In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, “The Source of Self-Regard,” was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain—page by page, line by line—that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With “Recitatif” she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”
Narratives of emotional attachment are central to our myths about our consumption of animal products, just as they are to our myths about marriage and the home. Feel-good stories told to children, and clung to by countless adults, imply that animals painlessly and instinctually bestow meat, milk, and eggs on farmers in return for care and protection, conjuring a semblance of a fair exchange. While there are no doubt farmers who care for and even love their animals, love is not an apolitical feeling, particularly when the one who is loved is a commodity. As political theorist Claire Jean Kim has poignantly observed, “With respect to animals, it is far too easy for us to confuse what feels good to us emotionally” — or, we might add, what benefits us economically — with honoring or acting in accordance with their “needs, desires, and interests.”
We have jetpacks and we do not care. An Australian named David Mayman has invented a functioning jetpack and has flown it all over the world – once in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty – yet few people know his name. His jetpacks can be bought but no one is clamouring for one. For decades, humans have said they want jetpacks, and for thousands of years we have said we want to fly, but do we really? Look up. The sky is empty.
But the tender heart of the book is literature — namely its capacity to save us, its utility even for the meanest meth head. One passage might double as an especially erudite BuzzFeed list for junkies: “Read Dante, read ‘Moby Dick’ while you’re high, get lost in the chapters that luxuriate on the different kinds of rope and how to tie knots. Read ‘Notes From Underground,’ Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ if you are withdrawing. ‘The Waves’ or Faulkner if you haven’t slept in a few days. Mostly, don’t go north of 1950. Stay away from the Beatniks — they don’t know what the f— they’re talking about. And memoirs are whiny.”
Books, Sanchez argues, are as powerful as any controlled substance — just time-released jolts of information — and in their own way are just as radically simple: “There’s two parts: the white part and the black part. Read the black part.”
“Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?” is more than a book about a woman looking for a man. It addresses themes such as female friendships, Black beauty standards and religion. This is not a romance novel, unless the journey to self-love qualifies.
Blame the comic book. Cheap and transportable, a trove of infantile fantasy and psychosexual Pop Art, often spiced with egregious stereotypes and nativist aggression, this humble medium was for a time the United States’ most ubiquitous cultural ambassador. Such is the thesis of Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, an engaging account of the ways in which comics variously served or confounded official interests.