The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

In several contemporaneous speeches, she notes that minorities are never defined as Americans exclusively but by modifiers that let you know where they’re “really” from (i.e. The rest of the section, however, considers how “American” is defined as white by default. “Too holy an act for impure thoughts.” The restraint of a tangible anger in search of a more constructive language is a defining trait of Morrison’s writing, and she notes here how in the aftermath of the attacks the term “American” seemed, for the first time, to truly encompass all who dwelled within its borders. “Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood,” she writes. The section opens with Morrison’s eulogy for the victims of the September 11 attacks, which is notable for the lack of bile that was nearly universal across the mainstream political spectrum in the days after the event.

The book is divided into three sections titled “The Foreigner’s Home,” “Black Matters,” and “God’s Language.” The first broadly considers questions of American identity and who gets to claim it. Befitting an author who displayed such an adept command of memory, these pieces are arranged out of chronological order, instead sequenced to build a series of arguments as if uniting Morrison’s entire public life into several interlinked themes. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations collects transcripts of such works ranging from the course of her career. In essays and speeches, Morrison fleshed out the unifying thesis of her fiction, that of foregrounding the voices consciously omitted not merely by history but literature, and of considering the ways that rectifying the aesthetic omissions of the latter can be a bridge to belatedly honoring the former. When Toni Morrison died last year, the United States lost not only its finest novelist of the last half-century but one of its most forceful moral intellectuals.

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison