As seen by the recent removal of six Dr. Seuss titles from republication rosters, debates over classic authors’ depictions of race and race relations in their works are still very much in progress. The religious aspects of Savannah-born author Flannery O’Connor’s writings have made some more sensitive to the issue where her writings concerned.
My objective when writing Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind was (and remains) to give a balanced honest account of how I and many others have experienced the racial components of O’Connor’s fiction and her documented statements regarding African Americans. At the same time, as previously noted, O’Connor is only one focus of discussion in the literary memoir. The first section recounts a kind of craziness which prevailed in Savannah, Georgia, with the phenomenal success of John Berendt’s bestselling nonfiction book, Midnight in the Garden of Good Evil. The second examines the life and literary impact of Pulitzer Prize-winner James Alan McPherson. Hopefully, the following quotes from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind give some sense of the title’s scope:
1. “Laughing and crying at the same time felt like a necessary expression of what it meant to be human.”
2. “Whatever grace might trickle down from the higher regions of a given society to the lower is no more essential than that which rises and converges from the opposite direction.”
3. “The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss.”
4. “The authors presented in Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind prompt us to look beyond the borders of individual personality and prepare ourselves to inhabit a new reality. It is a reality which leaves us no choice but to step outside our individual culture-comfort zones and exercise a more mindful sense of inclusion––as opposed to indulging biased instincts conditioned to reinforce mindless exclusion.”
5. “In the days leading up to the moments when we found ourselves choking on disbelief while watching streamed images of corpses being loaded into freezer trucks, emergency room attendants scrambling to save lives, nurses sobbing frustration over feeling overwhelmed and abandoned, and U.S. citizens on the march to take control of their own fates, Americans witnessed something foreboding. It was the formation of a dominating political culture which would prove fatally lacking when put to a test of ‘unprecedented’ severity.”
Aberjhani
Above quotes all excerpted from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Quote number four struck especially home to me. In a land of majority rule with only two parties, the idea of representation of all, often is squeezed by exclusion and collusion. I believe in the 21st century the mobility caused by many problems will result in more homogeneous and trusting world where all the naysayers have died.
In your last quote, I believe referred to the inequality when it came to prevention of the Coronavirus and its variants taking so many lives from the unprotected, but hard-working service workers in the trenches, followed by the infection of many of their families.
It should have backfired for the naysayers earlier, but didn't. It appears that Omicron is finally catching up with those who thought they were immune.
Ron
I enjoy your writing