Toni Morrison on Memory

Just finished reading Toni Morrison's essay "Memory, Creation and Writing" as featured in The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology.

I want to share some quotes from her essay here:

"Memory is for me always fresh, in spite of the fact that the object being remembered is done and past" (213).

"Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way" (213).

"Memory, then, no matter how small the piece remembered, demands my respect, my attention, and my trust" (214).

"I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does function as a creative writer's ruse) for two reasons. One, because it ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources. It also prevents my preoccupations from descending into sociology. Since the discussion of Black literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and almost never art crticism, it is important for me to shed those considerations from my work at the outset" (214).

"When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the fragment we are remembering may be, and very probably is, the most important piece in the dream" (216).



In the writing of Tar Baby, memory meant recollecting the told story. I refused to read a modern or Westernized version of the story, selecting out instead the pieces that were disurbing or simply memorable: fear, tar, the rabbit's outrage at a failing in traditional manners (the tar baby does not speak). Why was the tar baby formed, to what purpose, what was the farmer trying to protect, and why did he think the doll would be attractive to the rabbit--what did he know, and what was his big mistake? Why does the tar baby cooperate with the farmer, and do the things the farmer wishes to protect wish to be protected? What makes his job more important than the rabbit's, why does he believe that a briar patch is sufficient punishment, what does the briar patch represent to the rabbit, to the tar baby, and to the farmer?" (218).