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.
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.
When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else.
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.
Begun as a bleak narrative of psychological murder, the main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void.
So I invented friends, classmates, who understood, even
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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.
The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim.
The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.
I focused on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female.
In trying to dramatize the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause, I chose a unique xi situation, not a representative one.
The extremity of Pecola's case stemmed largely from a crippled and crippling family- unlike the average black family and unlike the narrator's.
Singular as Pecola's life was, I believed some aspects of her woundability were lodged in all young