what I needed, with everything gradually more and more disorderly, and a pile of dirty stuff on the floor. Now I unpack my suitcase and put the clothes into the closet, arranged on the shelves, with the dirty pile on the floor of the closet. And I used to keep all my toiletries in the bag, getting them out and putting them back again when I was done with them, but now as I get them out to use them, I put them in a neat line beside the bag. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 August)

Train trip with mask

I get off the crowded double-decker train, where everyone was wearing a mask as required, and cross the platform to wait thirteen minutes for my connection. All smiles, frowns, and resting faces are hidden – a constant reminder of the times. The waiting trains on the other tracks are vibrating, the loud and steady snore of a sleep that only ends when they pull out of the station and uncover the silence that was waiting its turn. A child chatters and laughs as he pulls the mask from his mother’s face. “Again!” he cries as she pulls it back on again just as the arrival of my day’s last train is announced. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 August)

Falling from on high in "Harry Potter" and "The Old Guard"

During the climactic duel in David Yates's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2", Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) pulls Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) from a high tower into a free fall. Similarly, in Gina Prince-Bythewood's "The Old Guard", when Merrick (Harry Melling) shoots Nile (Kiki Layne) as she tries to protect Andy (Charlize Theron), Nile tackles him, and they fall out a high window together. But unlike Merrick, the immortal Nile will recover from her bullet wounds and impact injuries. While Nile isn't sacrificing herself to kill Merrick, Harry accepts that possibility: he could be committing suicide in order to kill Voldemort (whose failed attempts to become immortal drive the story). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 August)

Beauty in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"

When Pauline in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye goes to the movies, she "succumb[s] to [...] dreams": "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." The destructiveness of these ideas thus involves comparison and self-judgement. Pauline compares herself to Jean Harlow and judges herself as inferior, especially when she loses a tooth to the cinema candy. But even before that, she has already absorbed a cinematic standard of white beauty that she cannot see herself, as a Black woman, as living up to. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 31 July)

"A two-million-dollar snuff film" and a seventy-million-dollar action film: "The Old Guard"

The first fifteen minutes of Gina Prince-Bythewood's "The Old Guard" introduce Andy (Charlize Theron) and her three friends, immortals whose wounds always heal quickly. The movie's first action scene is first an experience of the characters, but then it's a video watched by ex-CIA agent Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who later shows it to Merrick (Harry Melling), a pharma executive interested in the immortals. Yet for Merrick, the video is just "a two-million-dollar snuff film": he wants their bodies – and their DNA. Merrick's right, of course: Andy is not immortal; it's all makeup and special effects in a seventy-million-dollar action film that makes its heroes' invulnerability into an element of the plot. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 July)

On Richard Russo, the Flitcraft parable, White Americans, and the George Floyd protests

Richard Russo's "Will White People Forget About George Floyd?" recounts a story from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: having almost been killed by a construction accident, a man named Flitcraft abandons his life, only to be found elsewhere five years later, with a similar job and family. Russo wonders whether, with time, White Americans might also return to their old lives after George Floyd's murder. But Flitcraft's story is individualist and masculinist: he could have changed his life by spending more time with his family, working with homeless people, or even investigating construction-site safety. Russo's Flitcraft parable suppresses the social and inclusive elements of protest that change the lives of participants. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 July)

 

Women, power, and the pandemic

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in June, the apparent correlation between female leadership and a country's success controlling the pandemic might be "about the kind of country that chooses a woman to lead it." Further, a new study points out that countries with female leaders generally score better in equality indices. So women aren't necessarily the better leaders; rather, countries that elect women are generally in better positions to handle a public-health crisis. But I would also add this speculation: since misogyny blocks women's advancement to positions of power, women with power are seldom mediocrities. And unfortunately for the countries led by them, mediocre men have trouble dealing with such a crisis. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 July)

 

 

Talking about race is not in and of itself racist

Some respondents to my recent posts about race have suggested that discussing race is itself racist. Even me calling myself "White" would thus risk being racist. But while race is a "social construct" with no biological basis beyond melanin levels in skin, that doesn't mean "race" doesn't exist. It's not a biological "thing", but it's still a social thing. Nor does race as a "social construct" mean any given individual can decide which race to belong to. It's not an individual choice but a social determination. It's a construct with very real effects that need to be discussed, and discussing its construction and effects is not essentially racist – or even anti-racist. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 July)

Political opinion and right-wing "political correctness"

In "Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think.)", Jon Schwarz's examples of right-wing political consensus in the United States include the public pressure that led Jon Stewart to retract his 2009 statement on "The Daily Show" that Harry Truman was "a war criminal" for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I had a similar, private experience in the 1990s: in a discussion with relatives born before the war, I argued that even if Hiroshima might be defensible, I found Nagasaki to be at least bordering on a war crime. I was shouted down; the idea was unthinkable to them. Unlike Stewart, though, I did not retract my statement. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 July)

 

