Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am | Little White Lies

Toni Mor­ri­son: The Pieces I Am

05 Mar 2020 / Released: 06 Mar 2020

Woman with curly hair wearing a black suit and white blouse, posing against a purple background.
Woman with curly hair wearing a black suit and white blouse, posing against a purple background.
3

Anticipation.

A good chance to celebrate the life of a recently-deceased literary giant.

4

Enjoyment.

A very well made and insightful doc, powered by Morrison’s own perspicacious musings and reflections.

4

In Retrospect.

Makes you want to read the books, so full success on that front.

A mea­sured, light­ly poet­ic look at the life and work of one of the great mod­ern storytellers.

This doc­u­men­tary by Tim­o­thy Green­field-Sanders makes a con­vinc­ing case for author Toni Mor­ri­son to be con­sid­ered one of the most vital and suc­cess­ful artists of the mod­ern age. It artic­u­lates its claim through mea­sured, poet­ic, crit­i­cal insight rather than five-alarm hyper­bole, under­stand­ing that to be made aware of the sim­ple details of Morrison’s life and career is more than enough to con­vince you of her sta­tus as a lit­er­ary deity. She wrote good books, and she made killer car­rot cake.

She is per­haps best know for her 1987 Nobel Prize-win­ning nov­el, Beloved’, the lilt­ing redemp­tion song of a slave moth­er who slices her baby daughter’s throat rather than have her sold into bondage. The film takes us on a jour­ney through for­ma­tive tri­umphs and is more inter­est­ed in explor­ing select­ed aspects of her career and char­ac­ter rather than going deep on every­thing she’s penned. It’s inter­est­ed in her advo­cates, accom­plices and acolytes – those who rode on her wings, and those whose wings she rode. And in the spirt of her own writ­ing style, it tries to bring out her inner life rather than just reel off a cold­ly infor­ma­tive and episod­ic yarn.

The film also search­es for the more rad­i­cal aspects of her renown, such as the trail she blazed for women writ­ers and writ­ers of colour in the lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. She isn’t framed as an activist or some­one who point­ed­ly set out to upend the cul­tur­al sta­tus quo – she just goes about her busi­ness, does her job, rais­es a fam­i­ly and cre­ates art as and when she can. These changes mere­ly come as a byprod­uct of the real­i­ty that every­thing in her life is done to the absolute best of her abil­i­ties, and it’s all with the aim of attain­ing a mea­sure per­son­al sat­is­fac­tion rather than per­son­al gain.

While it may be easy to read her works now and find val­ue in them on an enclosed, super­fi­cial lev­el, the film reveals just how jar­ring and unique they were in the con­text of the era in which they were released; titles such as 1970’s The Bluest Eye’ and 1977’s Song of Solomon’. She was quick­ly accept­ed into the white, bour­geois lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment, yet was often crit­i­cised for her nar­row purview of black, work­ing class char­ac­ters and her unwill­ing­ness to present their lives and pres­sures as being rel­a­tive to some wider soci­etal malaise.

Mor­ri­son dared to look into the souls of slaves, young black girls, and peo­ple who didn’t tend to be the sub­ject of so-called high-brow fic­tion, and she then dared to express their inner thoughts and feel­ings. The estab­lish­ment was shook and the game was changed for­ev­er more.

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