N's Reviews > The Bluest Eye

I read this book several times since early 2000s.

Racism…. Hurts.

I first read Professor Morrison's powerful indictment of how the oppressed can be oppressors in her landmark first novel while I was an undergraduate taking a course on African American literature.

Though I had read Song of Solomon, beforehand, this is the Morrison that I found most upsetting and have had a hard time processing because of what whiteness, power and privilege can do to someone’s psyche when seen as less than. It’s completely heartbreaking.

I was awed by how her language was biting, coarse, languid and ethereal by reading her unforgettable writing.

I was seduced at how shocking and beautiful her words were, so when I became an educator, in the last two decades or so, young scholars were mesmerized and stunned as I was to have read something so bold.

Over 20 years later, and after having seen her read live in 2015 and 2019 during the last years of her life, I reread this novel in one sitting.

Not only did I feel how electric her language was after all those years, but the context of the book had changed considerably for me.

The themes of this novel are as relevant as they were, from the 1930s in which it's set, to the late 1960s, early 1970s on which it was written and published; and even more now- in the complicated and violent world of a post Obama, Biden and Trump era, black lives have been continuously destroyed just for being black and racism is just as horrible and degrading as its always been.

However, the story of Pecola Breedlove, an innocent girl whose obsession with whiteness and self hate is something that lives with anyone who's ever felt terrible about themselves.

The way townspeople shunned her, made fun of her, and scapegoated her is a cruel metaphor that society is willing to be bystanders acknowledging that awful and racist things happen, especially to the weak and passive.

Since Pecola is so down and low in the social hierarchy, her pain and sorrow empower those who scapegoat her.

The novel begins with Pecola being sent to live with the McTeer family- sisters Claudia and Frieda who live in strict, but warm family home where under the careful watch of their mother, has taught them to love themselves, especially spunky Claudia, who is confused as to why black isn't beautiful? She asks "What made people look at them and say, awww, but not for me?" (Morrison 22).

Claudia, unlike Pecola, refuses to conform to the norms of white beauty to the point of having violent thoughts, "I had only one desire: to dismember it" (Morrison 20).

Claudia and Frieda soon come to realize that its Pecola's inherent acceptance of self hate is why she is victimized so often: she wears it on her sleeve, and even those with the deepest insecurities and self hatred abuse this innocent girl as their physical and sexual punching bag just to make themselves feel bigger.

Beginning with the lack of a family support from her mother Pauline, brother Sammy; Pecola is victimized by classmate Maureen, a lonely boy named Junior whose mother has bizarre acts with the family cat leading to the horrifying scene where her father Cholly impregnates and rapes her. It's a shattering novel.

However, since Professor Morrison writes with so much empathy and backstory to the characters who victimize Pecola- especially her mother and father, we understand and have an empathy to their hideous actions- but we cannot sympathize with the violation of an innocent human being.

The Bluest Eye is a haunting, poetic novel that seizes racial self hatred by the horns and examines race as a construct that is both empowering and disheartening.

It also asks the question of why is the construct of whiteness and blue eyes more beautiful than being happy with oneself? I asked and reflected on my own experiences as man of color of how whiteness presented itself to me as something I thought about attaining- but quickly realized could never have.

As an adult, I couldn't put this novel down, and I remember how powerful Professor Morrison's love and rage was through her writing, and her work is always meant to be revisited from time to time.