Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

(Guest post by Anne Raeff)

Two years ago, tired of being in a perpetual state of anger about the state of the world and the United States especially, my wife, Lori, and I decided that we needed a different approach to life. We needed to do something we had never done before, something that would give us purpose and from which we could learn in a new, not an intellectual, way. Over the years of our relationship—we have been together for 28 years—we sometimes talked about adopting a child or fostering, but we enjoyed the freedom and focus on our work and writing that childlessness provided, so the conversations never were very serious. But this time, when my wife, Lori, mentioned fostering, we kept on talking about it, imagining what it would be like.

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Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency

As I write this, we are in a heartbreaking, enraging, and also potentially transformative moment, confronting the systems that make up structural racism, including state-sponsored and sanctioned murder and the inequities in every system from housing to the job market to health care. When Ezra Klein asked Ta-Nehisi Coates what he saw when he looked at the country, Coates said that he couldn’t believe he was going to say this, “…but I see hope. I see progress right now.” The anguish has been going on for a long time now, but this is the first time we’ve seen it erupt on such a massive, international scale, and in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that underscores our sense of urgency. We are remembering George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and too many more. We remember them in action, in protests, in voting, and in our commitment to standing with the Black Lives Matter movement.

So what is the role, in this moment, of fiction, whether reading or writing?

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