Toward New Kinds of Truths: Staging Toni Morrison with “The Homophonic Trinity”

“Truth is stranger than fiction.”

Toni Morrison reminds us of this familiar saying in her essay “The Site of Memory,” pointedly writing that the adage “doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the important thing is that it’s random—and fiction is not random” (1995, 93).

I love that generative observation: “Fiction is not random.” Unlike “truth”—which may exist despite itself—the purposed creation of fiction entails a methodology, a consciousness. The fictions we tell ourselves are not random. The fiction we construct and dispel and disseminate is not random. There is a design to our fiction-making; an agenda; an intention. For good or ill.

When I think of “truth” and “fiction” as they relate to Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, particularly from a performance perspective (and with due consideration toward our contemporary moment—that is, The Bluest Eye’s publication in 1970 versus the way Morrison’s novel resonates today, fifty years later) my mind races to the fact that our current cultural milieu reveals how truths are ever-contested and fictions are ever-calculated. In this moment we are living in Wag the Dog realities. Wag the Dog: the 1997 movie starring Anne Heche, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro. The one in which the President of the United States, in his attempt to avoid the political fallout from a sex scandal, employs the talents of a spin-doctor and Hollywood producer to fabricate a war and deviate attention away from his presidential debacles. (Ah, yes—it sounds so far-reaching!)

After all, we live in a multi-directional “fake news” moment; information is disseminated through journalistic facades and infiltrated through social media platforms. We are living in a Facebook selective, photo-shopped, Instagram filtered, edited-to-unrecognizability moment. We are living in a moment in which—as I addressed in my book Coloring Whiteness—we can actually engage in what I term naturalized whiteface, not simply as a superficial cosmetic illusion; but as a procedure-induced corporeal reality (Carpenter 2014, 24).

What is particularly remarkable about “the here and now” versus 1970 when The Bluest Eye was published is that advances in the cosmetic industry and medical procedures (have you heard of Bright-Ocular?) actually can make a brown-skinned, brown-eyed, Black girl’s dream of suddenly having blue eyes, come true. In this day and age, the potential to experience a phenotypical transformation is more than just a fantasy bound by a book, play, or film. What once was the material of science fiction is now a very real possibility, and innumerable people—artists, activists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and everyday folk—are experiencing, critiquing, and exploiting these real-life, embodied “adaptations.”

Yes, truth is stranger than fiction. But perhaps one of the strangest truths is how many things have changed since 1970 while the persistent overvaluation of embodied and performed whiteness remains a formidable challenge. As witnessed in The Bluest Eye, the biased privileging of whiteness comes with great costs. And I am not referring to procedure-based financial costs (that is another issue altogether), but rather I am addressing the emotional and psychological costs and consequences that are seeded from and proliferated by systematic, institutionalized, and internalized racism. Morrison’s novel addresses the horrors that inter-and intra-racism births, the lives they deform and prematurely abort. Writing about the necessity to reveal such things in The Site of Memory, she asserts:

My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.

Moving that veil aside requires, therefore, certain things. First of all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others [ . . . ] But memories and recollections won’t give me total...