The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

When I picked up this book, I did not have the slightest clue about the nature or depth of Toni Morrison’s writing. During the many hours I have spent browsing in bookshops, I had seen her novels displayed prominently on the shelves. But for some reason that I cannot retrospectively fathom, I was never nudged strongly enough by my subconscious to pick one up long enough to be dazzled by what lay inside.

And completely, unalterably, irreversibly dazzled is what I am after reading The Bluest Eye! Where were you Ms Morrison, during the past five decades of my engagement with the written word? And where was I?

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f I were to describe this profound work in simplistic phraseology, this is the story of Pecola, an impoverished and ‘extremely ugly’ African American girl who feels, deeply, that her eminently tragic existence could only be redeemed in some measure if her eyes magically acquire the color blue.

Each sentence is a gift wrapping that promises to reveal yet another surprise. The prose is brilliantly evocative, fearlessly direct and starkly honest. The entire star-cast is ‘black’ and yet among the longest shadows cast on the narrative is by the invisible presence of the ‘white’ people. It will be equally accurate to say that this is a book about ‘race’ and that it is a book not about ‘race.

None of the characters is straining to cover herself or himself with even a shred of glory, and yet we are compelled to understand the fabric of their motivations. No apology is made on anyone’s behalf either– not for Cholly Breedlove for sexually assaulting and impregnating his child, nor for his wife Pauline who fought him with matching violence and yet submitted to him, or the misanthropic Dream Reader Soaphead Church who plotted the murder of his landlady’s aging dog, or the ladies of easy virtue, delightfully named as China and Maginot Line; about the last name, I must confess that my acquaintance with military history did provoke me to wonder why a lady in flesh trade would be named after French defenses that were considered resistant to any breach?

The slim book has an extremely insightful Afterword that Toni Morrison wrote in 1993, nearly three decades after she started writing this book in days that were racially among the most surcharged in the US and 14 years after the book was first published in 1979. It gives the work an even more heightened context.  

A brilliant book!