desideratum: the pieces of us

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Table of Contents Introduction

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Syllabus

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Playlists

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Poem

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strange to myself

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The Farewell

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I learned of the ways in which Time haunts us

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To the highly vocal ghosts

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Emotion

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Home

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Instructor’s Note - Amanda Bennett

Amanda Bennett

Mia Miranda & Shibani Malik

Shourya Agarwal & Kees Heetdeks

Lucy Zheng

Shourya Agarwal

Hannah Zhang & Nicole Schwartz

Celine Wei

Tino Lopez

Hannah Zhang, Alycia Love, & Celine Wei

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to toni morrison

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Introduction Instructor’s Note

Welcome to the world we have made. You are free to commune with us between our pages.

Know though that the ideas held within will only hold meaning to you if you are ready and willing to be moved by them. Nothing here is static or promised; nothing here wishes to obey.

Imagination and a keen eye turned inward toward the self are the price of the ticket for admission. The trace of the world we collectively established in my course, “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” can be found here, within this multi-voiced talking book. The chorus formed by the pieces my students submitted to this talking textbook sings in the future anterior tense: what stories and poems will we have read, what emotions will we have felt, what norms will we have abandoned, what art will we have made, what people will we have become in order to experience the ecstatic responsibility of freedom and the vibrant, curious self-awareness of love? The purpose of the class and this book is the same: to offer an alternative narrative of the self, one which may only be accessed through a complete internal transformation.

Through the semester-long process of writing, teaching, learning, listening, feeling, and talking together, we have all become strange to ourselves. My hope is that the testimonies recorded in this book will give you the courage to do the same.

I did not expect the class to conclude this way. In the spring of 2020 as I developed the early drafts of this course, I was still allowing myself to be guided by an algorithm of deeply internalized racism and sexism. Though I never would have admitted it at the time, my primary goal in designing “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” was to advocate for her inclusion into a blindingly and stultifyingly white male canon of critical theory and philosophy. I intended to force the broad complexity of her mind’s excursions through the narrow interpretive sieves named by Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and others. I was going to convince my students that Morrison really was a semiotician, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher, a Marxist, and a literary critic. I was pitifully excited to assimilate Morrison into a system of thought that I knew had stifled my own creativity and made me doubt the value of my own experiences as a Black woman writer and intellectual. Why? Why suffer and perform in my own classroom, a place where the tyranny of the Father was purportedly absent? At that time, I was aggressively committed to being unaware of the pain of assimilation that was quickly, quietly, and surely killing me.

And then Death came. Not for me, shockingly, but for someone who was a mirror to myself. I say she is my sister, but the stories attached to our skin do not hear my plea. She was white. I am Black. She was called Alexa, but believed that Antigone was her true name. Between us there was communion, the creation of new stories about ourselves that exceeded the narratives of our skin, our names, and our most painful memories. Like communion in the sacred sense, I took her body and blood inside of me in order to be born anew. She took my body

4 and my blood inside of her to the grave. The Amanda that she knew died with her. Living as if the world was my coffin could no longer suffice once I accepted that a piece of me had already experienced the solitary intimacy of burial. She gave me what I thought I wanted in order to show me that I was capable of desiring so much more.

But still, I missed her. Every day. I would lie very still on my couch for hours with my eyes closed, crying. Alone. As if I, too, had been buried, just to hear her voice. I could not give up her ghost any more than she would give up on me. In her absence, there was a profound, spectral presence that urged me to reflect on the piece of me that shared a tomb with Antigone. Why were we so alike? And how were we different? I had no language for the indiscriminate intensities which welled up every time I thought about our communion. All I had were pictures, memories—of us laughing at the absurdities of graduate school, of her defending me when I had the audacity to invoke ideas by Black authors in front of our white colleagues, of me being awed by her interpretations of Michel Foucault, Claudia Rankine, Immanuel Kant, Frantz Fanon, and Toni Morrison, of her welcoming me into her home without question and sitting with me for hours when I called her crying over a devastating epiphany about my family. She read my poetry, my stories, and my essays and attended my early attempts at Black feminist reading groups. She believed in the value and the necessity of my voice as a writer, thinker, teacher, and artist. She believed that my words could make people feel things.

I say she is my sister, and the pictures in my mind of the friendship between us do not doubt my Truth. My Truth was that I missed her so terribly because she saw me. She heard me, and was always willing to listen to the needs I expressed as a human being and a person who was fortunate enough to receive her love. On this plane of love that we uniquely forged between each other, our identities were unfixed, unpredictable. We could critique whiteness and blackness within the specific context of how it alienated us from each other. If our goal was to truly know each other as friends and as women, the language that had historically been used to describe identity categories as static monoliths would have to get out of the way. We would have to surrender all that we knew of ourselves and the world in order to be closer to each other. So, when she died, it was inevitable that I would become intimate with ghosts. Both hers and mine, and primarily through the ghostly characters and haunting language within Toni Morrison’s novels. I had already been haunted by Morrison’s passing in the summer of 2019, and in my fresh grief, I clung to Morrison’s work as a medium between myself and all the ghosts which gave me no rest.

Just before dying, Alexa told me that she had always felt like Pecola Breedlove from The Bluest Eye, and that Morrison’s gift was her courage to speak truth to power. I compulsively replayed every story Alexa told me in my mind for months, terrified that I would lose her a second time in the act of forgetting. Her feeling of kinship with Pecola and with me completely arrested me. I could not move on until I understood this strange, passionate closeness which defied the narratives we had been taught to ascribe to whiteness and femininity. The feelings between us were forbidden, incoherent, and made secret through the dual discipline of language and biopower. I sought communion with the dead, initially to feel her love, then to feel myself, then to feel around for the words, ideas, and texts that did not necessarily capture our friendship, but rather sought to explain the process of self-transformation that cultivated the

5 intimacy, creativity, bravery, and joy between us. In death, as in life, she made me braver. In crouching down to the grave to listen to her ghostly voice encouraging and challenging me, I began to hear my own more clearly than I ever had before. I re-started my Black feminist theory reading group with new fervor, thinking with my group interlocutors through a Black feminist theoretical tradition that was capacious and compassionate enough to include not only the work of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Angela Davis, but also Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Andrea Dworkin, Erica Jong, Gayatri Spivak, and Alexa’s own undergraduate thesis, Poiesis and Death: Foucault’s Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Volume 1. I was angry and despondent at the loss of a beloved friend, and those feelings hardened into the knife of resentment when I compared the version of feminist genealogy that I had created in the reading group and through my friendship with Alexa to the version we had learned during our formal education.

