A Lovely Thing Done Together

Photo: Afrocentric Confessions

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”

Continue reading “A Lovely Thing Done Together”

Something Else Stands Beside It

Photo: The New York Times

What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

Continue reading “Something Else Stands Beside It”

Trauma and Community

Photo: She Counseling

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

Toni Morrison, Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World

Continue reading “Trauma and Community”