What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (review)

Borrowing the title from Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, Carolyn C. Denard’s What Moves at the Margin artfully assembles three decades of Morrison’s nonfictional statements that span from 1971, when Morrison was an editor at Random House, to 2002, when she was a professor at Princeton University. Edited and introduced by Denard, founder and Chair of the Toni Morrison Society, this collection, for the first time, provides an overview of Morrison’s reflections on the issues concerning the arts, literature, and society beyond the immediate realm of her fictional narratives and also offers compelling insights into the forces that shaped her as an artist. Although Morrison’s literary reputation, as Denard maintains, rests on her riveting novels, her nonfiction essays are mature statements in that they are powerful expressions of the novelist’s unique worldview—a vision the Swedish Academy defined as “an essential aspect of American reality.”

Divided into three related sections, “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society,” What Moves at the Margin arranges by theme Morrison’s acceptance speeches, book reviews, tributes, and introductions—all of which testify to her status as a public intellectual and a literary and cultural critic. The first section, “Family and History,” includes Morrison’s writing about “her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works” (xv). The second section, “Writers and Writing,” contains Morrison’s reflections on writers who had a considerable influence on her. “Politics and Society,” the third and final section, offers Morrison’s critiques about contemporary issues, and fittingly concludes with the Nobel Lecture, which Denard discerns as “the central metaphor” of the collection (xxv). The predominant theme of the collection is Morrison’s profound reverence for language and her insistence on the potency of history, which she believes is crucial for summoning different and better futures.

“Family and History” contains influential essays such as “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” “The Site of Memory,” and “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib.” These essays outline Morrison’s definition of black womanhood, delineate the ideological differences between white and black feminisms, describe her art as a form of agency, and explicate her celebration of black cultural heritage. “Rootedness,” which theorizes the role and function of ancestors as “benevolent, instructive, and protective” presences (62), is particularly significant in Morrison’s project of securing racial and cultural identity. Pilate in Song of Solomon (1977) and L in Love (2005) are two Morrison characters who embody these properties and bring about change and empowerment for their descendants. In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison contends that it is the incorporation of memory as a governing trope that makes “a text deeply rooted in the culture of the African American community” (xix). Both these essays mark what Morrison sees as “very special and very identifiable” elements of African American writing and culture (61).

“Writers and Writing” features selections in which Morrison forges and consolidates a distinctive African American literary fraternity. Dubbed as “the black editor” during her tenure at Random House, Morrison shepherded the careers of African American writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Wesley Brown, Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Michelle Cliff, Angela Davis, and Quincy Troupe. Her forewords, book reviews, prefaces, and introductions attest to her significant promotion of works by black authors. For instance, Morrison’s introduction to Bambara’s posthumously published Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (1999) conveys her deep reverence for Bambara, casting her as “a writer’s writer, an editor’s writer, a reader’s writer” (87). In “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered; Life in His Language,” Morrison expresses her deep admiration for and intellectual indebtedness to Baldwin: “It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that ‘this world is white no longer and it will never be white again’” (92).

“Society...