The story of feminism usually went like this: “White women are fragile, naive, selfish, and duplicitous spoiled princesses who seek to use feminism as a site to finally wield the power that they have been denied under white patriarchy. Black women are angry, defensive, magical, and endlessly giving mammies whose only purpose is to facilitate white women’s existential crises.” I was resentful of the resentment that had (often justifiably) accrued between Black and white women and, subsequently, the canons of Black and white feminist literature. The way that Alexa and I wished to know each other as friends and women was so far removed from the interracial antagonisms outlined by Barbara Christian in “The Race for Theory” or bell hooks in “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women.” The antagonisms we inherited from previous generations of feminists did nothing to help deepen the bond of our friendship. Our inheritance as women felt inherently tragic, as if the transgressions, fears, and shortcomings of our feminist “mothers” were fated to be our own. The genealogy of feminism that we knew then demanded a fate in which difference was not to be trusted and that there could not be shared experiences, feelings, beliefs, and dreams between Black and white women. And yet I missed Alexa so intensely because she understood me and believed in my dreams.

As I re-designed my course during the summer, it was Alexa’s voice that gave me the courage to craft a syllabus which was overwhelmingly populated by women, with James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and “Down at the Cross” forming the only exceptions. She made me feel reckless and vulnerable enough to include my own fiction, poetry, and essays in the syllabus too. Initially, I felt anxious. I had only recently begun writing creatively again in secret, and I worried that sharing such a strange, imaginative, and vulnerable part of myself with my students would undermine the negligible “authority” I had as a professor who was both Black and a woman. I eventually realized that it was imperative for me to introduce myself to my students as an author and an artist in order to honor Morrison’s demand that her readers embark on their own journeys of radical self-transformation through the artwork they create in response to her writing. I wanted to be an example of Black feminist scholarship and Black feminist life imagined otherwise. Yes, Morrison’s staggering genius enabled her to create in multiple genres, including plays, novels, poetry, critical essays, operas, and the many texts she edited during her tenure at Random House. However, it was also her refusal to ever be anyone

6 other than who she believed she was that gave her the courage to defy easy categorization in all areas of her life and career. To teach this class, I would have to be the one-and-multiple thing that I and Alexa had always wanted from me: myself.

But “being myself” seemed to be no easy task, as the self I had grown accustomed to had been undone by grief. My life had become strange to me. Upon realizing the deep fulfillment and love I experienced through being seen and understood by Alexa, I could not go back to relationships and spaces in which I felt devalued, unseen, and written off as “crazy” for expressing long-repressed emotional needs. The life that I had been living made me forget that I was a human being and not just a Black stock character in the melodramas of other (white) people’s lives. I could not continue living unless I began to demand more for myself, both from myself and the people around me. Most of the people to whom I initially expressed my emotional needs in the wake of Alexa’s death and my subsequent time of crisis were taken aback.

They could not come to terms with the violence they had been inflicting upon me by assuming that I did not have a complex interior life. They assumed that I would not need to receive the same quality and consistency of support that I had been conditioned to give endlessly and to my own psychological detriment. The racial politics we had been taught did not hold everyone accountable for the same level of emotional labor and compassion that often becomes the sole responsibility of Black women.

I was a dry well, and for the first time, I had to reckon with the fact that the life I had neatly slipped into was incapable of satisfying me when I lived as myself. I had to project a new version of myself into the world and blindly hope that it would attract the kinds of people and ways of thinking that would guide me toward a more meaningful and less self-destructive life. I realized that I was destroying myself because I had never been taught—by society, feminism, race politics, my relationships—to value myself. And based on the stories of Alexa’s that I keep, I don’t think she was taught to value herself either. Even as I write this, I feel a powerful wave of shame cresting over my shoulder. And even worse, I feel that I am betraying Alexa by telling this shared Truth. But why? Why shame? Why betrayal? Her death is trying to teach me that I can no longer allow shame to guide my hands or my life.

I am twenty-six, which means I am closer to thirty and should therefore have my shit together sooner rather than later. At this point in time, I’ve determined that “getting my shit together” means excavating the bones of my shame, peering upon them closely in the light, listening to the rhythm of the sounds they make, and giving them back to the earth so they may finally rest.

Because I still live, I cannot rest. But I can find peace. And in designing this class and communing with my students, I am finding peace within the confrontation and rejection of shame.

To do this, I ask very simple questions that quickly produce complicated answers: What happened to me? Why? In what ways does my past continue to limit my potential in the present?

Who am I, especially without this pain?

In academic jargon, the practice of asking myself these questions and then reading and writing texts that seek to answer them might be called autotheory. I would also call it healing or becoming self-aware. My decision to grow older means that healing and becoming self-aware

7 are both a necessity and a responsibility. Necessity in the sense that I have outgrown my “old” voice as a writer, and I must go underwater again to find the treasure of my new voice that has been marked by loss, rebirth, and the recognition of a dynamic self which has inherent value.

Responsibility in the sense that as a person who holds a (minimal) position of authority within the tradition of feminist thought, it is my duty to prevent younger feminists from inheriting the same toxic narratives and interpersonal dynamics that made Alexa and me feel isolated, alienated, ashamed, misunderstood, and worthless. As a teacher and a writer, I have the opportunity to break intergenerational cycles of abuse and help my students and readers imagine their own narratives of who they would like to become. The vulnerability necessary to admit that I need to heal and become self-aware is the source of my power and the motivation for my work.

If I do not take responsibility for healing my own pain, I will never be able to help others do the same.

Thus, I realize retroactively that I designed the syllabus of “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” to re-trace my experience of confronting the sources of my shame, taking responsibility for healing my pain, and beginning the difficult and fulfilling work of imagining a new life for myself after attaining an initial level of self-awareness. I am eternally grateful to my students for their brave willingness to seriously engage with my unconventional textual pairings and assignments. I am also deeply grateful for their earnestness. They shared of themselves with me and their classmates in ways that made me feel as if my desire to bring people together through collective healing was not so “crazy” after all. They made me feel more confident about discussing the ways we can use Morrison’s novels to identify and stop everyday violence within relationships, families, friendships, workplaces, communities, and political movements. We talked about how to use literature and art to address real-life issues like codependency, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, intergenerational trauma, the legacy of slavery, toxic masculinity, (internalized) racism, (internalized) homophobia, (internalized) sexism, suicide, child abuse, manipulation, sexual harassment, gaslighting, xenophobia, the hidden evil of the white suburbs, and a panoply of other topics which will appear in the works within this collection.

The syllabus I have included in this collection offers rudimentary coordinates toward the vast and dazzling emotional landscapes my students have formed within themselves and with their classmates through their artwork. My hope is that they will cherish the rich inner worlds they have cultivated in this course. My dream is that they will continue to share the beauty, distinctiveness, and intensity of their ever-unfolding selves with many, many people who will love, value, respect, and see them. Each of their lives is profoundly significant, and it is their inalienable right to live and express themselves in ways that encourage healing, self-transformation, and self-awareness. Look upon the world they have made and be forever changed. I certainly was.

Amanda Bennett Durham, NC November 2020

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Syllabus The Pieces of Toni Morrison Fall 2020 Instructor’s information Instructor: Amanda Bennett What is this course about?

This introductory course will familiarize students with five fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis—Oedipality, narcissism, masochism, mourning, and melancholy—through the literary and editorial work of Toni Morrison. Thinking through the often under-studied psychoanalytic registers of Morrison’s work will allow students to critically engage with the fraught and exploitative history that exists between Black Americans and the diagnosis of mental illness. The purpose of the course is not to superimpose European psychoanalytic models onto the Black familial constellations within Morrison’s novels. Rather, this course is interested in the chiastic relationship between Morrison’s narration of the interior lives of Black Americans and the terminology and analytic models of psychoanalysis. Our investigations of these five central concepts within Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Morrison’s narrative universe will allow us to collectively develop answers to questions such as: How must Freudian concepts be altered and historicized to interpret the psychic and social lives of Morrison’s Black American characters?

How does the established narrative of Black American “culture” change when witnessed through the frame of psychoanalysis?

How must the Freudian Oedipal model of desire and kinship change and become aware of its own historical and racial limitations when interpreted through Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Hortense Spillers’ “Isom,” “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight,” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”? How do the racial, legal, and gendered logics imposed upon Black Americans by chattel slavery (including partus sequitur ventrem) require the development of an analytic kinship model that is related to but not reducible to the Oedipal model?

Why is there a dialectical or chiastic relationship between narcissism and masochism for Morrison’s character Sula and the rap persona of Megan thee Stallion? How does a combination of structural inequalities and interpersonal violences cultivate or discipline an insecure Black female ego which is both self-destructive and self-protective?

How does the insecure ego delimit or overdetermine the kinds of political and intellectual movements that Black women develop in response to systemic racial and gender inequality?

How do writers such as Morrison, Angela Davis, and Hortense Spillers use written narrative to document, grapple with, and overcome external limits placed on the ego?

Why is the term “mourning” often inadequate when attempting to describe the responses of Morrison’s Black characters in novels such as Beloved and Sula to death and loss? How does a novel like Beloved demonstrate the inextricability of mourning from melancholia for Black Americans?

9 The temporality of this course is intentionally nonlinear, as each unit loops back into itself to form an intricate series of concentric circles. Time, when filtered through the bodies of Morrison’s characters who are descendants of American chattel slavery, will be experienced as “circles and circles of sorrow,” a description Morrison uses to capture the shape of Nel’s mourning cry in Sula.

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to identify the specific links between the (inter)personal and structural causes of psychological and intergenerational trauma for Black Americans as Morrison represents them in her novels. Students will leave the course with an introductory understanding of fundamental concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis that is not reducible to Freud himself or the historical and social context in which he lived. Students will be able to articulate the contours of what Morrison describes as an “Africanist presence” within European psychoanalysis specifically and the white canon of Western literature generally.

Books: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume 1994 edition) Sophocles, Antigone Toni Morrison, Sula Toni Morrison, Beloved Christina Sharpe, In the Wake Articles/Essays/Short Stories: Hortense Spillers, “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers” Michele Wallace, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity excerpted from Invisibility Blues Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me” James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind” Alexa Cucopulos, Poesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1 Written Assignments: You will be required to write two papers for this course, in addition to a critical introduction to a text of your choice. You will also be required to perform a short play, song, visual content, or series of poems that you wrote with the members of your assigned group. Guidelines for each will be distributed separately. You will be required to revise your mid-term paper after receiving feedback from me and one or more of your peers.

Please double-space your written assignments and use a standard word processing program, unless you are submitting a creative project. Guidelines for creative projects will develop over the course of the semester. All formal written assignments must include page numbers as well as your name, the date, and a (fetching and provocative) title on the first page. Submit a digital copy of the assignment via Sakai on the assigned due date. If you are concerned that you will be unable to make an assignment deadline, let me know at least 48 hours in advance.

That way, we can negotiate another due date and I can make sure that I submit your midterm and final grades by the university deadline (10/2).

10 Weekly Responses: Please post your responses to each week’s reading assignment in the Sakai discussion board by midnight each Tuesday before class. Your responses should run around 250 words. In your response, talk about ideas that interested you in the reading. Where did you detect specific psychoanalytic concepts in Morrison’s work? Were there ideas that you didn’t fully understand? Do the ideas expressed in the reading appear in different forms in the world around you? End each response with a question that you would be interested in discussing with the class. Feel free to respond to each other’s posts on Sakai—this space is designed to help you generate ideas about the week’s assignment before class. Feel free to be experimental in your writing—it is essential for you to become familiar with language as an artistic medium in order to complete the later assignments in this course. You may decide to publish some of your responses and critical introductions in our class ‘zine.

