Since finishing Sula last week, the story, its characters, and the person I perceive in the author have stuck in my thoughts. In fact, I’ve found some fascinating commonalities between Toni Morrison’s novel and the play by Tony Kushner, beyond the fact that the two writers share a first name. While reading the former, I […]
In a matrifocal kinship network, the relationship between mother and child is of utmost importance, and is the relation upon which all power is patterned. This integral, essential connection is blurred under the aegis of the patriarchy that defines power dynamics in the contemporary era. One could argue that the defining relationship was between father […]
Something about the way African American women write about sexuality is unparalleled. There is a kind of an easy and beautiful continuum between pain and passion, that is expressed in a raw and unashamed way, that speaks to a culture that developed from very different roots in this country. Maybe it stems from what Brenda […]
Rereading Toni Morrison’s foreword to Sula at the end of the novel was indispensable in cementing my comprehension of the story. While I understand that the desire to have an audience consider a text alongside a set of principles requires a strategic placement of them, Morrison’s preface doesn’t do justice to the words that follow; […]
As The Scarlett Letter was written in the Victorian Era about the Puritan Era, Sula was written about an older period of time through the lens of an more recent one. To what extent might Sula be superficially set in an older period of time, but actually concerned with society at the time the book […]
Despite the vast differences between the upbringings of Sula Peace and Nel Wright, the two bosom buddies in Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula have one aspect in common: both were reared by overbearing maternal figures. For Nel, this controlling female comes in the form of her mother Helene, whose own parentage is so spotty, as […]
This week’s readings paid very close attention to the power relations within African American communities. The African Americans in Sula and the essays by Stevenson and Hansen were often in a position of powerlessness. Be it slavery in the South or racism in the North, whites used numerous tactics to keep positions of power over […]
