The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

“In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience,” she said, according to an 1987 annotated bibliography of her work. And then, after I had published, it was sort of a compulsive thing because it was a way of knowing, a way of thinking that I found really necessary.” At the time, Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, was a single mom living in Syracuse, New York, and working as a textbook editor for Random House. “I was in a place where there was nobody I could talk to and have real conversations with. “I never planned to be a writer,” she told Jane Bakerman in a 1978 interview in Black American Literature Forum. Toni Morrison began writing her seminal debut novel, The Bluest Eye, more than 40 years ago as a way to cure her own loneliness.

This review was originally published for Bitch Media on February 12, 2019: In all, The Source of Self-Regard is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison's oeuvre. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, 'black matter(s),' and human rights. It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11 the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection-a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison