The Bluest Eye from Ten Views of Florida

The 'view" of Florida inspired by the title of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye references bathymetric maps of oceanic levels, the iris and pupil of an eye, and the sink holes that are proliferating in Florida. (Alise Cross's blog post, Tell Me About Sinkholes in Florida, explains the natural phenomena that cause sinkholes, as well as how climate change and human development are exacerbating the problem.) For most of the prints in Ten Views of Florida I tried to make imagery that responded to both the prompt of a banned book title and to some other verifiable reality of Floridian life that is under attack by the MAGA movement and its lackeys, in this case climate change. 

The print is a six-color reduction linoleum cut that I printed in increasingly darker shades of blue. In addition to the darkness, which is achieved by adding more pigment to each layer of ink, I also progressively skewed the pigmentation of the blue from green(ish) to redd(ish) to create more separation between the darker circles and those that came before them. This was done by starting with phthalo blue for the first two layers, adding milori blue to the third and fourth, and ultramarine blue to the final two layers.

Reduction block cutting entails printing an image from a block, then cutting away some of the printable surface, and printing this "reduced" block on top of the previous print. If you make a mistake on any layer of the print you have to start over, since there is no way to replace what has been cut away. In The Bluest Eye, this 'do or die' approach was mitigated by the fact that if I had mis-cut a layer I could easily have used a new block to print the successive layers. Luckily, this wasn't necessary.

In the image above you can see me starting to cut the sixth and final layer of the block. The rough outlines of the previous layers are visible in the cut-away areas of the block. The final print is shown at top; the five earlier states of the print are shown below, in reverse order so the last image shows the first layer of printing.

 

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If the supposed motivation for removing books from school libraries is sexual content, The Bluest Eye never stood a chance. Right on page 3 we learn that poor Pecola Breedlove is carrying her father's child. From there, the book proliferates with sexual 'red flags,' including a remarkable scene (beginning on page 129 in my edition) that is right up there with Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The scene is complex, conflicted, sexy, and brimming with yearning that goes far beyond the carnal. It is powerful and visceral and, like so much of the book, it captures the subtle nuances of human desire in startling detail.

The Bluest Eye is, by any metric, an adult book. It is an innovative literary work that maneuvers through such a breadth of emotional complexity that I find it hard to believe that any of the people calling for it to banned have actually read it. And if they have read it, I doubt they understood it. There's no way I would have understood The Bluest Eye if I had tried to read it in high school. I probably would have gotten the gist, but the subtleties would have been lost on me. The schools that I attended valued rote memorization (in service to our lord and master, the SATs) over comprehension and, as someone whose head was constantly in the clouds, I skipped merrily over both. I had to find my own way to reading. It was only after I had traveled a long, slow arc through life and books that I was ready for Toni Morrison. 

This doesn't mean that The Bluest Eye shouldn't be available in schools. I have only one memory of my brother expressing intellectual curiosity as a child. It was after he read The Bluest Eye in high school. The book had a profound effect on him. Suddenly the abstract (to us) concepts of racism, poverty, and many other isms besides, became relatable to him through the avatars of Pecola, Freida, Claudia, and their families. He excitedly described the premise of the book to me, and for days afterward he was visibly alive with the afterglow of his new insight into the world. There's no way of knowing if the book made him a better person, but it certainly planted the seeds of empathy, compassion, and change. 

It is precisely this response—one of the loftier goals of literature—that potential book banners find most threatening about The Bluest Eye. They can claim that they're protecting children from sex all they want, but it is the book's unflinching portrayal of the effects of racism and poverty that these people don't want their children to read. Because, according to them, racism and discrimination do not exist. (It's not as if there are people dedicated to silencing alternative viewpoints, to aggressively eliminating any mention of minority communities and historical perspectives.)

But arguments like these are pointless. The whole gambit of book banning is a ruse. No one is honestly worried about a contemporary student going to the library, selecting, reading, and comprehending The Bluest Eye. The chances of that happening are remote, especially if issues of critical race theory are not part of a school's curriculum. The goal of banning The Bluest Eye is not to protect children from sexually explicit material or from an awareness of how their behaviors might effect others. The goal of book banning is to normalize censorship, to marginalize dissent, and to keep the playing field as uneven as possible.

"Fade" print from "Ten Views of Florida"

The nine prints in Ten Views of Florida are inspired by the titles of books that are banned in Florida public schools. In an effort to situate myself in an imagined future where the book banners have succeeded and the lists of banned titles are all that remain, I specifically chose to work with books that I had not read. Now that I have finished printing, and the sheets are on their way to the bookbinder, I am reading the nine books on whose titles my prints are based, and posting my thoughts on them along with process descriptions of the prints. 

