The work must be political

In “Rootedness: the Ancestor as Foundation,” an essay published in the early 1980s, Toni Morrison clarified the social and political vision informing her writing, stating that:

If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams – which is to say yes, the work must be political.