How does a reader of any race situate herself or himself in order to approach the world of a black writer? Won’t there always be apprehension about what may be revealed, exposed about the reader? In 1970, when I began writing _Sula,_ I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, _The Bluest Eye,_ by both black and white reviewers that–with two exceptions–had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. This burden rested not only on the critics, but also on the reader. If Phillis Wheatley wrote “The sky is blue,” the critical question was what could blue sky mean to a black slave woman? If Jean Toomer wrote “The iron is hot,” the question was how accurately or poorly he expressed chains of servitude. Whether they were wholly uninterested in politics of any sort, or whether they were politically inclined, aware, or aggressive, the fact of their race or the race of their characters doomed them to a “political-only” analysis of their worth. Which seems to have been unavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens, is still with us, and, in 1969 it placed an inordinate burden on African American writers. What could be so bad about being socially astute, politically aware in literature? Conventional wisdom agrees that political fiction is not art that such work is less likely to have aesthetic value because politics–all politics–is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production. In the fifties, when I was a student, the embarrassment of being called a politically minded writer was so acute, the fear of critical derision for channeling one’s creativity toward the state of social affairs so profound, it made me wonder: Why the panic? The flight from any accusation of revealing an awareness of the political world in one’s fiction turned my attention to the source of the panic and the means by which writers sought to ease it. They don’t want glory like that in nobody’s heart.” “Nobody knew my rose of the world but me… I had too much glory. This book is for Ford and Slade, whom I miss although they have not left me. It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
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