The Unhurried Hermeneutics of Anti-Black Violence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Abstract:The opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) are undeniably some of her most famous: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out there… . there is time and the day has just begun” (3). While the novel eventually reveals the identity of those who constitute the “they” of the opening action, in a move that has received much critical attention, it famously leaves the first victim anonymous. This essay, however, draws our attention to “the rest.” What of the infamous black women of Paradise for whom the violence is slow and drawn out or the many more in our country whose names we say to rebuke a system of injustice that continues to insist that there is “no need to hurry” for “there is time and the day has just begun”?Privileging a reading of time over space, the essay puts Morrison’s Paradise in conversation with Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and Moya Bailey’s Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021) in order to address the urgent need for a temporal reframing of anti-Black violence. Paying particular care to what Karla Holloway describes as the “comparative laxity” to which Black women in this country have historically been subjected and the extent to which that comparative laxity persists in the face of spectacular scenes of violence, the essay concludes with an examination of Breonna Taylor’s murder in 2020. It considers how the events that resulted in her death, like the fictional raid that frames Morrison’s novel, are byproducts of white supremacist systems of slow violence and misogynoir designed to wear down the opposition by attrition.