Toni Morrison on the invention of the stranger

Hers “was not a story to pass on,” but one to be forgotten, an easy enough thing to do since there was nothing left of her to remember except “the one word her mother could have afforded to have inscribed on her tombstone, Beloved.” And yet her footprints still “come and go, come and go,” just as Toni Morrison promised.

They appear this time in the pages of Morrison’s latest excavation of the Western canon in search of the origin of others, where readers rediscover “Be­loved the girl, the haunter, [who] is the ultimate Other.” Far more is represented by the ghost of Morrison’s “speaking, thinking dead child” in Beloved than the “sixty million and more” dead African slaves to whom the novel is dedicated. In this new work, Morrison continues to grapple with the savagery and gothic sensibilities of slavery and still has much to say about the relics of people left in its wake.

The Origin of Others is a critical literary and cultural analysis of Western literature’s role in determining the way the culture perceives difference. In these essays, Morrison provides the same kind of “controlled wilderness” that she uses to create experiences of otherness in her fiction, fusing rich details and depth of perception to position the reader to relate to others “with sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.”