Paul's Reviews > Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations

4.75 stars
“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,”
“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.”
This is a collection of essays, speeches, lectures, meditations and short pieces by Toni Morrison spanning about four decades. There are also a few question and answer sessions. There are a couple of eulogies (Martin Luther King and James Baldwin), lot of writing about race and an equal amount of writing about writing. Morrison also talks about her own work and the origins of a number of her novels. She also writes about the literary canon (“canon building is empire building”). There is plenty on belonging and exclusion. She lots at gender and violence towards women throughout. There is plenty of insight:
“We will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.”
“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing — marketing for power.”
There is some familiarity in some of the pieces and a bit of repetition, which could have been sorted with better editing, but that is a minor point.
Morrison looks to history when she analyses present ills. Looking at the American Revolution she sees not a nascent democracy and an “Age of Enlightenment” but an “Age of Scientific Racism”, pointing out that many the intellectual forefathers (Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin) judged black people as “incapable of intelligence”. Morrison talks about feeling both “native” and “alien” in the US and goes on to ask questions about what a literary canon really is.
Morrison also talks about the impact of autobiographical slave narratives, but her scope is broad: from Beowulf to Cinderella to Stein to Faulkner and so on.
This is a collection for dipping in and out of and there is much to think about.