Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Toni Morrison is making the comparison of what home really is compared to how the rest of the nation treats home. In this case, Lorain treats its people (with its diversity as a staple of its culture) differently compared to the rest of the United States amidst the time while she was alive. That isn’t to say that other cities didn’t have a similar mindset as Lorain around the time she was a child, but it is crucial to consider what was considered normal in that timeframe.

“Last year a colleague of mine asked me where I had gone to school when I was a child. I told her, Lorain, Ohio. Then she questioned me: Were your schools desegregated then? I said, What? They were never segregated in the thirties and forties- so why would they be desegregated. Besides, we had one high school and four junior high schools…”

"I was in a time warp and obviously the early diverse population of the town I grew up in was not the way of the country. Before I left Lorain for Washington D.C., then Texas, then Ithaca, then New York City, I thought every place was more or less like it, except in size.”

"Her questions made me think anew about this area of Ohio and my recollections of home. This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home.”

“The reconfiguration of political and economic alliances and the almost instant reparsing of nation-states encourage and repel the relocation of large numbers of peoples. Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has ever been. It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame.”

“In press descriptions, place of origin has become more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as ‘a German citizen of such and such origin’ or ‘a British citizen of such and such origin.’ All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus of identity beyond the definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit and heightened threat within ‘difference.’ We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort with one’s own sense of belonging (Am I the foreigner in my own home?); of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.”