Zines/Public Scholarship: This portion of the class will develop in relation to how we collectively come to understand language, psychoanalysis, and Toni Morrison’s work over the course of the semester. How do you wish to tell stories that were never meant to be told?

Unit 1: Oedipality “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Week 1

Question/Sakai Prompt: What are some of the differences and similarities between the “I” of “Lay Your Head On My Pillow” and the “I” of Morrison’s Preface poem? What is the story’s understanding of the relationship between Venus’s family background and the larger history of Black women in America?

8/19: Introductions/syllabus; why Morrison? Why psychoanalysis? Why you? Discuss Toni Morrison’s poem Preface to The Black Book (1974)—who is “I”? Who is “you”?

8/21: Amanda Bennett, “Lay Your Head On My Pillow.” Submit response to prompt via Sakai by midnight on Thursday.

Week 2

Question/Sakai Prompt: How is Morrison manipulating language and narrative to make a critique of internalized racism? Why does she begin with and frequently return to the children’s story of Dick and Jane? How does the language of Dick and Jane's adventures influence Pecola's desire for blue eyes?

8/26: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye— “Autumn,” “Winter;” Toni Morrison interview, “Why I Wrote The Bluest Eye” 8/28: Continue The Bluest Eye—“Spring,” “Summer”

Week 3 9/2: 9/4:

Question/Sakai Prompt: What is happening in the conversation between Pecola and herself at the end of The Bluest Eye? Why are there experiences or words that Pecola cannot say, even within the privacy of her own mind?

Finish The Bluest Eye— Afterword (Plume 1994 edition); Sylvia Plath interview on confessional poetry: Hortense Spillers, “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers;” Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

11 Assignment: I would like for each of you to write a 1-2 page description of youselffrom the perspective of another person, either someone you already know or a total stranger. Pay close attention to the context in which you choose to describe yourself. What will you describe yourself doing (sitting in class, being at a party, going on a date, playing a sport, performing on stage etc)? Why is this person looking at you? What is this person like? How does this person see themselves within their own inner monologue?

Week 4

Question/Sakai Prompt: What is the cause of Antigone’s alienation, isolation, and death? What is Antigone’s—or her society’s—tragic flaw?

9/9: Anne Carson, Antigonick; “Antigone is You is Me” exhibit by Alexandra Grant 9/11: Anne Carson, Antigonick (continued); MC Schraefel, Talking With Antigone. Read the Abstract, Acknowledgments, Dedication, Preface, and Introduction. Also read the short quote from the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective on the page before Chapter Two begins.

Unit 2: Narcissism and Masochism “And if it's an illusion, I don't want to wake up. I'm gonna hang on to it. Because the alternative is an abyss, is just a hole, a darkness, a nothingness. Who wants that? You know? So that's what I think about control, and that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it” — SZA’s mother, Ctrl Week 5:

Question/Sakai prompt: What are the relationships that emerge between speech, sexuality, desire, womanhood, Blackness, and femininity not only in Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One, but also in the Sex Wars skirmishes that I outline in in my critical introduction to Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices” and Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse? Can or should BDSM be used as a method of interrogating the gendered relationship between narcissism (structurally masculine) and masochism (structurally feminine)?

9/16: Critical introduction due. No Sakai post due today. Watch Howardena Pindell’s experimental film, Free, White, and 21. As you watch the film, consider genre. What distinguishes documentary from cinema? How can Pindell’s work help blur the racialized line between documentary and fiction?

9/18: Submit response to Sakai prompt by midnight on Thursday. Amanda Bennett critical introduction on Irigaray; critical introduction on Sex Wars/BDSM; Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which is Not One”

Week 6:

Question/Sakai Prompt: Write a 1-2 page narrative about a time you were a bystander an act of violence. Violence here can be physical, sexual, emotional, and/or on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, etc.

Write it either from the perspective of yourself as a bystander, or from the perspective of the victim. Be prepared to explain why you chose to write from one position rather than the other.

9/23: Toni Morrison, Sula—“Foreword,” “Part One” 9/25: Toni Morrison, Sula—“Part Two”

12 Week 7:

Question/Sakai Prompt: How can we develop methods of reading Black women’s sexuality and identity beyond a binary of abjection and ecstasy? How do Sula, “Maureen,” and “WAP,” blur the boundaries between abjection and ecstasy? Why does trauma make pain feel pleasurable?

9/23: Amanda Bennett poems: “Sula,” “Nel.” Continue discussing Sula. At home, listen to “Maureen” by Sade. Listen to “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan thee Stallion.

9/25: Finish discussing Sula. Assignment: Bring to class one song that reflects your interpretation of Sula. Here’s the playlist we made.

Week 8:

Question/Sakai Prompt: How can the way we write and offer feedback during workshops unsettle the codependent relationship between narcissism and masochism? How is the collective practice of workshopping another’s writing a form of consciousness-raising?

9/30: Small group peer workshop of midterm papers. We will discuss guidelines for workshop etiquette and the mechanics of giving constructive, compassionate feedback to those with whom you are in community. How can the way we write and offer feedback unsettle the codependent relationship between narcissism and masochism? You will be required to submit written feedback on your peers’ work.

10/2: Midterm paper due by the beginning of class. In class, we’ll watch selections from SZA’s album Ctrl, including “Supermodel,” Love Galore,” and “Drew Barrymore.”

We will listen to her song “20 Something” as well. Before class, read these interviews with SZA in Spin and Rolling Stone.

Unit 3: Mourning and Melancholia; Or, The Fire This Time “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —Dinos Christianopoulos Week 9:

Question/Sakai Prompt: How does Baldwin understand the relationship between Christianity and the experiences of Black people in America? How does Morrison’s eulogy for Baldwin change your understanding of what writing can do?

10/7: James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind;” James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues;” Toni Morrison, “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered; Life in His Language;” Hortense Spillers, “James Baldwin’s America” 10/9: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”

Watch at home and discuss in-class Spillers’ lecture, “Shades of Intimacy: Women in the Time of Revolution” on the specific relation between “flesh” and the rape of enslaved Black women.

