Meditations on Hope & Home from Toni Morrison’s ‘Mouth Full of Blood’

“I have nothing to say…And I have nothing to give either–except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot of its box of flesh to understand, as you have done, the wit of eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing through the darkness of its knell.” –Toni Morrison

Where Do We Begin?

What an exhausting journey it is, to think about the futurelessness of our world. It is April and the birds hail the sun. But what does it feel like, to open your eyes to the morning sky, only to hear that the conditions of our world are unchanging. That the wars are worsening, that the violence is absolutizing. That our children are dying, our people are crying, leaders lying. How do you take a breath? The absence of time is death, and when history is over, it is the beginning of the end. The question from here is, when every next day is a step backwards, how can we begin to think of the future? The sun still shines, the earth still spins, and still, the world breaks. We live in fractures, separated by individualism, capitalism, neoliberalism, militarism, fundamentalism, racism, sexism, essentialism, the list is endless. The feeling is of hopelessness.

So, I turn to Toni Morrison, whose words are a living reverie. Whose essays, speeches, and meditations are the reasons I now, swoon, the reasons I now, fall in love, because what Morrison provides, is something that no other writer has been able to; she hallows hope. This is not hope in some abstract sense, this is hope with concrete, ordered thought and feeling, that is often and arguably, always, backed up with a focus on art. Art through the sensational, the visual, through literature, through life. Art as the invitation to break, to regrow, to deconstruct and begin again, to reimagine how to live, how to breathe, how to be. That is how we will see. When we open our eyes to the sunny blue skies, and the world still remains in its always precarious state, that is when “one looks through art for its signs of renewal” (Morrison 126).

Dwelling in the fractures, Mouth Full of Blood is Morrison’s offer of orientation. With an insistence on art’s capacity to transform, Morrison advocates for art to be the space where the broken world is neither denied nor accepted as final. It becomes the site where we are permitted to fracture and still remain whole enough to imagine again. Our everchanging world often insists on permanence; it does not recognize the flux we are constantly enveloped in. Art, however, insists on motion. The strokes of our imaginations are not meant to stay still. With this recognition, we begin.

            Renewal. When we begin the journey of imagining the world anew, we must begin with renewal. What is already there will always be. Whether engrained in memory, on flesh, on gravestones. Time, as the phrase goes, does not heal all wounds. But we are not fixed on a static path. If time teaches us anything, it is that movement is key. But before we move, we must ask, where are we now? “All war, all the time,” (Morrison 27) this is our condition. We are in a deadlock. A race against time, ensconced in genocides, in an eternal war with capitalism, with essentialism, with fundamentalism, with normalization, entrenched in inequalities, and, each system constantly asks us for either our acceptance, or death. Though it often seems that under such conditions, acceptance is death, and death is acceptance. In such a predicament, where life itself, as in, the very act of living, of breathing, has been reduced to a sempiternal nothing, a never-ending ending, what does it mean to be a human, with a heart and mind and soul. Is it better to be a corrupted human, than not be a human at all? When the alternative is to be a zombie, the living dead, where does the human reside? A question of counterpoint, how do we make a choice? When the world continues to grow more violent and disorderly, how do we hold hope? Hope cannot disappear, but like our current state of being, it can break. It is important to note that hope does not exist as a naive optimism, nor does it rest on the promise that things will improve. Instead, it exists alongside hopelessness, in fact, it is wedded to it. But it is in this feeling of hopelessness that we are granted the ability to confront the limits of what hope can do within the systems that are designed to extinguish it. Hopelessness, like the shadow of hope itself, is the evidence of a world in which belonging has been made impossible. And this is where foreignness emerges. To be without hope is to begin to feel foreign to the future. It is to no longer belong, to no longer recognize oneself in what is to come. The future becomes estranged, the present follows its command and in the slow inevitably of such a journey, one begins to feel out of place within one’s own life. So, one is misaligned, dislocated, unable to fully inhabit the space one occupies. What then?

Holding Hope

It is here that I echo Morrison’s question, “who is the foreigner?” (22). I have always been suspicious of the idea of belonging. Do you, as you are, belong here, in this space, in this time, in this body, with the brain you have, and the heart you hold? We want the answer to be yes, but we cannot negate an inquiry into how. How do you belong here? What are the feelings attached to that sense; has the grief ever felt lost in your heart, or the thoughts ever too foreign for your mind, the words wrong in your own mouth? What if your body is not home you wanted to house your soul in? What if this world is not the one you wanted to be raised in? How can we reconcile with this kind of confusion, this kind of loss? Loss of understanding, of identity, of a sense of being. The only answer I have come to learn is, to live the loss in order to come back to life. As in, to confront the full weight of absence in order to rediscover presence. Because we are also what we have lost, I turn to art. I turn to Toni Morrison, whose words awaken all senses.

