Toni Morrison

Kentishtowner explores what exactly we do

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Getting underneath the best literature
Getting underneath the best literature

The Kentishtowner asked if I would attempt to explain:
So what exactly is a literary salon?
Misplaced your love of literature somewhere along the line? Rediscover it this year with a “spa for the mind”
– See more at: http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk/2014/01/06/exactly-literary-salon/#comments

The comments are the best part…thanks London and Paris Salon folks for getting it said….

 

Teaching and learning should be an opportunity for great generosity – not an intellectual pissing contest.

With that in mind, what then is a literary “salon”? The answer is actually quite simple: it’s an informal study of a particular work of literature, either as a single intensive session or longer weekly series of meetings. Some even describe the experience as “a spa for the mind”. But mostly it’s where we laugh, express our frustrations, query meaning and purpose, and discover great depth in the language and vision of the writer.

My London Literary Salon actually started in Paris, back in 2004, where my partner and I had moved rather abruptly from California. I found myself at a loose end: after working as a mentor teacher and counsellor and unable to find a job teaching in the French system, I was meeting other English-speaking adults who, while loving la vie Parisien, were looking for further intellectual stimulation.

After a particularly heady party, the idea of the salon burst forward. I ran my first study in our apartment with a group of eight women on Beloved by Toni Morrison, a wrenching, complex book with a multi-level narrative. At the end of our five-week study, everyone said, “What’s next?” And so the salon began.

We moved here in 2008. Now based on Falkland Road in Kentish Town, I hope the salon brings to the surface the deepest questions about who we are — and without offering answers, help us understand life’s mysteries. What, for example, does it mean to be human, in different times or different skin, various genders and a spectrum of struggles?

Relaxed: inside the salon

Relaxed: inside the salon

I believe — with the passion of a southern minister that is part of my inheritance — that the best learning is not hierarchical but shared discovery. But a teacher or facilitator can only guide; in a room full of learners you have a vast array of experiences and world views, all of which can enrich the learning experience. This is the basis of the salon: adults that join may be highly educated or not, but all have ideas and insights that expand our study.

We can also discuss issues that are harder to bring up in casual conversation. Take racism and identity, for example: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man gives us an (apparently) objective platform to get inside the skin of one who is positioned as other – and glimpse how the world looks from there.

Then there is the writing: to grapple with the linguistic pyrotechnics of James Joyce — to enter into his exploration of the body, mind and street-life, to sit in awe of his allusions, musicality and thematic developments – is to expand the possibilities of the written word. To do this with a group of other curious readers who are also struggling allows each to enrich their own understanding many fold.

As facilitator I offer historical context, a biography of the writer, literary criticism, and other areas that the literature engages: the workhouses and debtors prisons of Dickens’ time, for example, or breakdown of Southern aristocracy in Faulkner’s world. The fees are for the physical and metaphorical space provided, the background and discussion notes and the atmosphere of flexibility combined with clear purpose and direction. It is also my responsibility to ensure a balance in the discussion and I do redirect when necessary. I try to keep the salons affordable to encourage a diverse group of participants.

But most of all? I celebrate the variety of participants who choose the Salon: I have seen friendships and relationships grow, and people come to a greater understanding of themselves and others. Reading literature does not need to be an isolating experience: through the salon and other local, grassroots book clubs (MeetUp, for example), there are authentic communities forming from the energy we have for the pure exploration of ideas — and how that connects us deeply.

 

Martin Wednesday 8 January 2014 at 10:30 pm #

Are there any drinks?

– See more at: http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk/2014/01/06/exactly-literary-salon/#comments

 

 

A Mercy

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Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

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“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”

― Toni Morrison, A MercyMorrison has commented that she wrote A Mercy  to explore a time before slavery was identified with race. This may help readers to consider race more as ‘an interplay with other social determiners, such as gender and class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that interprets “race” to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial America another different people lived here who were subjected to biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide” (Tally & Stave, intro to Critical Approaches: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy) .

Please notice as you read the differing perspectives and narrative styles that tell the story. Notice also how the land—the specific geographical settings—impact character and tellings. Notice how you read different paradigms: for example, what is ownership to one character is different to another….

Here is the blurb from GoodReads:

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences. 

SALON DETAILS

  • Offered as a one-day, four-hour intensive
  • Recommended edition: A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, Vintage (2009). ISBN-13: 978-0099502548

Beloved

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved

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“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

 Toni Morrison, writer, professor and essayist on issues including race, gender and forces of life, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved is regarded by many as Morrison’s best work, and once you have spent some time in the text, it is easy to understand why. Morrison works to help the reader grasp the psychological devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery by close observation of a community of ex-slaves creating lives in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century.

This text is meaty and evocative, and also quite difficult to read alone. The work also offers endless possibilities in terms of discussion of the formation of self, claiming of self, mother/child relationships, the fury of love, the permeable boundaries between the living and the not living, as well as the more predictable (but no less provocative) issues of race, gender and role of history.

But what you need to know– along with the history and context which will be provided as part of the Salon–is that the writing is so gorgeous. Morrison tackles the most painful aspects of human experience with an honesty and lyricism that will leave you breathless. If this is your first reading of the book, try not to read around too much: many reviews and commentary give away the central traumatic event that Morrison reveals carefully & purposefully in her own time.  I think Morrison is very purposeful in the way she tells this story—we will discuss the framing and the narrative progression and her purpose there.

SALON DETAILS 

  • One- Meeting Salon Intensive  Wednesday April 24th 6-10 PM 
  • RECOMMENDED EDITION: Beloved, by Toni Morrison,  Vintage New ed.  ISBN-10: 0099760118

This sounds like warning but is meant simply to prepare you: the book has some graphic scenes- not, I think, gratuitously, but disturbing nevertheless. There are also some incredibly beautiful passages- and some that weave the violence with beautiful prose. It is also a work that (purposefully, I think) disorients the reader in the beginning. This is one of the ways in which the Salon is useful; we usually start with a lot of questions about what is going on …and why Morrison seems to make the read so difficult for the reader. Your persistence is needed- but I promise you, you will be rewarded. 

If this is your first reading of the text, please know that you will read the first chapter and probably feel quite disoriented (just for starters, notice the chapters aren’t numbered- why would Morrison choose not to number the chapters? What effect does this have on your reading?) I have a few suggestions to help you get your bearings: you might want to keep a list of characters (who they are, what you know about them, how they are connected to each other). I also encourage you to write down dates- the novel opens in the year 1873 (third line, first paragraph) – see if you notice when the time changes and make a note of it.

I am an advocate of active reading- your engagement with the text will be strengthened with a close interaction. One of the ways to do this is to write notes directly in the book- question marks in the margin where you don’t understand, exclamation points where you do, highlighting or underlining a passage that strikes you- making note of a passage that is opaque but intriguing, finding connections both within the text and to your own experience. We will talk more about this- mostly find what works for you to help illuminate the text.

Reflections from a previous study participant:

“Beloved is one of the most beautiful and impactful books I’ve ever read. The impact I got in my first reading (I had recently become a parent), but the lyrical beauty I didn’t fully appreciate until I studied it with you. It was really interesting to re-read such a complex book at a different time in my life (I’m such a slow reader that I tend not to spend time re-reading). My first reading of Beloved left me thinking that forgiveness (or redemption) was perhaps not possible, the crime against humanity was too great. My second reading left me with a feeling of the possible and I felt some hope for humanity shine through that I hadn’t quite picked up on before. Thank you for guiding me through that experience. I have students of many different nationalities and ethnicities. I think Toni Morrison has helped me to start unpicking some of my own biases and preconceptions, for which I am grateful.”

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