Assignment: Write a 1-2 (or more, if you have time) page narrative told from the perspective of the monstrous “female with the power to ‘name’” who appears at the end of Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” What would she call herself? What kind of language would she use? What kind of environment would this individual need to exist? How would she describe herself, others, and the world around her? What is her opinion of herself? What is her purpose? What does she spend her time doing? What are her friends and relationships like?

What is her internal monologue? Try to answer as many of these questions as you can while weaving together this character’s universe.

13 Week 10

Question/Sakai Prompt: What do you think Morrison means when she writes in the Foreword to Beloved that “to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (xix)? How might the definition of language that Morrison wishes to move past in the Foreword differ from the language that Sethe’s mother and Nan use? Specifically, I want you to look at the scene at the end of chapter 6 in which Sethe recalls her childhood memory of Nan telling her stories about the abuse of Sethe's mother on the slave ship (page 74 in print version).

10/14: Toni Morrison, Beloved, chapters 1-7; Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.” Listen to this recording of her essay. Watch this clip from Marlon Riggs’ documentary, Ethnic Notions.

10/16: Toni Morrison, Beloved, chapters 8-12 Assignment: Write a 1-2 page description of one of these primary emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and interest. The actual word that claims to describe the emotion shouldn't appear in your description. What do these words mean from your perspective? What do the emotions beneath these words feel like to you? What memories, beliefs, and narratives are conjured when you think of these words?

Week 11:

Question/Sakai prompt: For this response, please focus on the chapters that begin “I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves” and “I am Beloved and she is mine. Sethe is the one that picked flowers...” How does Morrison use language in these chapters to “say things that are pictures”?

Why is it important to find ways to “say things that are pictures”? What is the difference between the language Morrison uses in these chapters and the language Morrison said needed to “get out of the way” in the Foreword?

Additionally, please read the critical introductions and the NYT Morrison interview I uploaded to the Week 11 folder. Now that Morrison has moved language out of the way, how might we read Beloved as a text about self-sabotage and witnessing? What lessons can we take from her experimentation and exploration?

10/21: Continue Beloved, chapters 13-18 10/23: Finish Beloved, chapters 19-22 and Part III Assignment: For Friday, I'd like you to submit a 1-2 page description (or more, if you'd like) of how you imagine a family should look, function, and feel. To describe this “family,” you'll have to move language out of the way. The point of this assignment is to give you the space to detach yourself from a false binary of “good” and “bad” families in order to imagine what you think a family would look like in which all members are respected, seen, heard, valued, and loved (and what do those words even mean in the context of your imagined family?). “Family” in this sense can be forged either through biological or chosen connections— it's your choice.

If you find it difficult to begin imagining this family structure, you might start by imagining what Spillers’ “monstrous woman” from “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” would need from her family. Now that Spillers’ “monstrous woman” has named herself, what kind of family does she need around her to help her live up to her new name?

Week 12:

Question/Sakai Prompt: In her thesis, Poiesis and Death, Alexa Cucopulos writes, suggests that the “constant undoing and remaking of the self is an

14 ongoing resistance to biopower, a power that constantly tracks and orders life” (Cucopulos 6). How does she demonstrate the possibility of resistance to biopower through the formatting of her thesis, her argument, her objects of study, and her particular interpretation of a “fragmented Foucault”?

What roles might poetry and poiesis have in making and unmaking the self, especially once language has been moved “out of the way”? What conceptual and emotional links do you see between the ideas in Cucopulos’ thesis, the trio of poems I’ve shared with you, and other texts we’ve read earlier in the semester?

10/28: Alexa Cucopulos, Poiesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1. Read the Preface, the Introduction ("A note on poem-lives"), and Chapters I and II. 10/30: Alexa Cucopulos, Poesis and Death: Foucault's Chiastic Undoing of Life in History of Sexuality Part 1. Read Chapter III ("Poetics and mourning," "Poesis as keeping vigil," "Poetic reading and the gesture of mourning in Eve Sedgwick,") and the Conclusion.

Poems: Amanda Bennett, “I See All the Girls Who Could Have Been You :: You Could Have Been All the Girls I See,” “A Ghost is an Irrational Number,” “Something Funny Happened on the Way to Mimesis.”

Video clip: Marlon Riggs, Black Is, Black Ain’t Week 13:

Question/Sakai Prompt: Think back to Morrison’s editorial work on The Black Book. How might you collectively make a ‘zine to describe your various experiences in this course? How would you tell our class’s story?

11/4: ‘Zine Day!! Discuss Heresies #12 “The Sex Issue.”

11/6: Another ‘Zine Day!! Bring in either an archival print ‘zine (like Heresies) or a contemporary digital ‘zine or manifesto.

Week 14:

Question/Sakai Prompt: What pieces of Toni Morrison will help you find your people? What does the fragment of Toni Morrison we have created together mean to you?

11/11: Presentations 11/13: Presentations, final thoughts.

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Poem

Shourya Agarwal & Kees Heetdeks Isley’s Icecream.

Bleached white walls dripping on Jem and Scout.

The parlour melting between tongue strokes, White splattered on dark palatesHansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house.

Just more cozy and without the witch.

Jem looks out at the counter, An earnest smile crashing onto An upturned upper-lip sprinkled with scorn.

A small ant-trail, milky white Trickles into his shoe.

Scout notices but chooses to unsee.

Cream filled to the brim in Jem’s throat He can only speak in ice-cream gobbles To spill everything onto Scout.

A large splash of white on the table A lot of cold...enveloping the siblings.

A lot of laughter in that deathly grip Jem Scout The Day of reckoning The Day of challenge A hopeful call An eavesdropped call Jem gets to join a pack of wolves Scout rushed ahead to pack Comradery between half-baked men the gladiator armour Strength of the wolf is the pack The icy numbness of evenings Strength of the pack is the wolf without her brother.

He thinks these men will give him everything She echoes back his happiness Except what he precisely needs.

Smiles lighting one another like candles A frantic search in a dingy closet A chest strapped to the gladiator armour.

A heavy emptiness underneath Scout helps put on the pads Wishes him luck for the Contest of…champions

A frantic boy projecting Onto his need for her Worrying She tosses him the keys To his own demise Tickets to his downfall

20 The clock froze.

Eagle crashes down Every commercial, every movie Claws buckled, clipped wings Every sliced turkey, every coach into the darkness of the unmade bed.

