ACCLAIM FOR TONI MORRISON’S

1 ACCLAIM FOR TONI MORRISON SSula Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time.. [Morrison] is a major talent. Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as aclenched fist .. written in language so pure andresonant that it makes you ache. Playboy In the first ranks of our living novelists. St. Louis Post-Dispatch Toni Morrison s gifts are rare: the re-creation ofthe black experience in America with both artistryand authenticity. Library Journal Should be read and passed around by book loverseverywhere. Los Angeles Free PressALSO BY TONI MORRISON fictionLoveParadiseJazzBelovedTar BabySong of SolomonThe Bluest EyenonfictionThe Dancing MindPlaying in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary ImaginationTONI MORRISONSulaToni Morrison is the Robert F.

2 Goheen Profes-sor of Humanities at Princeton University. Shehas received the National Book Critics CircleAward and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993she wasawarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She livesin Rockland County, New York, and Princeton,New INTERNATIONALV intage Books A Division of Random House, Inc. New YorkFIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2004 Copyright 1973,2004, and renewed 2002by Toni MorrisonAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American CopyrightConventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, andsimultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A.

3 Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:Morrison, [ ]813'.5'473-7278 eISBN: book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 768 is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you. This book is for Ford and Slade, whom I miss although they have not left me. Nobody knew my rose of the worldbut I had too much don t want glory like thatin nobody s heart. The Rose TattooFOREWORDIn the fifties, when I was a student, the embarrassment ofbeing called a politically minded writer was so acute, thefear of critical derision for channeling one s creativitytoward the state of social affairs so profound, it made mewonder: Why the panic?

4 The flight from any accusation ofrevealing an awareness of the political world in one s fic-tion turned my attention to the source of the panic and themeans by which writers sought to ease it. What could beso bad about being socially astute, politically aware in lit-erature? Conventional wisdom agrees that political fictionis not art; that such work is less likely to have aestheticvalue because politics all politics is agenda and there-fore its presence taints aesthetic wisdom, which seems to have been unavailable toChaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shake-speare, or Dickens, is still with us, and, in 1969it placed aninordinate burden on African American writers. Whetherthey were wholly uninterested in politics of any sort, orwhether they were politically inclined, aware, or aggres-sive, the fact of their race or the race of their charactersdoomed them to a political-only analysis of their Phillis Wheatley wrote The sky is blue, the criticalquestion was what could blue sky mean to a black slavewoman?

5 If Jean Toomer wrote The iron is hot, the ques-tion was how accurately or poorly he expressed chains ofservitude. This burden rested not only on the critics, butalso on the reader. How does a reader of any race situateherself or himself in order to approach the world of ablack writer? Won t there always be apprehension aboutwhat may be revealed, exposed about the reader?In 1970, when I began writing Sula,I had already hadthe depressing experience of reading commentary on myfirst novel, The Bluest Eye, by both black and white review-ers that with two exceptions had little merit since theevaluation ignored precisely the aesthetics only criteriait championed. If the novel was good, it was because it wasfaithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it wasbecause it was faithless to them.

6 The judgment was basedon whether Black people are or are not like this. This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored theshallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrativein a landscape already tainted by the fact that it a few people would be interested, I thought, in anywider approach fewer than the tiny percentage of the fif-teen hundred who had bought the first book. But the actof writing was too personally important for me to abandonit just because the prospects of my being taken seriouslywere bleak. It may be difficult now to imagine how it feltto be seen as a problem to be solved rather than a writer tobe read. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright,Zora Neale Hurston all had been called upon to write anessay addressing the problem of being a Negro that no-win situation inauthentic, even irresponsible,FOREWORD / xiito those looking for a politically representative canvas;marginalized by those assessing value by how moral thecharacters were my only option was fidelity to my ownsensibility.

7 Further exploration of my own interests, ques-tions, challenges. And since my sensibility was highlypolitical and passionately aesthetic, it would unapologeti-cally inform the work I did. I refused to explain, or evenacknowledge, the problem as anything other than anartistic one. Other questions mattered more. What isfriendship between women when unmediated by men?What choices are available to black women outside theirown society s approval? What are the risks of individu-alism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uni-form and socially static, community?Female freedom always means sexual freedom, evenwhen especially when it is seen through the prism ofeconomic freedom.

8 The sexual freedom of Hannah Peachwas my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds ofmemory about the way local women regarded a certainkind of female envy coupled with amused her fairly modest claims to personal liberty areplaced conventional and anarchic ones: Eva s physical sac-rifice for economic freedom; Nel s accommodation to theprotection marriage promises; Sula s resistance to eithersacrifice or accommodation. Hannah s claims are accept-able in her neighborhood because they are nonfinancialand nonthreatening; she does not disturb or deplete familyresources. Because her dependence is on another woman,Eva, who has both money and authority, she is not com-petitive. But Sula, although she does nothing so horren-dous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as notxiiiFOREWORD/just competitive, but devouring, evil.

9 Nel, with the mostminimal demands, is seen as the muted , Nel, Eva, Sula were points of a cross eachone a choice for characters bound by gender and race. Thenexus of that cross would be a merging of responsibilityand liberty difficult to reach, a battle among women whoare understood to be least able to win it. Wrapped aroundthe arms of that cross were wires of other kinds ofbattles the veteran, the orphans, the husband, the labor-ers, confined to a village by the same forces that mandatedthe struggle. And the only possible triumph was that of job, of course, was summoning those perceptionsin language that could express them. Sula stretched myattempts to manipulate language, to work credibly and,perhaps, elegantly with a discredited vocabulary.

10 To usefolk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic norcomic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, andartistic judgments saved for African American was living in Queens while I wrote Sula, commuting toManhattan to an office job, leaving my children to child-minders and the public school in the fall and winter, to myparents in the summer, and was so strapped for money thatthe condition moved from debilitating stress to rent payment was an event; every shopping trip atriumph of caution over the reckless purchase of a best news was that this was the condition of everyother single/separated female parent I knew. The thingsFOREWORD / xivwe traded!