“Am I the foreigner in my own home?” (Morrison 19). To continue this question, alongside the several I have posed above, we must first understand that foreignness is not merely imposed from the outside precisely because it is cultivated within the individual themself. Like a seed you never knew you planted, it is the estrangement from one’s own sense of self, produced and inherited by a world that insists you do not fit, that you do not count, that you do not belong, and the flower blooms in all its toxicity, an Oleander or a Foxglove. Just one touch is a threat, just one sensation, just one moment. That is all it takes for hope to feel hopeless. And yet, what a wonder it is, to think that just by naming this condition, by asking the question at all, we already create a form of resistance. Because if foreignness is the feeling of not belonging, then the articulation of that feeling must be the first step towards reclaiming it. Right?

I have situated that belonging itself is fractured. But let it also be supposed that what is in pieces was once whole, and wholeness is never achieved without fragmentation. This is adaptation. Notice that it is a process of breaking and re-forming; a negotiation between what was and what must now be lived. Adaptation requires movement, but we know, movement unsettles, and in adapting, we are made unfamiliar to ourselves. We shed skins, we rearrange our hearts, we become something not yet fully known. And it is here, it is in the in-between, that foreignness takes root. Hope, adaptation, they are risks to becoming foreign. But as Morrison claims, there is a “necessity for risk, a necessity for innovation and criticism,” because “it is in that climate that individual artists develop” (62). Hope is a risk. It is a wish in the dark, a prayer for the unknown, but it is also to see the world with your eyes wide open.

When Morrison asks, “Who is the foreigner?” this time, I would like to add that this is a question that leads us to the perception of an “implicit threat within “difference”” (22). But what is this difference? If we move beyond the visible markers of race, language, and nationality, we may recognize the instabilities that they signify. Difference is a disturbance of order. It exposes the illusion of coherence, of sameness, of normalization, of a stable ‘we.’ Any encounter with difference is to be reminded that identity is not fixed, that belonging is not secure. And this, in turn, produces fear. Only it is not fear of the other as distant, but the other as uncomfortably near. Dangerous closeness is what I propose to call this feeling. And it must be a notion predicated on feeling ​​because understanding the complexity of foreignness, of belonging, is a matter of the heart. The feeling of foreignness itself, then, must be rethought, because it is, as Morrison notes, “a foreignness that suggests intimacy rather than distance” (22). What is the threat of closeness? Why is intimacy dangerous? Because it collapses the boundary that we rely on to feel stable. The foreigner is no longer safely outside, they are the interlocutor at the edge of their own ribs, within reach, within the self. A ghost bruised and buried inside. In this kind of closeness, difference can no longer reassure us of who we are, or who we pretend to be, instead, it asks us to inquire what we call ‘other’ may not be other at all, but a reflection, a possibility, a version of ourselves we are unwilling to claim. We maintain distance for safety, yes, but does this not just amplify difference? What is the cost of care? It is difference, and as Morrison says, “we see it in the defense of the local against the outsider, of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance” (52). In this very tension, we lose a part of ourselves, and oftentimes, we do not even know it. Scared, and attempting to fill some kind of void, but we are already gasping before the scream. Fear fails us, fear kills the mind, fear tells us to conceal what we feel, but we reveal ourselves by hiding. So, we must move toward difference, inhabit it, and be willing to be reshaped by it. And in doing so, we must come dangerously close to losing the coherence we associate with belonging. Because without this movement, without this encounter with foreignness, there can be no transformation, no renewal, no becoming. How do you reach for a spear you throw in the darkness? With intuition, with a feeling. The danger of closeness is not in proximity, no, it is in our refusal to endure the feeling of it. The heart knows what the mind cannot explain. And “no more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity” (Morrison 9).

