The Source of Self-Regard

Peril

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, call­ing into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights can disturb the social oppres­sion that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

That is their peril.

Ours is of another sort.

How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writ­ing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unha­rassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The

Peril

Part I THE FOREIGNER’S HOME
The Dead of September 11
The Foreigner’s Home
Racism and Fascism
Home
Wartalk
The War on Error
A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed
Moral Inhabitants
The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
The Habit of Art
The Individual Artist
Arts Advocacy
Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address
The Slavebody and the Blackbody
Harlem on My Mind: Contesting Memory—
     Meditation on Museums, Culture, and Integration
Women, Race, and Memory
Literature and Public Life
The Nobel Lecture in Literature
Cinderella’s Stepsisters
The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations

Interlude BLACK MATTER(S)
Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
Race Matters
Black Matter(s)
Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
      The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
Academic Whispers 
Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes 
Hard, True, and Lasting 

Part II GOD’S LANGUAGE
James Baldwin Eulogy
The Site of Memory
God’s Language
Grendel and His Mother
The Writer Before the Page
The Trouble with Paradise
On Beloved
Chinua Achebe
Introduction of Peter Sellars
Tribute to Romare Bearden
Faulkner and Women
The Source of Self-Regard
Rememory
Memory, Creation, and Fiction
Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell
Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading

Sources

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

Close your eyes and make a wish. Wish that one of the most informed, smartest, most successful people in your profession walks into your living room, pulls up a chair and says, This is what I ve been thinking. That s The Source of Self-Regard The bursts of rumination examine world history, skirt religion, scour philosophy, racism, anti-Semitism, femininity, war and folk tales There s even a tidbit or two about her closely guarded personal life. But the real magic is witnessing her mind and imagination at work This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.
James McBride, New York Times
 
The Source of Self-Regard speaks to today's social and political moment as directly as this morning's headlines... Morrison tackles headfirst the weighty issues that have long troubled America's conscience... profoundly insightful.
NPR
 
Clearly we do not deserve Morrison, and clearly we need her badly...In this collection of nonfiction written over the past four decades, the revered (and sometimes controversial) author reinforces her status as a piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race... the book explodes into pure brilliance... [It is Morrison s] definitive statement.
The Boston Globe

"Dazzlingly heady and deeply personal a rumination on her literary career and artistic mission, which is to reveal and honor the aching beauty and unfolding drama of African American life... Have there been many minds more intriguing, or writers more sublimely challenging? The Source of Self-Regard excavates Morrison's vast well of knowledge. Open its pages and receive."
O Magazine
 
"In an era when complex ideas are reduced to slogans and tweets, when language is dumbed down and truth so often debased, The