My result on an implicit-association test

Following a link from Bajour, I took the race test at Project Implicit, and the result of the test differs from my sense of myself: while I see myself as not preferring Whites to Blacks, the test says I have a moderate preference for Whites over Blacks. This doesn't surprise me: as a White American, I grew up immersed in racism (even though my parents were Civil Rights activists). In Ibram X. Kendi's terms, the point is not to say "I'm not a racist" but to recognize and combat racist ideas in myself and others. Kendi's book is "How To Be an Anti-Racist"; for me, it's how to become an anti-racist. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 July)

"Terms that didn't exist at the time"

In his review of Walter Johnson's "The Broken Heart of America" in The New Yorker of May 25, 2020, Nicholas Lemann absurdly criticizes Johnson for his use of "terms that didn’t exist at the time to describe the motivations of historical actors: 'genocide,' 'settler colonialism,' 'ethnic cleansing' [...]." "Genocide" was coined in 1944 to describe ongoing events, but Lemann's logic implies that any discussion of Nazi mass murder prior to 1944 should avoid the term. And the distinction between "settler colonialism" (no matter when it was coined) and other types of colonialism can be usefully made as far back as classical antiquity. Lemann's criticism is thus both linguistically and historiographically ridiculous. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 July)

If baseball were like soccer

As the shortened baseball season gets started in North America, I wonder again: what if baseball was organized like soccer? Each team would play 1-2 games a week; the season would consist of home and away games against each other team in leagues with 18-20 teams; tiered leagues would exist with first, second, third, and lower divisions, with promotion and relegation at the end of each season; and a single-elimination cup competition would involve teams from all the leagues. With fewer games, teams would need only one or two good pitchers, so historically, one of the greatest teams might have been the historical Washington Senators when their ace was Walter Johnson. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 July)

Ted Yoho bites his thumb, sir

After "a brief but heated exchange" with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on the Capitol steps on Monday, Representative Ted Yoho (R-FL) was heard to mutter "fucking bitch". In response to criticism, Yoho's spokesman Brian Kaveney said that Yoho "did not call Rep. Ocasio-Cortez what has been reported in 'The Hill' or any name for that matter. Instead, he made a brief comment to himself as he walked away [...].” Or, as Sampson says to Gregory in the first scene of "Romeo and Juliet", "No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir." Ocasio-Cortez turned the insult around, tweeting that "'b*tches' get stuff done". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 July)

 

 

Four "lost" texts by Franz Kafka

The June 29 "New Yorker" features "The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time", Michael Hofmann's translation of four texts by Franz Kafka that will be published by New Directions in September in "The Lost Writings". I recognized the first as "Prometheus", but I assumed I just knew it in German and that it had never been translated before. Online, however, there is an interview with Hofmann and Barbara Epter of New Directions with an addendum at the end: all four of the stories have actually been translated before, and the Muir translation of "Prometheus" is even in "The Complete Stories". "First translation"; "lost writings" – all that is nothing but marketing. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 July)

A Klan sign on a Palo Alto street corner in 1946

In "Driving While Black", Gretchen Sorin provides a number of examples of 20th-century road signs that warned African-Americans when they were about to enter towns where their presence was not welcome. One came as a surprise to me because it referred to a town I spent part of my childhood and early adulthood in: "In Palo Alto in 1946, California's Klan painted KKK in red letters three feet high on the road at the intersection of Homer Ave and Ramona Street, to make sure motorists saw it." Though the article Sorin cites is not online, its author, Matt Bowling, has a website on Palo Alto history where he includes the story. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 July)

 

Stateless in Switzerland

For a brief period in May and June, I was a stateless person. In April, I discovered I'd mixed up the expiration dates of my American passport and my daughter's: mine was expiring in May; hers in October. Due to coronavirus, I could renew my passport at the American Embassy in Bern in mid-May. When Switzerland's borders were opened in mid-June, I still hadn't received my new passport, so I couldn't leave Switzerland. This is nothing compared to what actually stateless people experience, but until my new passport arrived a few days later, I had at least an inkling of what it is to be without papers in the globalized world. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 July)

"Reverse Self-Segregation"

Gretchen Sorin's "Driving While Black" includes two examples of "reverse self-segregation". The first took place at the Shady Rest Golf and Country Club in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, which was "the first black golf club in the nation" and "a gathering place for the black upper class". Duke Ellington and other jazz greats played summer concerts there to two sets of dancers: African Americans inside, white locals in the parking lot. Similarly, Prince's in Nashville served their "hot chicken" to African Americans who came in through the front door while the whites entered through the back. In each case, the white desire for African American culture inverted segregation for a moment. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 July)

Aunt Jemima challenged in 1943

Recently, Quaker Oats announced that the Aunt Jemima brand would be taken off the market, and as usual, there were claims that an image and name that had not been seen as offensive in the past were suddenly being treated as racist. But in 1943, as Gretchen Sorin writes in "Driving While Black", David J. Sullivan, an African-American market researcher, advised white businessmen and advertisers aiming at African-Americans to avoid blackface, racial slurs, images "exaggerating Negro features", and such stereotypes as Uncle Mose and Aunt Jemima. That is, the Aunt Jemima brand, the associated "mammy" image, and racist brand names and logos have long been seen as offensive by African Americans. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 July)