Belonging with Art

It is a cosmic punishment, to not belong. A feeling of misalignment within the self, your own language insufficient, an unnameable displacement. Stuck in an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, we must acknowledge that what we reject in others is often what we cannot reconcile within ourselves. The question now moves beyond who is the foreigner, and towards why the foreigner exists at all. And to answer this, we must return to the idea of home. Home, Morrison writes, “is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory,” (17) but as a memory, home is slippery. Home is stuck in the past, waiting for a new memory to crowd it out, displace it. So, “what do we mean when we say “home”?” (Morrison 17). To suggest something even more fragile, home is an idea and it is also a feeling. As an idea, home is a construct that must be continuously sustained. Home is not guaranteed by geography, not secured by borders, it is created, made and unmade through relationships, through emotions, and through recognition. As a feeling, home is

A heart ungraved from its hole,

Being loved without shame, without blame

Without a colour to your name,

Heart a fourposter bed,

A canvas bleeding, an organ screaming

Heart hopelessly holding hope.

Searching for what is already looking at you, home is

Your zealous heart,

Holding imagination, a candle in the dark.

Understood only through your language, your dreams, your prayers, your breaks.

What gives also takes.

“For one’s language, the one we dream in, is home” (Morrison 17). Home, as both an idea and a feeling, is created through the art of language and literature. Language is a site of belonging, a reservoir of possibilities. And when language is disrupted, as in, when it is policed, distorted, or rendered untranslatable, the sense of home begins to unravel. Who is lost in translation? To not belong is, in part, to lose access to the language that once held you. This is why literature matters, and Morrison names it clearly, “literature, sensitive as a tuning fork, is an unblinking witness to the light and shade of the world we live in” (126). Literature reconstructs the world, offering a space, a sanctuary, where language can be reclaimed, reshaped, made to speak again, breathe into again, allow hearts to beat again. Taken more broadly, and more to mine and Morrison’s point, art functions in the same way. Morrison insists that the impulse toward art is timely, and necessary, “to do and revere art is an ancient need–whether on cave walls, one’s own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean” (54). It is the kind of hunger that does not starve, a hunger that is fundamental to being human. Without art, the self remains unformed, unspoken, suspended in a kind of internal exile. So, there is faith in the world of art, because “art reminds us that we belong here” (53). Art: the wound that does not close, gives feelings a shape. Art gives foreignness a shape. It allows us to see it, to name it, to hold it without being consumed by it. And in doing so, it creates the possibility of belonging as an ongoing act of creation. And irrefrangibly so, creation creates life. “Art is not merely entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning–not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities” (Morrison 54). Here, I allow Morrison’s voice to unravel my own. Confronting the instability of all the categories that claim to define us, belonging is created outside of exclusion, away from expectations, through relation. And art is the very space where this becomes possible. Arguably, it is the only space. An “unblinking witness” (126) to the world, art holds contradiction without resolving it. It allows for grief and possibility to coexist. It makes room for the foreign by accentuating difference, by giving it form and meaning. By giving it a home.

Twice in Mouth Full of Blood, Morrison quotes a poem from a student of hers. It goes,

“No one told me it was like this.

Its only matter shot through with pure imagination.

[So] rise up little souls–join the doomed army toward the meaning

of change

Fight…fight…wage the unwinnable” (32, 57).

Art wrapped art, Morrison gives this poem a place to belong. Poems breathe life into us. Art breathes life into us. Because the thing that art is predicated on is possibility. Each verse is created with meaning, with feeling, intended for us to interpret all the possibilities. And these are possibilities to understand how we live. This is how art becomes essential to belonging. “Wage the unwinnable,” that is what it means to persist. In the act of striving, in the refusal to relinquish imagination, even when the world insists on its limits, we keep holding hope. Like a flame in the wind.

The Journey Home

That exhausting journey, the one I began this long meditation with, the one of thinking about the futurelessness of our world–what if it is given a future with and through art. Belonging is a sensation I am still trying to understand, in fact I have spent my whole life on it, but for some time now, I can acknowledge that in little moments, like those of creating art, I sense myself in a state of intoxicating balance. It is partial, it is contradictory, but it is, for a moment, a feeling of peace and passion, that I would like to assign to the idea of belonging. If we ever do belong, we all belong in different ways, and for myself, I take belonging with balance, and balance, we know, is not ever achieved without there first being an imbalance. We have to let go, to let in. Lose to regain. Fall to fly. And only art opens the doors for such possibilities.

To imagine otherwise. This is what art asks of us. When we hold hope, we assign a place for our existence, and consequently, we hold home. We begin to see not only what is, but what could be. And in that act of seeing, the future shifts, it has potential. It is the irreducible effect of art that constitutes a hospitable world because art is, and always will be, the home to house the self that is foreign

And we know, the journey home is always the quickest.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Mouth Full of Blood. Penguin Random House, 2019.

Read more at Doaa Tirmizi.