I suspect my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers – not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly Racialised society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position – all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?
I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and “race-free”. All of which presented itself to me as a project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “race- free” or “race transcendent”. Whether it is or not is another question – the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for granted that it is because Others are “raced” – whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all “raced”. Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to altogether and write about the second world war or domestic strife without referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only, most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the centre of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write about.
- Toni Morrison (on re memory)