On Opacity: Toni Morrison’s and Paule Marshall’s Narrative Vision Therapy

Acknowledging an ongoing atmosphere of Black death, assault, and pain, and its relationship to a kind of ocular and imaginative distress, this article highlights the urgency of revisiting the lessons embedded in the writing of Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye [1970]), Beloved [1987]) and Paule Marshall (“Reena” [1962], and Praisesong for the Widow [1983]). I join robust conversations in Black and literary studies in examining Marshall’s and Morrison’s crucial lessons on healing Black vision—work necessary for full command of the imagination. These lessons become more pronounced when viewed through the lens of Marshall’s and Morrison’s literary “dark sousveillance,” which Simone Browne defines as the charting of possibilities and coordination of “modes of responding to, challenging, and confronting a surveillance that [is] all encompassing.” I argue that through the use of narrative vision therapy, or the use of narrative as a healing device that realigns readers with their power to imagine and craft narratives that decenter anti-Blackness, Morrison and Marshall demonstrate that imagining otherwise futures requires intentional returns to and ongoing vigilance from opaque spaces—wherein the embrace of Black flesh, sounds, movement, and memory can help reverse distortions that our hyper-seeing of various violent forms of anti-Blackness have wrought.