Take flesh all at once.

She picks up the fallen helmet, Then slowly thawed and trickled away The soiled armour resembling Only the clock-hands could toy back A tin shield peeled from the soldier As the boy fell through the time.

A crippled tortoise out of the shell A loud thud which no one heard A Steely gaze is his last defence Broken pieces under the armour Until no longer can the grunts hold up.

Held together by silenced sobs The melted torrent takes control Wolves don’t cry, they don’t bleed.

He shuts his eyes biting back the tears They wait for solitary full-moons Muffled against the pillowhead.

To ejaculate their anguish His body does not obey Years of dried streams flush at once An upturned inkpot on the sheets Until speech becomes madness.

Warm liquid slowly ebbing from within.

Push the feeling deep deep down She doesn't need his tears to see him Into that little dark box Just through the hole in the trousers Healed up under the bed She can sense the tumult raging within Too low for Achilles to reach Through the body of her once cheerful brother Undead vampires fester within the box The back that for years was her playground Growing fangs on the lonliest of nights Is crumbling in front of her eyes Leaching off the raw venom There is no emotion and just man That flows below the armour.

Here is the boy.He is strong, big, and confident. The boy has everything he wants.

He is good at sports and is a “man”(Everyone wants to be him). He goes home, does not talk with his family, does not talk with anyone. He is a man Here is the boy he is strongbigconfident The boy has everything he wants He is good at sports and is a man everyone wants to be him He goes home does not talk with his family does not talk with anyone He is a man HereistheboyheisstrongandbigandconfidentTheboyhaseverythinghewantheisgoodatsportsandthinksheisamanEveryonewantstobehimHegoesHomehedo esnottalkwithhisfamilyhedoesnottalkwithanyoneheisaman

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strange to myself Lucy Zheng

22 “We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own little plot of black dirt.”

Antigone, in her rebellion, was sentenced to be buried alive. Pecola, the seed of a marigold, was planted in dirt that rejected her growth. Beloved, slain by her mother, was buried in a grave, with only seven letters to her life. The women are deposited in the earth, and the narrative ends. Or, in the case of Beloved, she returns, but as a reminder of the unending nature of trauma.

But what if these women were the seeds of growth, of change, of healing from trauma? What would it look like for the seeds to sprout from the earth? What would bloom?

This class has pushed our learning in directions I’ve never traveled in a class. What has shaken me the most is how much we were asked to imagine. As much as the institutions I’ve been surrounded by have professed how much they prize creativity and innovation (which is perhaps merely valued only when it offers something for the institutions to wield, something that abides by their definitions of utility), imagination to foster self-examination, self-expression, and healing both for myself and for the places I am within, is something I’ve seen consistently fade in myself.

I can think of reasons why I’ve felt compelled to throw out my imagining, certainly out of familiarity with and codependence on the structures I’ve grown up within, but also out of fear— fear that my imagining, which I haven’t even begun, will not come to fruition.

I could feel that uncertainty, that avoidance of imagining filling my mind countless times as we were asked questions I could not even begin to answer. I felt it as we were asked to depict Hortense Spillers’s “monstrous woman,” as we were asked to imagine what the ideal family would look like. (So many years of examining my own cold family, vowing not to perpetuate the same, and I still could not fully answer.)

I cannot say I have learned to imagine otherwise without bounds. But I have learned to think more in images, in symbols not fully concrete, but ones that provide me with questions to answer questions. Perhaps as these open up further possibilities, what I imagine for myself and for the world will begin inching towards realism, materializing from the nebulous haze of my imagination into something more substantial.

And so, I ask, what if Antigone was the seed for rebirth, for healing? What would it look like for the “black dirt” of The Bluest Eye to not only support life, but for us to thrive within it, pump our hearts and breathe within it? What would it mean for us to bury our traumas, not to forget them, but to recognize the potential we have to grow beyond them, to imagine the trees and flowers that would sprout, blossom? What would it look like for the marigolds to grow that year, and every year?

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https://www.canva.com/design/DAENCZmH4E8/9-kDrSmr6UaCHB4BOr9SNg/ view?utm_content=DAENCZmH4E8&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=viewer

Is this a song?

When I listen to it, it begs to be expanded before it lulls me to sleep. But when I try to extend it, my attempts feel empty, lacking in depth and dimension and roundness of sound.

I may not have the means to sing beyond what is here yet. Sula herself perhaps could not.

So I leave it here, a lullaby for Sula, a song and not a song, a cycle that resists escape and yet demands it.

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The Farewell Shourya Agarwal

“I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over” Macbeth, William Shakespeare.

Icy cold-water soaks through the petticoat. With each step, it seeps deeper and deeper into her crevices. Fills up the lacerated thighs and the cratered vagina to finally puddle into her enormous belly-button. The needles creep up slowly, spikes gnawing into her skin— until she is completely drenched by this sharp pang of freedom.

Just below her swollen breasts, two brown moons shine. Two hungry mouths to feed, four twilit eyes to coddle. Months of traveling have tattered the strands of her bodice and they no longer wait for her approval to feed. Just suckling at the diaphanous cloth drains milk into the ravenous lake. Filtered through the last speckles of the plantation dirt, life dribbles into their mouths as she wades across the water.

Twenty yards. Fifteen. A small raft hovers about in the middle of nowhere. Ten paces to safety. In eight, the flogging would end. In six, she will be free from the chains. It feels too unreal— dawn not breathing back to her in cattle dung.

She clambers onto the raft and breathes a sigh of relief. Quickly, she unbandages her breast-wrapping to release the children into freedom. One of them comes off loose and crashes down on the wooden board like a fisherman’s catch. Eyes staring into the milky way as if consuming the sky. Too fraught to close themselves, they are transfixed in a vacant stare while the clumps of stars glide away from the barge. The hungrier one keeps biting at the dried teat and she waddles over to the stargazer.

