The Clearing: A Communal Reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye [OFF-SITE]

Date / Time

  • May 3, 2010
    6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location

1 Awbury Road, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19138, United States

“When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing—a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees… ‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard…’” – Beloved by Toni Morrison)

The Clearing is a communal reading of a Toni Morrison novel, curated by Trapeta Mayson and Yolanda Wisher and sponsored by The Rosenbach. The inaugural reading will be held at Awbury Arboretum and will highlight Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. The Rosenbach collection holds galley and first edition copies of the novel, which will be on display during the reading. The reading will commence and close with rituals acknowledging ancestors and land. More than fifty intergenerational readers of African descent will recite the novel in four acts interspersed with performances with breaks for socializing.

Tickets coming soon!