UPDATE - 11/08/2019: In the recent aftermath of Morrison's death, one of my biggest regrets is that I haven't read enough by her. Something I hope to rectify very soon.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW -
n  Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time.n

I had an English teacher who used to tell us to read Russian authors if we wanted to actually appreciate literature, but from my experience, it is Women of Colour whose books have made me appreciate literature more. Perhaps it is because they write with so much heart. Perhaps it is because they write about real world issues. I don't know why it is so, but what I do know is that after I read something by any of them, I feel an overwhelming need to hug someone and cry my eyes out; sometimes out of happiness, sometimes out of sadness, other times, because I just have to.

n  You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.n When I was about twelve years old, I got it into my mind that I was ugly. Now, the reasons for this were of course, very superficial, but I was, after all twelve. And I had been conditioned to believe that some features were considered pretty and some weren't. And the literature said that ideally, my features were not supposed to be pretty. I have never been thin, puberty is the worst time for anyone to learn that. From then, for the next three years, I was obsessed with being thin. Now, I didn't start on a diet or anything, but every time I looked in the mirror, I hated myself.

I'm also dark; my skin colour is something I'm very proud of now, but back then, I wanted to be fair. All the advertisements, movies, series...everyone I saw was fair. I've always had long hair, but this being the 2000's fancy short hair cuts were in vogue. And no matter how much I begged my mother, she never let me cut my hair. You see, like most mothers, she saw the beauty in it. But I hated it. I hated not being able to leave my hair open when I went to the mall, I hated that my mother used to oil and braid my hair everyday, I hated that I couldn't style it the way I wanted to. My teeth never fell out on time, so my permanent set is extremely crooked. I hated smiling for photos because I hated my teeth. I also wore thick glasses, because I am extremely short-sighted. All in all, I hated how I looked. I envied the fair girls with short hair and straight, even teeth. I was jealous of those girls who wore the-then trendy rimless glasses. Why? Because conditioning. I think children, especially girls, in general are conditioned from childhood, by various sources that they're supposed to look a certain way. Not looking in that certain way, in many cases, can lead to a serious case of self-loathing.

By the time I was fourteen, many of friends had had boyfriends. And again, I hated myself. Because I assumed I was too ugly for any boy to like me. But somehow, I don't really know when, I started finding beauty in the flaws. It was perhaps when someone told me that my skin was very clear (it isn't anymore, but it was, back then). Or perhaps when someone else told me my hair was thick and long and black and looked beautiful. Of course, my then self-esteem didn't let me completely believe them, but I was secretly happy about this.

When I was seventeen, I fell in love with someone. Not the teenage-seventeen infatuation, but truly in love. And as luck would have it, this person fell for me as well. I don't really know what he thought about my looks, because at seventeen, you don't discuss that. I did know that he thought I was smart and kind and intelligent. Of course, I was seventeen, so while I didn't believe my mother when she told me this, I believed this boy. Suddenly, I loved myself again. Funny that someone else needed to see good in me to do this, but I did. When I turned eighteen, I went away to college. College was on the other end of the country. And one day, I had a fight with this guy, and we've never spoken since. And yet again, my self esteem hit a new low. And while that fight remains the biggest regret of my life, that's not the point of this story. At this very low point in my life, I met two girls in college; I had a minor falling out with one though we still remain acquaintances, and the other went on to become my best friend. These two girls had everything to do with making me love myself again. They took me to the fanciest parlour in the city, and I was glad they were finally helping me chop my hair off, but they didn't do that. Instead, they made me get a cut that flattered my face, while the length of my hair remained the same. I was perplexed, but like my mother, these girls found beauty in my hair as well. And perhaps this is another form of conditioning, but that haircut changed my life. I suddenly saw myself as beautiful. I learned that being dark or fair didn't matter. I began taking pride in my long hair. Most importantly, I learned that smiling wasn't about showing perfect teeth, it was about showing joy. I learned to smile from my heart, and that, to me, has made all the difference. I also learned to use make up, but that's besides the point.

Of course, now, almost twelve years after I started hating how I looked, I've realised that beauty isn't about how you look. But twelve-year old me would've never believed it. Pretty much like how 9-year old Claudia or 11-year old Pecola didn't. n  It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.n

The reason for this very long, and slightly boring anecdote is that I can understand. When Pecola thinks she's ugly because she doesn't have blue eyes, I can understand. When the Breedloves collectively believe that they're ugly, I can understand. When the writer says that a lot of their "ugliness" comes from the conditioning that they believe they're ugly, I can understand that too. That said, I'm not trying to say that I can feel, or understand even a small percentage of what Pecola went through. Or for that matter, the Blacks in that era in general. Disregarded by many of her own fellow-Blacks who thought themselves to be superior, born to a mother who loves a White child more than she loves her own daughter because of her skin colour, scorned by the many Whites that she constantly interacts with, shamed by the boys who share her skin colour but hate her skin colour. Pecola represents a whole slew of people in the Segregation era who were made to feel ugly because of the colour of their skin. Or in this case, the eyes. n  It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.n

n  Northern colored folk was different too. Dicty-like. No better than whites for meanness. They could make you feel just as no-count, ’cept I didn’t expect it from them.n What happens when some African-Americans consider themselves to be better than other African-Americans? The answer is fairly simple, that it makes it easier for people outside the community, in this case, Whites, to hate them. While the answer is simple, the consequences of this can be far worse. In a way, this is what happens to Pecola. This is what happens to the Breedloves. Soon, Polly herself begins neglecting her own husband and children for the rich, pretty, White family for whom she keeps house. n  More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely.n Why? Conditioning. n  Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her children. Them she bent toward respectability, and in so doing taught them fear: fear of being clumsy, fear of being like their father, fear of not being loved by God, fear of madness like Cholly’s mother’s. Into her son she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life.n Cholly, similarly, also feels contempt for his fellow Blacks, even when together, they become victims of oppression and hate from White men. n  Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.n

