In “Wartalk,” Toni Morrison wrote about the shifting of the language of war, how it transformed from being romanticized in literature and epics as “noble” and “brave” to finally being recognized as mass unnecessary violence for the sake of land and resources. Morrison believed that this change in language meant that society had agreed “that war is, finally, out of date; that it is truly the most inefficient method of achieving one’s (long term) aims.” It was 2002 when Morrison wrote this piece and now it is 2024. But has war honestly gone out of style, especially considering the vastly different responses to the crisis in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine? What about the silence for the crisis in Sudan, repeatedly hailed as the “forgotten war"? How can a war be forgotten? How can a whole country—a whole people—be forgotten? If war has gone out of date, there are more than a few countries who haven’t caught up with the rest of the world.
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BORN IN BABYLON
Non-FictionMy school of indifference opened and never closed; I remained its only student. BORN IN BABYLON is a collection of short essays, fragments, prose, creative nonfiction, and other miscellany regarding Blackness, womanhood, memory, identity, and Americ...