Why, although reviled by others, could this beauty not be taken for granted within the community? Why did it need wide public articulation to exist? These are not clever questions. The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.
And twenty years later, I was still wondering about how one learns that. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that to say something about why she had not, or possibly ever would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Beauty was not simply something to behold it was something one could do. In any case it was the first time I knew beautiful. It must have been more than the face I was examining: the silence of the street in the early afternoon, the light, the atmosphere of confession. Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word “beautiful,” I had never experienced its shock-the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad” at her instead. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a childhood friend. They could not save their friend from the world. So I invented friends, classmates, who understood, even sympathized, with her plight, but had the benefit of supportive parents and a feistiness all their own. Begun as a bleak narrative of psychological murder, the main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void. The project, then, for this, my first book, was to enter the life of the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed. The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has “legs,” so to speak. But there are some who collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it.
Others surrender their identity melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack. I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over. Not resistance to the contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident. When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human. And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the dislike or hatred is unjustified-that you don’t deserve it. It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated-hated for things we have no control over and cannot change. Perhaps the feeling is merely indifference, mild annoyance, but it may also be hurt. There can’t be anyone, I am sure, who doesn’t know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily or for sustained periods of time.
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