The story starts with what is called a "Dick and Jane tale", and this particular tale plays a very important role in this story. Morrison uses the excerpts of the tale, that talks about the happy, White family of Dick, Jane, and their parents, while contrasting it with the bleak story of Sammy, Pecola, Pauline and Cholly. These excerpts are written together without spaces, and form the titles of those chapters that are written in the third person perspective. For instance SEETHECATITGOESMEOWMEOWCOMEANDPLAYCOMEPLAYWITHJANETHEKITTENWILLNOTPLAYPLAYPLAYPLA refers to n  See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play.n In the Dick and Jane tale, the cat represents the family ideal of a happy pet. In Pecola's tale, however, the cat, or n  an cat just manages to further her misery, making her more ostracised and wretched than ever. Similarly, HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWHITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETTYITISVERYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYP is contrasted with n  Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.n Pecola's house isn't pretty; not on the inside, nor on the outside. Her only solace is with three prostitutes, Miss Maginot Line, China, and Poland, who live above Pecola's apartment. This, in a way, makes her residence even more ugly for the rest of the neighbourhood, because who would want to associate with three "ruined" women? SEEFATHERHEISBIGANDSTRONGFATHERWILLYOUPLAYWITHJANEFATHERISSMILINGSMILEFATHERSMILESMILE as opposed to n  See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smilen; a father that rapes Pecola, as opposed to a father that plays with Jane.

The Bluest Eye is a very small book, but the wealth of the message it spreads is vast. My mother always said to my brother and I when we were fighting, "if you don't support your own family, do you think an outsider will?" The same, I believe, holds true for this story, and its moral. If people of colour discriminate against other people of colour because they believe they are fairer, would a White person really support a person of colour? Of course, in today's world, many would. More than many would. In those times, however, not sticking with your own people could have serious consequences. n  More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.n

I'm not saying that Pecola needed someone to get her a life changing haircut. I'm not even saying that calling her beautiful would've helped her or made her story any less appalling. I'm saying that maybe some affection from her mother, or a word of praise could've helped her more than I can imagine.Or maybe if Polly had actually seen herself like her husband initially saw her, if someone had told her that she was still beautiful, she may have been a more loving wife, a more loving mother. May have been. Could have been. But of course, isn't that the point of fiction, the "could've been" of it all? This book wrenched out my soul in ways I didn't think was possible. It greatly diminishes most literary experiences I've had in the past year. I know I've written a lot of words about what is one of the smallest books (in size) that I've ever read, but believe me when I tell you, I don't actually have words to tell you how I feel after this book, because everything I say is greatly inadequate to actually convey how I feel. Toni Morrison would've deserved the Nobel for just this book, if this book was all she wrote.

n  Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.n I guess what remains to be said has already been spoken (or sung) by a very wise man who said, "all you need is love". What he forgot to mention, was that love can take many forms; and the kind of love that we need, is the unconditional kind.

The most insidious form of prejudice is the one that's internalised and self-directed. The Bluest Eye examines the ways in which latent cultural measures of beauty and self-worth can become reinforced and self-perpetuating. White people figure rarely in the narrative, and yet whiteness is pervasive as the very currency of self-worth: a means of defining value, and of establishing one's own superiority over others. The novel digs out the dirt to examine the roots of this behaviour, but provides no comfortable resolution for the reader.

This was my first Toni Morrison novel (and hers too). A beautiful and devastating book.

4.5/5

I had my share of body hatred while growing up, but it would be foolish to believe that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, skinny white girl has the same problems as those who diverge in any of the four descriptives. After all, we are talking a physicality that differs in very few respects from the type idealized by the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party, and in the land of the whites and the home of the bleach, that phenotype means power. Just last week, one of my professors commented on her constant well-dressed appearance with "I can't wash this off," scrubbing at her hand as synecdoche for how her African heritage had chosen to display itself. Sixty years ago that choice in clothing was just as politically charged, for to dress well and not be white was an open invitation to getting the living shit beaten out of you. As you can see, the white supremacy is a canny thing, always knowing how to change its skin.

Four to five hundred years or so ago, the science of race was invented to excuse the existence of slavery in the face of religious humanity and social equality. Since then, the country of the United States was invented, taught to children as a "cultural melting pot" that flenses them from schoolyard to mass media and back again. It is an easy process: bully any who diverge into a morass of self-hatred, let others who are of the flock accessorize with the dehumanized divergence, then commercialize until all that is left of a human heritage is white people consumption. Jazz, Hinduism, bindis, yoga, rap, sushi, greeted with raging disgust and vitriolic hatred unless, of course, you're white. Then by all means, consume away. There's no danger in your representation. Only oppression.

It would be allegory if the entire machinery of the US Government didn't single out the chosen sacrifices based on the color of skin and the inheritance of creed, but it does. It would have aged badly if cultural appropriation wasn't an imperialistic practice that takes the existence of others as the latest "fad" for a blonde-haired and blue-eyed persona, but it is. I'm talking dark-skinned girls bleaching their skin, I'm talking the violation of civilizations for the pursuit of a hobby, I'm talking a disconnect between an entire host of souls from their bodies that makes the incest in this book ugly and a white man raping his three-year-old daughter legally acceptable in the US as of 2014. Toni Morrison wrote this book while people were killing themselves to keep themselves aligned with "respectability politics" of white fashion; today, every white person wants dreadlocks. Shit on something long enough and it's yours for the commercial taking, so long, of course, you look a certain way.

If you dehumanize someone because they don't look like blonde-haired blue-eyed white-skinned skinny-assed me, you are utter, fucking, goddamn trash. It's as simple as that.