The Origin of Others

“One of the ways nations would accommodate slavery’s degradation was by brute force; another was to romance it.”

Here, Morrison speaks of two strategies that white Americans have used to accept slavery, despite the ways it demeans all involved, including themselves. Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries exemplify the strategy of brute force, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin exemplifies the romanticization.

“A reading of his diaries reveals that, like most of his countrymen, he had a seamless commitment to the status quo. He did not wonder about slavery’s morality or his place in its scheme. He merely existed in the world as he found it and recorded it.”

The quote refers to Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries, which Morrison uses to demonstrate the casual acceptance of slavery and its attendant brutality towards enslaved people. Thistlewood’s diaries illustrate how the process of Othering requires violence towards the Other as the white person attempts to define himself by differentiating himself from the Other. The strategy goes unquestioned and becomes a part of everyday occurrences, as exemplified by Thistlewood’s diaries, where he documents the brutality alongside everyday chores and activities on the plantation.

“Different, but no less revelatory, are the literary attempts to ‘romance’ slavery, to render it acceptable, even preferable, by humanizing, even cherishing it. Control, benign or rapacious, may ultimately not be necessary.”

Here, Morrison acknowledges the side of racialized Othering in which the cognitive dissonance is a bit more subtle than that which brute force creates. Accommodating the degradation of slavery requires making it acceptable by constructing a sanitized narrative in which brute force is neither necessary nor the reality. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves as the primary example of this romantic narrative.

“These immigrants to the United States understood that if they wanted to become ‘real’ Americans they must sever or at least greatly downplay their ties to their native country, in order to embrace their whiteness. The definition of ‘Americanness’ (sadly) remains color for many people.”

This quote speaks to the homogenizing effect of racism and how the sense of belonging in American society is contingent upon that racist homogenization. Receiving the privileges of belonging requires quieting any characteristics that might imply difference or foreignness from the privileged class, i.e. white people. Furthermore, this quote acknowledges the conflation of national identity with racial identity—a conflation that makes the task of Othering much easier since physical attributes play an integral role in racial categorization. Therefore, those with physical attributes, like skin color, that do not fit the standard of acceptance do not have the choice of belonging; the Othering is automatic.

“This twentieth-century perception of the stranger must be placed alongside earlier narratives written or recorded by the stranger in which he details his own perception of himself.”

This quote makes two important points: one, that racism is not the first or only exclusionary system of categorization that relies on Othering; and two, the narratives of those who have been Othered offer much regarding our understanding of the process of Othering. The first point bolsters Morrison’s claim from the first chapter that Othering is rooted in the psychological and social need to define the estranged self and therefore is not unique to racism but part of a longer human history. Morrison elaborates on the second point in the second chapter with the discussion of slave narratives and what they reveal about the process of Othering.

“The necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal. The urgency of distinguishing between those who belong to the human race and those who are decidedly nonhuman is so powerful the spotlight turns away and shines not on the object of degradation but its creator.”

This quote not only makes the relational aspect of Othering evident, but also the irony that the attempted negation of the Other is actually the negation of the self. In trying to prove what one is not, one confirms that one is, in fact, those very things. Slave narratives, then, illustrate how slaveholders' violence towards enslaved people as supposed brute savages actually demonstrates the slaveholders’ own brutality and savagery.

“Art gesturing toward representation has, in some exalted quarters, become literally beneath contempt. The concept of what it is to be human has altered, and the word ‘truth’ so needs quotation marks around it that its absence (its elusiveness) is stronger than its presence.”

Here, Morrison acknowledges the ways that language and image inform experience, and how artistic representation influences how we see ourselves and others. This quote explains the purpose for her analyses of other people’s literature: to tease out the language and images that art has presented as “truth” about the Other and what it means to be human, specifically in racialized ways. Her own narrative choices have been an attempt to combat such “truths.”

“To understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is random; not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summons a ripple of alarm.”

Here, readers see clearly the self-reflexivity that informs Morrison’s work. She recognizes that the process of Othering is an attempt at self-definition, and she acknowledges that attempts to differentiate between oneself and the Other, or the Stranger, come from a subconscious place where we recognize that we are, in fact, just like the Other. This subconscious familiarity prompts alarm that causes us to act in ways that cement and maintain our conscious power and control.

