What Moves at the Margin: Selected
Nonfiction by Toni Morrison
Author Toni Morrision Writing Outside The Fiction Box
What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrisons
writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The
works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931)
was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002
when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate.
Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers,
writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak
out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written
for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the
commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has
consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These
works provide a unique glimpse into Morrisons viewpoint as an observer of
the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The
first section of the book, Family and History, includes Morrisons writings
about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The

second section, Writers and Writing, offers her assessments of writers she
admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a
special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section,
Politics and Society, includes essays and speeches where Morrison
addresses issues in American society and the role of language and
literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection
includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black
writers as Albert Murrays South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Joness
Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy
for James Baldwin, and Morrisons Nobel lecture. Taken together, What
Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of
American literatures most thoughtful and eloquent writers.
Personal Review: What Moves at the Margin: Selected
Nonfiction by Toni Morrison
One of the most frequently uttered phrases in the United States during the
month of February, Black History Month, is the United Negro Scholarship
Fund's slogan: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." While reading Toni
Morrison's powerful nonfiction collection, What Moves at the Margin, I
found myself considering the opposite of that slogan: an exceptional mind
is a beautiful thing to develop.
That Morrison commands one of the most remarkable creative talents of
our era is a celebrated fact. Her journey to iconic literary status began in
1969 with the publication of The Bluest Eye. Each of her novels since
then--currently totaling nine, the latest being A Mercy--have consistently
won critical acclaim, ultimately culminating in such extraordinary honors as
the National Book Circle Critics Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
With an illuminating introduction by Carolyn C. Denard, founder of the Toni
Morrison Society, What Moves at the Margin stands as a self-defining
commentary on Morrison's overall cultural vision and as a singular
extension of her literary output. What Moves at the Margin presents almost
thirty works of short nonfiction--written from 1971 to 2002-- to bring us the
Toni Morrison who lives, breathes, thinks, and acts outside the fictional
boundaries established by her novels. The book is divided into three
categories that include: Family and History; Writers and Writing; and
Politics and Society. They may be described alternately as personal
essays; tributes to fellow warrior authors in the form of eulogies, forewords,
and reviews; and cultural criticism that leaves neither a political nor a
literary stone unturned.
The African-American tradition of honoring ancestors is well represented in
section one. It is particularly interesting, in light of Barack Obama's election
to the U.S. presidency, to note the dialogue on race relations between her
grandparents in the opening essay: "A Slow Walk of Trees (as
Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say)." Equally
compelling are Morrison's writings about her classic work on African-

American history: "Behind the Making of The Black Book" and
"Rediscovering Black History." The value of recognizing and claiming one's
historical roots is not just academic, she offers, but imperative because
"When you kill the ancestor you kill yourself."
The writers to whom Morrison pays tribute in section two stand among the
handful of late-Twentieth Century authors whose works expanded the
presence and acceptance of African-American literature in the U.S.
publishing industry. (It should be noted as well that Morrison herself
assisted that process early in her career in her role as an editor for
Random House.) They include the great Toni Cade Bambara, whom she
describes as "a writer's writer, an editor's writer, a reader's writer." Also
present is her moving tribute to Henry Dumas, whose work she describes
as "some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction
that I have ever in my life read." It is largely due to Morrison, the poet
Eugene Redmond, and Dumas' widow that the world knows anything at all
of this brilliant author whose life ended at the age of thirty-three when he
was killed by a transit policeman in a New York City subway station.
Her eulogy for James Baldwin, whose collected essays and fiction
Morrison edited for The Library of America, is a deeply personal and
profound one in which she observes: "Yours was the courage to live life in
and from its belly as well as beyond its edges to see and say what it was,
to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it."
In the final section, "Politics and Society," Morrison engages contemporary
issues with clarity, compassion, and unyielding conviction. "The Dead of
September 11" reveal her to have been as stunned as any by the savage
events of that history-altering day. Boldly lobbying on behalf of fellow
writers in "For a Heroic Writers Movement," the author asserts
"competitiveness and grief are the inevitable lot of a writer only when there
is no organization or network to which he can turn."
The book concludes with two speeches that demonstrate Morrison's
commitment to political and cultural responsibility. The first, "How Can
Values Be Taught in the University," was delivered in April 2000 at
Princeton University and in it the author delivers some of her most potent
social criticism: "If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its
role as guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more
complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic
practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in
spite of us, and without us." Appropriately enough, the very last text is her
famous Nobel Lecture in Literature. In the lecture, she uses a parable
about a blind old woman challenged by a group of young people to state
her concerns for the state of language in the modern world: "Sexist
language, racist language, theistic language--all are typical of the policing
languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or
encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."

Morrison long ago identified as one of her primary goals the production of
"word-work" grounded in the African-American experience and worthy of
inclusion in the greater American literary canon (as represented by books
regularly studied on the high school and college levels). To entertain such
a noble vision is one thing; to actually achieve it is quite another. In What
Moves at the Margin, readers get a good strong sense of the family
influences, literary culture, and passionate political dynamics that made
Morrison's achievements possible. It also illustrates that by striving so
mightily to accomplish specific goals on behalf of one segment of
humanity, she went beyond them to create literary wonders capable of
enriching the lives of not just her own people, but of all people.
by Aberjhani
author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library
of American History)
and The American Poet Who Went Home Again
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