“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. to think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.”
Toni Morrison eradicates, with one concise sentence, the notion that literature (and presumably all forms of knowledge) exist independently of context. To think about, and more importantly, to write about humanity in some vain attempt at objectivity is not only unethical, it is quite simply impossible.
To deny an entire faction of humanity their rightful place in history, their right of culturally, historically situated expression, under the pretense of “universalism” is not just unethical, not just impossible but entirely tyrannical in the effective denial of humanity that it proliferates.
For Toni Morrison to state, clearly, the different facets of her identity that contribute to her construction of the world, threatens the monopoly that the white male has over the propagation of a singular construction of the world, a singular “knowledge”; a knowledge that has been celebrated for its supposed objectivity because the writers of that literature have been afforded the privilege of objectivity. For Toni Morrison to do the same as a “woman”, a “writer” and an “African-American’ would quite simply be a denial of her own truth. For in America, where her presence as a non-white non-male being is unaccounted for, it is her duty to represent herself in a world that refuses to do so.
Morrison makes it clear when she implores the reader to think as a writer, through the lens of their own personal experience, in creating a world that others like them can recognize. A world that goes beyond Uncle Toms and Bens and Joes; a world that recognizes the diversity that flourishes in a post colonial America, because to write is to create a world, potentially from the ground up. A world that the reader, being a non-male, non-white and even non-American should be able to situate themselves within, not one that is inherently exclusionist through the erasure of differences.
This “work” that Morrison talks about is the burden that plagues the writer; the burden to “think” truly, unfettered by the expectations of the kind of knowledge one is expected to produce; the burden of accountability. To write is to be held accountable for what you put out into the world, for the language you use, the characters you portray, the things you include and the things you omit.
The “implications” of writing certain things and not others must then be at the forefront of the author’s mind when they write, because this is no inconsequential task; it informs the reader whether or not there is space for someone like them outside their own homes, in the greater scheme of things
Decoloniality and Decolonization 