The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

by Toni Morrison Narrated by Bahni Turpin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We cannot contain ourselves. There's so much joy to have 40 plus years of Toni Morrison's essays and speeches in one volume. This is why booklovers value their libraries — so much knowledge so close to home.

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection — a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

The Source of Self-Regard is brimming with all the elegance of mind and style, the literary prowess and moral compass that are Toni Morrison's inimitable hallmark. It is divided into three parts: The first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin.

In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)", and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here, too, is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars.

In all, The Source of Self-Regard is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison's oeuvre.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - James McBride

Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing. Yet even as she moves into the October of life, Morrison, quietly and without ceremony, lays another gem at our feet. The Source of Self-Regard is…a reminder that the old music is still the best, that in this time of tumult and sadness and continuous war, where tawdry words are blasted about like junk food, and the nation staggers from one crisis to the next…the mightiness, the stillness, the pure power and beauty of words delivered in thought, reason and discourse, still carry the unstoppable force of a thousand hammer blows, spreading the salve of righteousness that can heal our nation and restore the future our children deserve. This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard-bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.

Publishers Weekly

12/03/2018
Some superb pieces headline this rich, if perhaps overstocked, collection of primarily spoken addresses and tributes by Nobel laureate Morrison. Many are prescient and highly relevant to the present political moment. For example, Morrison alludes in 1996 to controversy at the U.S.-Mexico border, writing that “it is precisely ‘the south’ where walls, fences, armed guards, and foaming hysteria are, at this very moment, gathering.” She focuses, of course, on the issues closest to her heart: racism, the move away from compassion in modern-day society, the often invisible presence of African-Americans in American literature, and her own novels. Some of her strongest pieces are the longest: for example, her talk on Gertrude Stein, and her two essays on race in literature, “Black Matter(s)” and “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” are must-reads. The collection is organized thematically, which is helpful, but because the pieces jump around in time, dates would be a valuable addition to the essay titles. And while it is no doubt important to create a comprehensive collection of such a noted figure’s writings, the book, which includes 43 selections, can seem padded and overlong at times. Nevertheless, this thoughtful anthology makes for often unsettling, and relevant, reading. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Morrison is more than the standard bearer of American literature. She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.” —The New York Times

“Dazzlingly heady and deeply personal—a rumination on her literary career and artistic mission, which is to reveal and honor the aching beauty and unfolding drama of African American life.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A piercing and visionary analyst of history, society, literature, language, and, always, race. . . . The book explodes into pure brilliance.” —The Boston Globe

“This book is a must.” —The Washington Post

“Profoundly insightful. . . . Speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines.” —NPR

“Moving. . . . Magnificent. . . . It’s a large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah. . . . With this book, one is tempted to quote at length from her words: her acuity and moral clarity are dazzling, but so is her vision for how we might find our way towards a less unjust, less hateful future.” —The Guardian

“Her critical mind is as original as her literary vision. . . .  Morrison’s style is, for the most part, stately, not so much ornate as complex, not so much stentorian as insistent, authoritative, often fierce. . . . Morrison is not simply a narrative spellbinder. . . . She is also a thundering prophet for our time.” —Commonweal

“The Source of Self-Regard is a must-read.” —Essence

“Altogether fantastic. . . . One of the deepest seers of our time.” —Brain Pickings 

“Give[s] insight into Morrison not just as a master of American folklore and the novel but also as a keen observer of humankind.” —Vogue

“A priceless record of an original thinker’s attempt to grapple with some of the hardest and most intractable questions of our time, of language, and of the human condition. . . . Toni Morrison’s collection of nonfiction makes a striking contribution to American letters and to an understanding of her own rich and complicated fiction.” —Christian Century

“Utterly timely. . . . The Nobel laureate and author of Beloved is fearless and insightful in essays on race, literature, love and more. . . . The Source of Self-Regard moves with courage and assurance.” —Tampa Bay Times

“Lucid, stunning . . . offers not just a glimpse at a master novelist’s and intellectual’s inner workings, but lays bare the mantle which those of us who write might pick up. . . . With this book, the Queen of American Letters has again blessed us with a work that is profound, soaring, intimate, and gives us permission to become the source of our self-regard.” —Bitch

“Morrison has proved herself to be both gift and necessity to our cultural consciousness. . . . [She is] one of our most incisive cultural critics.” —The Root

“This staggeringly brilliant collection of nonfiction pieces on the creative process, race, and the role of the artist in society takes our breath away.” —Shondaland

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Bahni Turpin is an experienced narrator whose strong voice makes her an excellent choice for this selection of essays by Toni Morrison. She delivers the author's meditations on social issues in a steady, firm tone that makes us feel like we are in a classroom, soaking up the wisdom of a beloved professor. Turpin’s deliberate and precise narration further illuminates Morrison’s insights about art, artists, and society. This is a title listeners can sink into whenever they are in need of intellectual stimulation. Fans of Toni Morrison will keep this on their playlists for years to come. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-11-07

Brilliantly incisive essays, speeches, and meditations considering race, power, identity, and art.

A prominent public intellectual even before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, novelist Morrison (Emerita, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; The Origin of Others, 2017, etc.) has lectured and written about urgent social and cultural matters for more than four decades. Her latest collection gathers more than 40 pieces (including her Nobel lecture), revealing the passion, compassion, and profound humanity that distinguish her writing. Freedom, dignity, and responsibility recur as salient issues. Speaking to the Sarah Lawrence graduating class in 1988, Morrison urges her listeners to go beyond "an intelligent encounter with problem-solving" to engage in dreaming. "Not the activity of the sleeping brain, but rather the activity of a wakened, alert one" that can foster empathy—a sense of intimacy that "should precede our decision-making, our cause-mongering, our action." To graduates of Barnard in 1979 she recasts the fairy tale of "Cinderella," focusing on the women who exploit and oppress the heroine, to urge her audience to "pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition." "In wielding the power that is deservedly yours," she adds, "don't permit it to enslave your stepsisters." In an adroit—and chillingly prescient—political critique published in the Nation in 1995, she warns of the complicity between racism and fascism, perceiving a culture where fear, denial, and complacency prevail and where "our intelligence [is] sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned." "Fascism talks ideology," she writes, "but it is really just marketing—marketing for power." Speaking at Princeton in 1998, she considers the linguistic and moral challenges she faced in writing Paradise, one of many pieces offering insights into her fiction. Aiming to produce "race-specific race-free prose," she confronted the problem of writing about personal identity "in a language in which the codes of racial hierarchy and disdain are deeply embedded"—as well as the problem of writing about the intellectually complex idea of paradise "in an age of theme parks."

Powerful, highly compelling pieces from one of our greatest writers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169153361
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/12/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	605,093

Read an Excerpt

Peril

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, call­ing into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppres­sion that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

That is their peril.

Ours is of another sort.

How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writ­ing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unha­rassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to cen­sor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the per­ception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure; incarceration in holding camps, prisons; or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct mean­ing in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is right that such protection be initiated by other writers. And it is impera­tive not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

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