Hey everyone! It's been a h o t second since I've written here, and can't lie- it does feel a little strange to be back. I feel like I've tried and explained my spottiness again and again, but there's really no excuses - second semester senior year & its best friend burnout hit me like a truck and everything just kind of fell through... it was a little scary - there was like a good few months where I didn't even feel motivated to read!
But then summer kicked in, and I've been reading a lot more- just need to organize my thoughts about the books and get back on here again :) But even though this is a book blog, and I don't feel like I have any authority or experience to review films, I thought I'd come back with some thoughts on a fantastic documentary I saw yesterday: The Pieces I Am, about literary icon Toni Morrison.
To be fair, I'm really not an expert on Morrison at all - I read Beloved earlier this year, and that's the most I've read of her work. But that one book absolutely blew me away, and I still am amazed by just how inventive but also deeply intelligent and emotional it was - it was so ambitious and yet fulfilled its promises perfectly.
I've also become more interested in her work after finding out about her influence on and time at Princeton, where I'll be headed in the fall. She's no longer teaching there, but just knowing that she was working on her incredible books while she was working there as well is so amazing to me.
So when I saw a showing for The Pieces I Am in town, I decided to go. I ended up being probably one of two people under sixty in the entire theater, but there was still this nice unspoken sense of community, just knowing all the other viewers were also readers :)
Making writing interesting on film is really hard, but this one did it so well. I think it was largely because the whole documentary was structured around an interview with Morrison herself, and she has such a warm, infectious personality - every time she talked, it felt like a conversation with a friend. It doesn't follow any set sort of chronology but dips into her influence, her youth, then her work throughout, taking us on a sort of emotional journey realizing how powerful her words really are.
The main thing I felt walking out was just complete awe at such a magnificent talent. She juggled taking care of her two kids, teaching at various colleges, editing books at Random House, and writing her own by waking up at 5 AM in the morning. Her dedication to all of it was amazing, along with the unfortunate reality that she had to work doubly hard to prove herself in a society dominated by white men - and yet she did.
It was fascinating to regard Morrison as a representative for a turning point in the literary canon - a figure that represented the diversification of what could be considered a "universal" story. In so many ways, I was amazed at how hard she worked to remove the "white gaze" from her work, liberating and humanizing her characters in a way not many writers of color could've done before. She had opened up the conversation for so many writers in her footsteps, and yet she hadn't done it by writing great political works or statements- rather, I think her books are just some of the most true portraits of life, specifically black life.
I think I felt just an incredible gratitude to her for pushing the academic literary community to catch up with the times, so to speak. What was a community that had been largely ignoring the social changes of the time had to face the reality that the power of words was not just limited to a certain demographic.
All in all, even though there were a few moments where other critics' anecdotes got a little drone-y, I think the documentary was such a great journey through the career of one of the most talented & revolutionary writers of our time- a writer that by all existing convention, wasn't supposed to succeed, yet through just believing in her writing, changed the game.
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