The first print is inspired by the title, Fade, the second book in Lisa McMann's Wake trilogy. From the outset I wanted the print to be a two-color transition, a fade from one color to another. It was a simple place to start and a nice opener for a book meant to increase in gravity. The narrative arc of the prints travels from sunrise to nighttime, so the color fade is well-suited to the print's "sunrise" position in the narrative. 

Initially, I was inspired by some of the more garish color combinations in hyper-saturated postcards, like salmon pinks sandwiched between cyan skies and cerulean seas. The Florida History and Florida Tourism Ephemera Collections at the University of Florida's Smathers Library are full of such images and, as a color printing fetishist, I find them irresistible. 

Once I began proofing my own print, though, nothing worked as I planned. I wanted to achieve a subtle gradation from cerulean to salmon. I first experimented with linear gradients, none of which captured the feeling I was trying to convey. I then switched to rainbow rolls and the situation only got worse. 

On a Vandercook press, a rainbow roll works by placing multiple ink colors on the oscillating roller in the press's roller assembly. As the roller oscillates it mixes the ink colors where they meet, creating a gradient or ombré effect. 

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, maintaining a rainbow roll is a highly precise balance between colors. It is also a race against time, trying to pull as many prints as possible before the colors mix too thoroughly and ruin the gradient effect. This time element was pushed to the extreme in my cerulean/salmon combination. After one or two prints, the pink and blue inks mixed into a slurry muck, more fetid swamp than cheery coastline. With a controlled rainbow roll I expect to have to clean the press and re-ink after every 15–18 prints. Having to clean after every two prints was not going to work. In my frustration I laid proofs of all the prints side by side and noticed that there was a lot of blue, but no yellow, in the book. The resulting orange to yellow gradient is more delightful and satisfying than any of the other prints I tried—another reminder (I need a lot of them) that what is in my head needs to be adjusted once it comes into contact with the outside world.

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The driving force behind Florida book bans is Moms for Liberty, an organization whose Orwellian name makes me shudder every time I hear it. Their Wikipedia description: "Moms for Liberty is an American political organization that advocates against school curricula that mention LGBTQ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination.^[6] Multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban books that address gender and sexuality from school libraries.^[2][7][8] Founded in January 2021, the group began by campaigning against COVID-19 responses in schools such as mask and vaccine mandates.... Moms for Liberty was co-founded in Florida on January 1, 2021, by former school board members Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, and by then-current school board member Bridget Ziegler, the wife of Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler.^[20][21][22] In spring 2021, Christian Ziegler was removed from his position in the party because of a sexual assault allegation.^{[23]" [italics mine]}

^{I include the last bit about the sexual assault allegation because schadenfreude is particularly satisfying when aimed at the self-righteous. Of course the husband of one of the "Moms for Liberty" was accused of sexual assault. No one thinks about sex more than the censor.} 

^{Sexual assault is also relevant to the content of Lisa McMann's Fade. The book charts the fluctuations in the relationship between Janie and Cabel, two eighteen-year-old high school seniors who work as narcs for the local police. Their primary means of crime fighting is a supernatural power of Janie's—dream catching—in which she is pulled into the dreams of anyone sleeping nearby. As the story unfolds, McMann delicately traces the conflicting feelings of teenagers colliding against the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood.}

^{Janie and Cabel are a couple but, for eighteen year olds, they have a surprisingly non-sexual relationship. They are in love, they fool around a bit, they even stay at each other's houses, but sex is off the table for most of the book. When they do finally consummate their relationship (as consenting adults BTW), Janie presents Cabel with a condom and their ensuing safe sex is barely described.} 

^{The main sexual content of the book is a party put on by three of the male teachers in the school. The host is the chemistry teacher who makes homemade roofies that he and his friends use to dose the booze and the food. They then proceed to rape, or attempt to rape, multiple students. Where other writers might seize on this scenario for its shock value, McMann shows restraint. The situation is described, the assaults are not. The story is not about torrid sex, it's about surviving. In the lead up to the party, Janie, who is attending as bait in a sting operation, does extensive research on the types and effects of date rape drugs. She arrives at the party prepared for the worst case scenario. All the same, she succumbs to the drugs. Who thought they'd drug the meatballs? Ultimately she is saved by her self-defense skills and her cohorts in the police.} 

^{Fade is not a book about hyper-sexualized teenagers. The teenagers in the story are the survivors of prurient adults. Maybe the Moms for Liberty don't want children to be prepared to fend off sexual predators.}