What would Toni Morrison Think?
Examining the new Gaze
It’s happening right now. With every word that I type, I’m already thinking about how to carefully craft each statement not for creativity or for clarity of messaging; not for imagination or for the purity of this piece. I’m writing to avoid the Gaze.
Toni Morrison would be so upset right now. In this interview decades ago, she warned us about the Gaze. In her argument, she was referring specifically to the white Gaze, a marginalizing eye that others every piece of literature not written by white fingers.
In the same interview, Morrison rightfully boasts about her amassing a large readership by forcing everyone outside of the community she was writing for to shift to her center. She compares herself to a “Russian writer, who writes about Russia, in Russian, for Russians. And the fact that it gets translated and read by other people is a benefit…but he’s not obliged to ever consider writing about French people, or Americans...”
I wonder what Toni Morrison would say about the Gaze today. The Gaze today is powerful and it’s pervasive. It has one job and that one job is to peer. To sit on our shoulders and peer.
The Gaze today has transcended race and is infecting creativity at its core. And I’m not just talking about book bans. Books have been burned and libraries destroyed and authors have been writing in hiding for thousands of years. The bans have intensified over the last few years, but that is only part of the Gaze.
The Gaze is also cultural. Which communities are authors allowed to write about? What if they don’t get the lingo exactly right? What if the sensitivity reader missed a nuance that could stir that community into an uproar? Then what?
I’ve seen books pulled off the shelves by its own publisher because of the cultural Gaze. Authors see this. I know because I see this. And when we see this, the Gaze intensifies. It perches itself more steadily on our shoulder, peering, daring us to write the precise words that are turning in our minds. And we feel the weight of the Gaze and pause, because if that author got pulled off the shelf, what will happen to me?
The Gaze is also social. Even if your characters are fictional, there are standards your community is holding you to. And if your characters don’t meet those standards, if they step outside of the social boundaries your community has deemed acceptable, then there are consequences.
These social standards are tricky because sometimes they’re reinforced by your community but not set by your community. If you read Erasure by Percival Everett or watch American Fiction, the movie based on Everett’s book, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
The Gaze can force you into a corner. It can make you question who you’re writing for, who you’re writing about, why you’re writing in the first place. The Gaze is telling you to look left and right before you walk ahead when all you want to do is put your head down and run. The Gaze is telling you that running is dangerous, but if you walk this way, there’s a prize waiting for you at the end. But you must walk in your lane, the lane that it has drawn.
I say fuck the Gaze.
The Gaze is an enemy of imagination. It’s a killer of creativity. There is no appeal to writing with peering eyes. No inspirational benefit, no literary benefit. It’s an enemy that must be stopped.
Once you’re aware of the Gaze, you need to fight it. And we all have it. It starts on all of our shoulders and it’s up to us to grab it by the throat and violently throw it as far away from our writing as possible.
Replace that Gaze with the eyes of your heroes. Write through the soul of those who came before you. Find confidence and intention in the writers who have been brave and courageous, the ones you admire because their prose are honest and vulnerable and powerful and beautiful, all at the same time.
Let’s rid ourselves of the Gaze once and for all so we can tell the stories we truly want to tell and become the writers we know lives inside of us.
Thank you! I agree. American Fiction is a brilliant movie because it hits out at this. I haven’t read the Percival Everett novel yet but I heard it has a sharper bite than the film.
I am so over the censorship (including self censorship) that’s infected everything. The brave and authentic thing to do is to write fiercely and to say “fuck the gaze”. I agree! Thanks for your voice in this world. Looking forward to reading your book!
The Gaze is the fuel behind everyone using book bans as political campaigns. It's rare for it to be targeted against white authors unless they are also part of a minority community.