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Sula toni morrison book7/6/2023 I don’t remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember is the color around her-a kind of violet, a suffusion of something violet-and her eyes, which appeared to be half closed. Her name was Hannah, and I think she was a friend of my mother’s. I began to write my second book, which was called Sula, because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way in which I heard her name pronounced. Morrison saw Sula in someone, too, before she wrote her: I’ve seen Sula in my days, in my sisters, my aunts, my friends, a stranger crossing the road. Sula is incomparable, matchless, singular. She’s the kind of woman about whom you start to say “she’s the kind of woman…” even though you know any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong. She is, of course, a type, but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. Sula always seems to me to name a person, not an idea. There are other proper names in Morrison’s titles-Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved-but they do not wear their allegory so lightly. That’s what always strikes a space between my breasts whenever I think of Toni Morrison’s second novel, published in 1973, and my favorite of her oeuvre.
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