Toni Morrison Had No Use for the ‘Paralyzing Emotion’ of Anger

‘There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,’ she wrote. ‘We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.’

Toni Morrison warned us about anger from the very beginning.

A pivotal scene in The Bluest Eye — her debut novel — sees its protagonist, the tiny and vulnerable Pecola, recognize a kinship with the dandelions that spring from sidewalk cracks. Through Pecola’s child eyes, we see the beautiful yellow flowers afflicted by the arbitrary designation of their wrongness. They’re ugly, Pecola scolds them. They’re weeds. Similarly, she sees herself as ugly, feeling that without resembling the “smiling white face” of the blonde and blue-eyed Mary Jane cartoon, she — Pecola — can only be a weed, not a flower.

It’s then that Pecola becomes angry. Morrison described the feeling of anger as “a reality and presence. An awareness of worth.” This anger is preferable to the shame that preceded it; it’s described as a “lovely surging.” But the gravitas borne by anger is illusory and quickly turns corrosive. Turned inward, it becomes her tender protagonist’s undoing.

“I need all of my…