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This year, I read Minor Feelings : An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong and I keep wishing I hadn’t done so because I want to read it for the first time. Nothing like swimming in a single paragraph for far too long.) (Something I discovered in 2021: eating a weed gummy, waiting 30 minutes, drawing a bath, and reading two pages of Toni Morrison in the hottest water. Take this sentence from Sula, for instance, about men’s pants and the treasures within: “The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled.” That phrase, “marking with a mere seam”-I’ll live off it for days. Instead, it bent me.Īll of Morrison’s characters have bodies, are embodied, and there are moments of sexiness, just as there are moments of humor and celebration that don’t get talked about when we talk about Morrison’s work. I could not get over how experimental The Bluest Eye was, with its perspective shifts and refusal to bend to the reader’s expectations. My favorite was The Bluest Eye (a reread) although all of them deranged my brain as I dipped into their syntactical feats. I’ve read five so far, in order of publication: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. Instead, I slowed down and picked one up when I was in the mood for Morrison’s rich prose and vivid, often brutal, worlds. I certainly could have, until I realized I didn’t want to rush through them, to conquer them as if cramming for an exam. There are 11 and I figured I could read them all in 2021. In January, I started reading and rereading Toni Morrison’s novels because I wanted a project. What does one read and enjoy in a non-year? As in 2020, I’m still scared: less by Covid and more by…everything else. (“Writing! Is this just a hobby of mine now?” I sometimes want to cry out, and do.) Life in 2020 felt scary and small this year it feels liminal, perhaps irrelevant. An unexpected 10 days without childcare is enough to keep any parent on edge.
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All three of them have been back in school full time since mid-August, although each week I steel myself for a call from the principal-it’s already happened twice-telling me there’s a positive case in the classroom. By the end of March, I was fully vaccinated, but, for most of the year, my kids couldn’t be-and the youngest, who is two, is still waiting.
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Still, it wasn’t the celebration I had imagined for that milestone birthday. I turned 40 in February and marked it by gazing at the camellia bushes at a nearby garden, and because I hadn’t spent much (or any) time alone since that fateful day in March 2020, the visit was blissful. I was thinking of calling 2021 a non-year.