“There is a perfectly good reason for the part color-ism plays in literature. It was the law. Even a casual examination of the ‘so-called’ color laws makes the case for the emphasis on color as indicator of what is legal and what is not.”

This quote points to the interplay between power distribution as indicated in legal code and power distribution as conveyed in artistic media. What is legitimized institutionally becomes acceptable in artistic representation. Morrison demonstrates that the narrative choices made by the white American authors whose work she examines are products of a society in which belonging, its benefits, and what it denies to the Other have been defined in the law.

“But if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white. It may be comfortable for her or uncomfortable, but it lasts and has advantages as well as certain freedoms.”

Morrison again acknowledges the homogenizing effect of American racism and the conflation of American identity with whiteness, as well as the benefits and advantages offered by assimilating under the banner of whiteness. The fluidity of the race construct is an important element here, as the ability of European immigrants to become white shows the border of whiteness to be porous and malleable, meaning it must be desperately maintained by identifying and controlling the Other. However, as she mentions later, the colorism of racism necessitates the ability of European immigrants to become white, while such becoming is denied to Black Americans and darker skinned immigrants who can be visually identified as non-white, i.e., Others.

“I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bȇte noir, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing.”

With this quote, Morrison explains her choice to reveal character in non-colorist ways. She implies here that even though a racialized experience can inform her narratives, the emphasis is more so on the culture circumscribing the preoccupation with skin color than the skin color itself. The juxtaposition of her narrative choices to those of white American writers reveals her transcendence of (white) literary norms as well as her cultivation of creativity and careful writing.

“But I was so very successful in forcing the reader to ignore color that it made my editor nervous. So, reluctantly, I layered in references that verified Frank Money, the main character’s, race. I believe it was a mistake that defied my purpose.”

Here, Morrison alerts readers to the ways that the literary market and demands of consumers can, in a racialized society, prompt (Black) writers to make narrative choices that defy their own intentions. This goes back to a previous point made in Chapter 2 regarding the art market’s complicity in deploying language and images that narrow the vision of what humanity looks like or ought to look like. Again, Morrison demonstrates the self-reflexivity that is inherent to the theory she puts forth in The Origin of Others.

“There are so many opportunities to reveal race in literature—whether one is conscious of it or not. But writing non-colorist literature about black people is a task I have found both liberating and hard.”

Morrison reiterates that skin color need not be a driving force in plot development and character because there are other ways to reveal race in literature. These other ways include an emphasis on culture rather than physical attributes, as Morrison demonstrates with her own writing. The liberation she feels most likely stems from the transcendence of white literary norms and the opportunity to present Black characters from a Black perspective, while the hard part is perhaps the care that must go into creating these Black narratives, especially in a literary market subsumed by racialized ways of being.

“Once blackness is accepted as socially, politically, and medically defined, how does that definition affect black people?”

Morrison poses this question in her consideration of how Blackness is configured in Black towns and in Black literature. It emphasizes that Black people are not simply the objects of institutionalized racism, but also that their subjective experience matters and plays a role in the choices they make. The question can expand to consider the effects of Othering of all kinds and the subjectivities of the Other in American society.

“Color coding among blacks themselves, the threat of being turned away by members of one’s own race, as well as the severe possibility of being brutalized in the same way and for the same non-reason as Isaac Woodard was, were the realities that motivated the founders of many black towns.”

Morrison indicates that the need for belonging and the fear of racist violence prompted Black folks to create Black towns. She also addresses the impact of Othering on intracommunal relations among those who have been Othered. This implication is significant because it demonstrates that belonging is a basic human need, and when that need is denied on one level, we seek it elsewhere. The paradox is that if Othering is integral to a sense of belonging, then Othering will perpetuate itself indefinitely within social groups that have been Othered. This suggests that in American society, racialized Othering is the ultimate form of Othering that must be confronted in order to eradicate Othering of other kinds.

“I was eager to simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.”

