"Quiet as it's kept..."

This post will comprise of excerpts (randomly selected, by me, of course) withdrawn from the afterword in The Bluest Eye as written by its author, Toni Morrison (November, 1993).  I will do this to provide added context, and also just for the sake of it, to my post about the novel that comes before this particular post.  I love how she articulates her meaning, reasoning and purpose behind the construction and the how-to read of the narrative.  

"The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her." (p.167)

"'Quiet as it's kept' is also a figure of speech that is written, in this instance, but clearly chosen for how speakerly it is, how it speaks and bespeaks a particular world and its ambience. [...] Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy seemed crucial to me." (pp. 169 & 170) 

"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 internalisation of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.  I focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonisation of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member; a female. [...]
In exploring the social and domestic aggression that could cause a child to literally fall apart, I mounted a series of rejections, some routine, some exception, some monstrous, all the while trying hard to avoid complicity in the demonisation process Pecola [focal character] was subjected to." (p. 168)

"A skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things: a September, an autumn, a fall without marigolds.  Bright, common, strong and sturdy marigolds.  When? In 1941, and since that is a momentous year (the beginning of World War II for the US), the "fall" of 1941, just before the declaration of war, has a "closet" innuendo." (p.170)

"...a problem lies in the central chamber of the novel... the void that is Pecola's "unbeing"' (p.171)

"With very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola's life: dismissed, trivialised, misread.  And it has taken twenty-five years to gain for her the respectful publication this edition is."  

Again, all excerpts are taken from Toni Morrison's foreword in the book 

The Bluest Eye (1970).