With her huge palms, she erases the sky’s reflection from the eyes. Putting the children together on the raft, she looks back across the lake. Near the pine trees with branches whiplashing in the wind. Beyond the rock outcrops on the bruised bedrock. Flocks of morning birds whistle through the air. Just like Massa used to when he had trouble sleeping. Years of memory thaw over the frigid lake. The thick clot burdens the barge, almost sinking it deep into the water. She’s too afraid

26 to put her hand in the water. Her gut tells her that something will clutch at it.

Grab her colossal body and chain it to the bottom of the lake forever. She wants no part of it. She wants to silence the sirens calling at her from below the water.

Those loud painful screeches she doesn’t understand but speak to her nonetheless. Taunting her. Reminding her that she will never be free. That she cannot steal from the plantation.

She quickly lifts the child from the wooden floor. In one heap, the brown bag falls overboard, sinking deeper and deeper into the water. With patient ears, she waits for the final thump. But nothing speaks to her anymore. Only the deafening silence and the creaky barge nearing the shore. She lifts her child to her breast and cold meat pinches at her skin. Cold flesh slips from her chest and slides deeper. From inside the chemise, a powerful wail emerges. Through rage, anguish, horror, and freedom. The sounds close in one word, Sapphire.

Acrostic Shourya Agarwal Frozen stars are snuffed out by wispy clouds.

Oasis of molten silence enshrouds.

Roaring across these weather-broken trees, Furtive whispers of the moist, winter breeze.

Under the blanket of my shattered dreams— Clustered Hope sewn in the Horizon’s seams.

Kindling the liquid crystals of dew, Soiled moonlight immolates itself anew.

Shadows and the emptiness are entwined— Ageless wrinkles one can not leave behind Knotted berries clung to edges of grime, Eager to burst and stain the moving time.

Injured Moon winces through its cloudy cloak— Amber swerving through snaky locks of smoke, Mystifying the glow of silk-soft grass, Senses churn as wine in an upset glass.

Addled you are; I am no lunatic.

Dunderhead, just read the damn acrostic!

I learned of the ways in which Time haunts us

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Nicole Schwartz & Hannah Zhang Steam and Warmth Ambiguous directions Dark green swings Breaking down ice cubes Fear lurking And patterns.

Embraces and languages language and no languages

To overcome fear and Time; It was something I had never done before I did not speak of everything Only of what was moved to become words I learned vaguely of what moved you So tender in our approach I wondered how compassion could come so easily And not to ourselves

A steam formed beneath my feet All I wanted was to create a short gap Between them and the ground I wanted to fly

I felt and feel nearly defeated I could no longer distract myself And not because I needed things to be done Or waste less of Time, But because I needed to know what it feels like to be me To not be touched, But to open my heart in its entirety And become nothing but completely different

It is always the things I am scared of the most.

The thing right in front of you.

The thing burning below me.

The thing propelling.

And as was suggested, To fly meant that We would have to become strange to ourselves We danced for each other Tendons and vibrations move by so quickly.

There is so much confusion, Chaos in each crossing.

Time moves past me And weNever move through Time at all It’s as, if I moved I might be able to understand you better Even if we both knew we couldn’t be understood I asked what I did not know Rather than extract assumptions I spoke, also, of what I did not know Rather than pretend to know I stopped myself before perceiving As to overcome our fears

I began feeling my heart pound as I read, And the steaming in my heart as you spoke What feels like me.

We learned of the ways in which Time haunts us Of how to fly past Time’s phantasmic presence We pulled ourselves away from lines that shrink us into particles And formed fractals with our parts, our minds Our movements That was us As floaters Us As amorphous subjects Us Struggling to hear our own stories Strangers.

Friends.

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https://youtu.be/lLiZaq9Awrw

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To the highly vocal ghosts Celine Wei To Beloved

who was a baby ghost not to be passed on held the only ways we know how

To Cyclops

who was blinded by Odysseus a black hole breathing revenge never settled

To No Name Woman

who was thrown down the well name to be buried with her but still haunts our virtue

To Grandmother Wong who refused to assimilate spitting on the imperialists and bringing us home

To Me

who is a future ghost get ready to wrong some wrongs for haunting is the resolution

Home

Hannah Zhang, Alycia Love, & Celine Wei On the brick entrance is a sign that reads “Psi Upsilon”, a foreboding sign of scarlet and ebony with the remnants of assault and hate etched into its walls. Its legacy is broken beds and random stains, as well as a slur or two carved into the window frame.

Yet on the second floor is an unusual sight. It’s four girls, sometimes five or six, running down the hallways, kicking a soccer ball or celebrating a birthday. The doors are often open, propped by door stops that were communally bought, yet sometimes closed, establishing personal boundaries. And even then, the voices in the hallway can be faintly heard, a reminder that they are never alone.

They are each other’s alarms — always buzzing with new thoughts and ideas, notifying each other of important news, urging each other to get food, and most frequently, being awoken in the mornings. It’s a fine line between caring and overbearing, yet somehow, they all manage to walk the line.

And sometimes, like all alarms, they make mistakes. Something is forgotten, something is misplaced, something is lost. They cower and hide, waiting for the lash to come. And it never does. Hugs are shared and stories are listened to. Soon, they learn how to stop flinching.

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31 And together, they tighten the screws on the beds, wipe off the mattresses, and scratch out the slurs, building a reality of their own.

Saturday night, up late, just sitting. Sitting, sprawled on the floor talking. A feeling of real safety. Tomorrow morning holds responsibility and meetings and more work. But today is just here. When tears fall, they are allowed to fall, not hidden away. We won’t sleep tonight There is no more dish soap downstairs. Laughter bubbles as the dishes soak in suds in the bathroom sink. One person rinses while another scrubs and another dries. Chores have never felt less like chores

Squeaky wheels on a tile patterned floor. Standing on the edge of a grocery store cart as it races down the aisle. Snacks and meals for later that week. No pressure or shame

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Bad days aren’t nearly as lonely. No longer yelling and slamming of doors but quiet care. Did you eat today? Go take a shower, I’ll sit in the bathroom and play music. Four people sharing a twin size bed because close still isn’t close enough. I love you is chosen, not forced. I don’t know what safety and security in a family looks like, but if I had to imagine it, it would look a lot like this.

