It was a fine cry–loud and long–but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
page 174, Sula by Toni Morrison
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about Sula by Toni Morrison from Plant Based Bride’s top 10 best books of the year video, and Sula was in the top three which piqued my interest. Before this I had only seen brief mentions of Toni Morrison by way of a review blurb on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me so I wasn’t familiar with her writing.
This was the first book I read in 2026 and I wanted to start off the year with a good book. I don’t often read books in the so-called modern genre but between Plant Based Bride’s glowing review of the book and my curiosity about Toni Morrison’s writing I was cautiously optimistic that this was going to be a good one. It was also the shortest of the four books I obtained from my first library haul of the year and I wanted to read them in ascending order of page count.
So without further ado, let us get into it.
The Book
Every once in a while I start reading a book and am immediately enraptured by it. Sula was one of these books. From the very beginning of the book to its very end I was quietly awestruck by the way Toni Morrison wrote. The way scenes, characters, and moments are described were a treat for the imagination. I could visualize them so well.
Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences, iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.
page 56
Toni Morrison’s writing reminded me of the way Malice of the hip-hop duo Clipse raps. The writing is precise, economical. Descriptions of scenarios are just the right length, dialogue between characters just enough to get the point across and even the book’s lingering on the interiority of its main characters stays focused. At 174 pages, this is a lot of story in a very short length, it is impressive.
At its core, Sula is a character study. Our two black heroines as the back cover describes them – Nel Wright and the titular Sula Peace are the two main characters of the book. What I was enthralled by is the way Toni’s prose made the small town setting of Medallion, Ohio a character.
From beginning to end, this book tells a story of poverty, of small joys, of moments of friendship, love, lust, and loneliness. Of the conflicts between family members and neighbours. Of choices made and regrets calcified with age. This is a story about Black people written by a Black person. More specifically this is a story that paints a nuanced portrait of the lives of two different Black women and the choices they make.
The titular Sula is such a wonderfully complicated character. At many times in the story I found myself wanting to grab her and shake her and tell her to stop doing the asinine thing she is doing to her friend Nel. Despite that, I understood where she was coming from and why she made the choices she made. Same goes for Nel. The tragic arc of Nel and Sula’s friendship broke my heart. Two paths diverging in a way that could never join back together.
Sula’s arc as a character and the way she was vilified by the town of Medallion in some ways reminded me of a quote from Audre Lorde essay that was in the Sister Outsider collection.
Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the sources of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel.
Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger by Audre Lorde
That particular essay is about the relationships between Black women and in some sense I thought that Sula was a person who valued the hatred of her enemies over the love of her friend and she used this hatred to fuel her life until the very end.
While reading Toni Morrison’s Wikipedia page to get more of a sense of who she was, I came across the section on her contributions to Black feminism and how she rejected the white male gaze in her writing and how she wrote from the perspective of Black women. That is very much case the case in Sula. The white male gaze is very conspicuous in its absence in this book and it was refreshing to read such a book.
Morrison consistently advocated for feminist ideas that challenge the dominance of the white patriarchal system, frequently rejecting the notion of writing from the perspective of the “white male gaze”.[122] Feminist political activist Angela Davis notes that “Toni Morrison’s project resides precisely in the effort to discredit the notion that this white male gaze must be omnipresent.”[123]
In a 1998 episode of Charlie Rose, Morrison responded to a review of Sula, stating, “I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said, ‘One day, she’, meaning me, ‘will have to face up ‘to the real responsibilities, and get mature, ‘and write about the real confrontation ‘for black people, which is white people.’ As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”[124]
[..]
In a 1986 interview with Sandi Russell, Morrison stated that she wrote primarily for Black women, explaining, “I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, re-name, re-own.”[125]
Toni Morrison – Wikipedia
Concluding Thoughts
This book is the best possible start to a year of reading that I could possibly ask for. A modern literary classic that broke my heart, fed my soul and got me thinking about the choices I make in my own life. Talk about starting off the year with an absolute banger of a book. Sula is the first entry in my books of the year list for 2026.
At some point in the future I want to read Toni Morrison’s other books because I just fell in love with her writing style. It is a writing style that makes me want to write more and write weirder and that is the biggest compliment I can give to an author and their writing style.
That is all from me y’all. Happy new year and I’ll see y’all in the next one.
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