Again, Morrison reiterates the fluidity of the race construct. This quote refers to the narrative choices she makes in Paradise, where the reverse dystopia and intra-communal conflict of the all-Black town conveys the meaninglessness of racialized belonging. The reversal of the Other in literature is a narrative strategy that Morrison demonstrates in Paradise and that she discusses in Chapter 6 regarding Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King. These works push back against real-life racialized Othering by showing its features to be nonsensical.

“Amid all this struggle, chaos, and unbreakable conflict caused by power distribution within classifications of race and gender, I hoped to draw attention to specific individuals trying to escape harm and mitigate their failures—one narrative at a time. One to one.”

Morrison further elaborates on her narrative choices in Paradise, here explaining that individual stories communicate the harm of social Othering, and that it is in engaging with these stories one-on-one that we come to identify with the Other. This points back to Morrison’s previous assertion in Chapter 2 that our encounters with the Others prompt a subconscious recognition of the ways that they are just like us. It also leads into the fifth chapter’s discussion of Morrison’s narrative choices in Beloved, which centers the dead child’s voice to allow readers to identify with the ultimate Other.

“I wanted to rely fully on my own imagination. My principal interest was in trying to fathom the mother-in-law’s inability to condemn her daughter-in-law for murder.”

Morrison explains why she did not rely on the facts of Margaret Garner’s story to construct the Beloved narrative. Instead, she used fiction to explore why Garner’s mother-in-law might not have condemned Garner for the infanticide. This quote is significant because it further supports Morrison’s belief in the use of individual narrative to help us identify with those who have been Othered. While the character Baby Suggs is not the ultimate Other that Beloved is, her sermon on self-love carries important messages about how to endure in spite of the harm of Othering.

“Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The Stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination. In this iteration, for me the author, Beloved the girl, the haunter, is the ultimate Other. Clamoring, forever clamoring for a kiss.”

Again, Morrison reiterates the use of narrative for identification with the Other. The words “controlled wilderness” frame narrative fiction as a space where one can engage and identify with the Other self-reflexively without the real-life consequences of repudiating the benefits conferred to the privileged class. This hearkens back to Chapter 2, where Morrison discusses how there are social and political consequences for sympathizing with the Other.

“Much of this exodus can be described as the journey of the colonized to the seat of the colonizers (slaves, as it were, leaving the plantation for the planter’s home), while more of it is the flight of war refugees, and (less of it) the relocation and transplantation of the management and diplomatic class to globalization’s outposts.”

Here, Morrison refers to globalization’s mass movement of people—particularly the direction of that movement. This quote emphasizes that colonizers have created the conditions that prompt “foreigners” to cross the borders that colonizers wish to protect. The less frequent direction, then, is an attempt to fortify these borders. With this quote, Morrison demonstrates how Othering, in its present iterations, is a colonialist strategy to mitigate the undesirable (from the colonizers’ point of view) consequences of colonialism. The colonizing strategy paradoxically deepens the need for control and a sense of belonging that wouldn’t exist without colonialism in the first place.

“The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners.”

Morrison points out how the process of globalization exacerbates Othering. While the emphasis here is on geographical borders, she is also making a larger point about identity borders and the fluidity of constructs of belonging. The tenuousness of borders—geographical, racial, cultural, etc.—prompts those invested in maintaining power and control to try to fortify those borders by identifying and excluding the Other.

“African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in their homeland; of being exiled in the place where they belong.”

This quote helps explain the importance of African and African American voices in literature. Morrison, herself belonging to this tradition of writers, acknowledges the experience of exile and Othering that occurs for Black people when whiteness defines belonging. The vantage point of Black writers offers much to the understanding of Othering, a point that Morrison has made throughout The Origin of Others through her analysis of slave narratives and her own work.

“It was an idea of Africa fraught with the assumptions of a complex intimacy coupled with an acknowledgment of unmediated estrangement.”

This quote refers to the idea of Africa that Morrison held as a child. It underscores her point about the experience of Black people regarding a sense of exile and Othering: specifically, the complicated relationships between Black people and America and Black people and Africa as a result of slavery.