Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison...

To Claudia Tate in another interview in  1983, Morrison  declares,

When I view the world, perceive it and write about it, it’s the world of black people. It’s not that I won’t write about white people. I just know that when  I’m trying to develop the various themes I write about, the people who best manifest those themes for me are the black people whom I invent. It’s not  deliberate or calculated or self-consciously black, because I recognize and despise the artificial black writing some writers do. I fell them slumming among black people.⁴

There are other contexts that frame Morrison’s writing. Two of the most pivotal are black music and black preaching or the black church service.  In the essay “Rootedness the Ancestor as Foundation,” she indicates how her art is related to music, oral aesthetics and the ritual of black church services:

There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature : to combine those two aspects so that the stories can be read in silence…but one should be able to hear them as well. It should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and cry and to  accede and  to  change and to modify—to expand  on the sermon that is being delivered. In the same way that a musician’s music is enhanced when there is a response from the audience….I have to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate. Because it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance, as it is in these other art forms that I have described.⁵