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Emotion Tino Lopez

Emotions play a massive role when talking about internalization. People tend to overlook the emotional connection and don't really understand what it is like to be in that person’s spot. Many times when learning about internalization people overlook the true meaning about what is being told to them. For example, many people that internalize their problems such as slavery. People tend to be afraid to speak up for themselves and just want to be able to survive the day. This statement will just be read over and not be fully understood. This is because many people do not know what it is like to live a life like that. Imagine if it were you, you were being dehumanized and there wasn't anyone that truly cared about you. My experience of seeing the slave ship with people living in boxes was terrifying. I could not get past the fact that people were willing to dehumanize others because of their differences. This is important for the comparison of slavery and hazing because it provokes similar emotions for me. It provokes the feeling of fear.

Imagine if you were put onto a ship for weeks, maybe months, and had to stay in a box and not move. Imagine watching people next to you die. Imagine watching your family die. Imagine always having the thought that you would be next to die.

Now, I am hoping to open your eyes a little so that you understand how terrible your life could be. Morrison refers to rendering slavery as a “personal experience.”

This is because not many people understand what slavery was like unless you were enslaved. A personal experience is when I went to a new team and older people on the team seemed to be trapped in a box. I tried talking to our team captain but seemed to be bothered by the fact that I was trying to get to know him. Early in the year, the underclassmen beat the upperclassmen in a scrimmage which seems to be the prime reason why he is in this box. It seems to me that my captain was more intimidated by the fact that I come from a professional environment that he had not experienced before. He had created this alpha male personality that dominates everyone around him. Especially younger people. Since I was able to beat him in a game it threatens his entire sense of his masculinity. This made me feel intimidated because he said he wanted to hurt some of the younger kids because we “need to be put in our place.” His words hurt a little because I

34 was not used to having someone trying to destroy my confidence because I threatened his masculinity. I was thinking about how someone, a teammate, could think like that. The younger people only want to make the team the best as possible. It seems like he does not want that. This does not make sense to me because he is a captain and should be helping the younger ones out. How could someone with a leadership role be so hurt and scared? Is it because the younger kids are pushing him to his limits? We will never know because he has the look of someone that would be the boss. He has the presence that is seen no matter where we are.

Yet somehow he still does not want the best for anyone. People seem to underappreciate what they have in their lives. When comparing your life with someone that is dehumanized and struggles with internalizing their problems, all of a sudden, your life seems to be a whole lot better. The person who was internalizing their problem in this situation would be me because I am too afraid to confront the captain. He had put me in this box that I was stuck in for a while because of his masculinity. However, through classes I have taken, I was able to become more self aware and in touch with my own emotions. This allowed me to remove myself from the box that traps the older team captain. I was able to learn how to form healthy and intimate friendships with people unlike him.

Hazing is also a big problem in today’s society. A prime example is having the feeling that someone is always watching you even though they really are not. For me, I feel as if someone is always watching me because I am on an athletics team.

I always have the feeling that if I do something wrong, there will be someone that is there to tell someone about everything that I have done. Having this feeling has the potential to put someone into a mental box. This is because it puts fear into an individual's head which takes away from them the ability to make their own decisions. That happens because no one wants to get punished for making a decision. People just want to be able to make their own free decisions and live the life that they want. This is how it made me feel at least. How does it make you feel?

Although today many people are starting to see the problem with dehumanizing others

35 and the impact internalization can have on some, we still tend to do the same thing over and over. We have experimented in the past and have seen the results of dehumanizing others such as slavery. They have been terrible, but today we still see the same things happening. It creates a problem in the world that someone cannot just apologize for. It just does not make sense as to why these problems still occur in today’s world. I believe it is because people are arrogant in the sense that since they do not experience that type of life, then they believe it does not exist. The logic that justifies both hazing and slavery discourages people from taking other people’s experiences and perceptions seriously. The sense of having power because of skin color is why people internalize their problems. For example, when walking down a street, white people tend to feel more safe because they are white.b Compared to colored people, they tend to have a better sense of their surroundings because they have a sense that someone is always watching them. Just because people have differences proves how arrogant some people are. However, if the emotional connection is made, it seems as if people start to respect others more. Understanding how lucky someone is to have a free and happy life is everything. This is because it could have easily been someone else such as yourself. I assure you that if you put yourself in the situation some people are in, you would fold and not want to have that life.

Toni Morrison does a fantastic job in relating to the emotional state when she writes. She is able to have the reader put themselves in the situation and provoke actual feelings. The reader will not be able to just read the text, instead they understand it. That is because if the reader does not put themselves in the characters’ situations, then they will not fully understand what Morrison is talking about.

In the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, many of the characters suffer from internalization. Internalizing meaning holding problems within oneself and being afraid to talk about their problems to others. The only way to truly understand how the characters feel, is to put yourself into their shoes. This is how Morrison connects to the emotional state of her readers. Morrison does this by walking through the characters life by demonstrating what they think and not by what they do. Her characters are defined through their thoughts and their struggles that they deal with in the head. Listening and understanding the characters' problems, allows for the reader to truly experience something that they have never understood. Most of Morrison’s characters end up dying because they cannot deal with being dehumanized. This is very important in Morrison’s work because it shows the significance of how misunderstood the problem is. This then provokes the reader to switch places with the character which places fear into the reader's mind.

36 Fear goes into the reader's mind because they now understand that if that were them, they would be just as afraid and want change. How can someone write in their own way without having to worry about what the readers emotions will be?

For example, fear, not everyone has the same definition of fear. A writer must be capable of writing to their readers feeling of fear even though they have completely different definitions of fear. Once in an interview, Morrison stated that she has to hurt the reader if she wants them to understand her pain. Morrison does a great job with this. She provides real life examples that would bring fear into anyone’s eyes. This person would be stuck in a mental box because they do not know how to get out of it. They have this feeling of being trapped. This then could make someone feel as if they are being harassed or dehumanized because of how they feel. Being stuck in this box builds someone's biopower. That is because this individual only wants to do what is accepted by society because if they do not, then they look “misplaced.” Taking away from someone’s free will is horrific because now they will not make their own decision, or they make the decision that is not the right one for their body or mind. Do you agree?