BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL: PAST AND PRESENT

Abstract [English]

Due to the direct and long experience of discrimination by white people, gender and race has been the most common experience of black authors. Toni Morrison is no exception. In her very first novel she too picked up the issue of race and gender. In an interview in 2004 Morrison described her motivation to write the novel. She adds that in the mid 1960s “most of what was being published by Black men was very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or nonfiction.” These publications “had a very positive, racially uplifting rhetoric.” Black male authors expressed sentiments like “Black is beautiful” and used phrases like “Black queen.” All these works made Morrison realize that people would forget that “black was not always beautiful”. In "The Bluest Eye" , her aim is to make the readers remember how racism against black people ruined their life. Morrison”s novel is based upon a short story of a young black girl who had a longing for blue eyes. Idea of writing this novel was conceived by Toni Morrison nearly twenty years ago during a workshop at Howard University. Story is partly true. Morrison had a childhood friend who would express her desire for blue eyes. How racism had an adverse effect on young minds that they wanted to turn unreal into reality or the sense of ugliness was so deep that the girl wanted to do away at every cost. In Pecola’s case gender too leaves an equally devastating effect on her life. It is her female body which made her more vulnerable and left her completely broken.