Toni Morrison on Whiteness as a ‘goldfish bowl’
A short extract from Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination
Harvard University Press, 1992, pp16–17
How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other?
What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work?
As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing “happens”: Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative — displays of the agile writer’s technical expertise.
I assumed that since the author was not black, the appearance of African characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the “normal”, unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people — no more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by.
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.
It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.
It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl — the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface — and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.
In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books got written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project.
I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.
What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992, pp.16–17
Editor’s note, by Malory Nye
Toni Morrison’s book, Playing in the Dark is a key source for the development of Whiteness studies, that is the foregrounding of issues of hegemonic white racial identities for the study of contemporary America and other western contexts.
The section of this book that I have used above is a much quoted part of her argument, where (as you’ve seen) she makes use of an analogy with a fishbowl to explore and analyse the use of African and African American characters within white American literature.
The use of such characters by white authors for the constructions of their narratives, to be read by white readers, is what is at stake here. Why and how are (what Morrison calls) the Africanist presence to be understood?
As part of answering these questions, Morrison uses the analogy of the fish bowl. Everything about the fish, their environment, and the water in which they swim is created and framed by the bowl that contains them. And that bowl is the construction — the fabrication — of the writer. That is, the white writer who is writing for a white reader.
It is as though the writer has created an imaginary literary world in miniature, like a fishbowl, which contains much to fascinate, entertain, and entrall. But it is not a representation of the world beyond the bowl, it is the world that comes out of the writer and his/her (white) cultural world.
However, there is another understanding of this analysis that I have been working with since I first came across the fishbowl analogy (and before I was actually able to pin it down to Morrison’s own writing).
In this other approach, when we talk about the fish in its bowl, we see a metaphor for most individuals living within the context of whiteness. That is, the fish swimming around in the bowl might see the castle, the pebbles, the fronds and know its world for what it is. But everything around it is the world of whiteness — the ornaments, and also the water and the bowl itself are also the defining frames of whiteness. The fish sees these things and lives within them constantly, but the frame (the whiteness) itself is invisible, hidden in plain sight.
For a person who sees themselves as white, being white and what that means (in terms of power and conflict) is as invisible and as fundamental to them as the water that a fish swims within, and the bowl that contains its world.
Religion Bites is edited by Malory Nye, an academic and writer who teaches at the University of Glasgow. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015).
