“What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
This quotation in the flap of the book says everything about the tale, as does the title. There’s a gloominess in this which Morrison, extraordinary writer that she is, takes to a point of changing your world.
This child that is being blessed in the title has been born too black. That’s not the opinion of the outside world, it’s her mother’s. Think about starting your life that way. Before you have even formed any relationships, your most important caregiver has decided you’re not good enough because of the intensity of the colour of your skin!
It makes your skin crawl when you think how tough life is, even with advantages. Kick someone in the butt before they even have an inkling of that and you’ve pretty much messed up their life from the word go.
But that’s where Morrison is so clever. Her stories are exquisitely but simply told. There’s no way you can manoeuvre around this one and not get her meaning. There’s no way out.
She’s determined to speak loudly to everyone who wants to hear about race (especially important in the US currently); but, as we all know, it’s much larger than one country.
You have to be very clear in a world where abuse is only witnessed once it is captured on camera.
Before, many people listened to the tales young black men told about their lives as permanent suspects and treated the testimony with similar suspicion. When white interviewers today ask African-Americans about the relationship between police and young black men, they have to remind them that this isn’t a new phenomenon.
For the first time, the crime against these men (and they’re not only the young) is being witnessed.
Living in this world of intense prejudice, Sweetness wants to love her child but she struggles. If she as a mother is struggling, she knows she has to arm her against the world. For Bride and her lover Brook, their love is challenged by a childhood that is damaged by prejudice. What they have between them is something special, but the last thing they have been taught is to love – or be loved.
And that’s what Morrison is so clever at pointing out. If life keeps kicking you down, there’s a point where it’s difficult to stand up.
God Help the Child by Toni Morrison is published by Chatto and Windus
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Review: Home
Once I had read the latest novel, God Help the Child, I had to go back to her previous book, Home, which had slipped through the cracks two years back.
Morrison knows how to tell stories of her time by reaching into the past and allowing people to reach for their memories rather than deal with the harshness of the present. She allows her readers to draw their own conclusions about the way life has changed so little for some.
In Home, Frank Money is an angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War. He finds himself back in racist America after fighting for his country.
As with many wars, the soldier returns with more than physical scars.
If white veterans are struggling today, imagine how a black warrior in the 1950s would struggle to find any help to soothe his anguish.
Soldiers were treated like fodder and, if your skin colour added to the disdain, you may as well have fallen in the war. It was that devastating.
But then someone reaches out to him and he finds his humanity in a world that has turned its back on him.
This is a damning insight into the devastating effects of racism, how it damages lives, but also how people in the worst circumstances will reach out a hand even when there is nobody who would do that in similar circumstances for them.
The way people turn on one another is simply told, but with such clarity everyone should hang their heads in shame.
As if the world isn’t tough enough, we turn on one another rather than reach across the divide.
How desperate must people be to take their last money, pile into an overcrowded boat and travel to a far-away land where the only thing waiting is a dream.
That’s how many in the world try to eke out some kind of life.
But still we judge, without holding a mirror to our own lives.
That’s what Morrison does so searingly. As she grows older, she has lost patience with the world and its stupidity.
She will simply keep on telling her stories hoping to touch a few souls. If she can’t, it’s even more desperate than one could imagine.