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What Does It Mean To Be Ugly?
“I used to like to watch her. You know they makes them greedy sounds. Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.”
-Mrs. Breedlove, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, published her first novel, The Bluest Eye. I just finished reading it. To say the book was eye-opening is an understatement. The book chronicles the lives of three young Black girls and their near futile struggle to cope with a world that treats them as if they are nothing, horrid stains on the beauty that is life.
The book is especially keen on describing the hideous circumstances, a familiar staple in many Black lives, that lead to self-hatred and contempt for other Black people.
Morrison highlights as causal factors of Black self-contempt, poverty and dehumanizing treatment by whites, the loneliness that comes as a result of illness and death caused by poor inescapable living standards, and the desperation to be accepted and worthy of love.
What I found most insightful was the psychological description of Cholly, the abused…
