1
Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.
— “A Letter from 18 Writers,” August 18, 2006
I wanted to write an essay about Toni Morrison’s work as an editor. I’ve been looking for a model to put to use. How did Morrison practice the profession of editing?
I’ve been a writer and editor for over twenty years, and I teach at a university. Morrison worked in higher ed at the start and end of her career—in her late twenties, instructor at Howard; in her late fifties, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in Humanities at Princeton. In the middle of her life—while she wrote her first four novels—she worked in publishing, her day job, most notably as a trade editor at Random House from 1971 to 1983. From that position she shaped American literature and culture, one of very few senior Black editors across the US publishing industry of her era, which would be true in any era. Within the oppressively white publishing industry, Morrison focused on Black writers, Black readerships. Her editing included the singular anthology/catalog project The Black Book, the early novels of Gayl Jones, Muhammad Ali’s The Greatest, Angela Davis’s autobiography, and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.
Lately Morrison’s editorial work has been a focus of scholarship and conversation. Last year saw the release of Dana A. Williams’s major study Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship; Dan Sinykin’s 2023 Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature considers Morrison’s position at Random House; emerging scholars such as Charlotte Terrell discuss her editorial work alongside her fiction, tracing her formation of literary publics across these sites. Scholars often quote Morrison from a 2003 interview with Hilton Als, in which she frames editing as a form of political activity: “I wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line.”
Yet the occasion of my question about Morrison’s editorial practices, how she approached her job—my desire to learn, mid-career, new approaches to that career—was not the publication of new scholarship on America’s best-known writer/editor. I wish it were. The occasion of my question was the ongoing US–Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The genocide, for those of us fortunate enough to witness it from a distance, incited a crisis within our institutions—higher ed, media—that hasn’t ended and shouldn’t end. The form of the crisis is and should be personal. How can you work here, in a cultural institution you now know, beyond doubt, will not protest genocide—in fact, will punish those who do? The question bears both emphases: how could you and also—given that you must work, in some form, at some job—how should you?
2
Morrison did not address the subject of Palestine often in her public life. Perhaps her most consequential statement on the subject was collective. To some readers it seemed to become her definitive text, though there’s little reason to believe she herself wrote it. This is an open letter—I quoted from it, above—published on August 18, 2006, across global news media. It has eighteen signatories including Morrison, all prominent writers, ranging across generations, nations, backgrounds, genres: Arundhati Roy, Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, José Saramago, Charles Glass, John Berger, Naomi Klein, Eduardo Galeano, Carolyn Forché, Harold Pinter, others.
The letter expresses moral concern about, first, the imbalanced media coverage of Israeli and Palestinian suffering, of Israeli and Palestinian power in the “conflict” that is an occupation. It notes how an Israeli soldier’s capture by Palestinian forces on June 25, 2006, was covered internationally and “considered an outrage” (this soldier is Gilad Shalit, unnamed in the letter, presumably because his captivity was well known at the time)—compared to the lack of media coverage or concern when “Israeli forces [had] abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza” the day before. (These civilians are Osama and Mustafa Muamar.) This imbalanced coverage by Western media, the letter suggests, obscures and naturalizes the inequity that defines the situation in Palestine, including “the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources—most particularly that of water—by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces” (emphasis in original).
The letter’s authors are writers by profession; they start with a problem in representation, in narrative. They connect this representational failure to its human costs. “Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones,” the letter continues before arriving at the paragraph quoted above: here, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is framed as “a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.” Discourse functions as “a distraction,” the letter argues, that prevents the global community from acknowledging this fundamental reality.
“This has to be said loud and clear,” the text concludes, “for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognized for what it is and resisted.” This sentence seems prescient, twenty years later, in these days when that liquidation has advanced so fast. The covert become overt, the intent declared: “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery,” a Likud member of the Knesset said in October 2023. Just one example.
On liquidation: recently, Israel publicly accepted Gazan health authorities’ estimate of the death toll from the 2023–2026 campaign (supported, armed, and funded by the US). Thus Israel officially agrees that its military has recently killed over 20,000 Palestinian children. And since I began writing this essay, US–Israeli assaults on Iran and Lebanon have begun, are ongoing.
In 2026, the claim that any open letter could matter, on the subject of Palestine especially, is hard to believe. The phrase “open letter” arrives tinged with dark bitterness, irony. “Open” would seem to mean “void.” How many open letters have you or I signed by now? Did it matter?
So if Morrison’s participation in this text, its protest, mattered in 2006—I think it did—it may not serve as a model, not exactly, not the way I seem to be seeking, today. But let’s note again that this act of writing, this protest, was collective. It emerged from the different politics and positions of its signatories. Like editing, it was a collaboration in which the resulting text, attuned to its context, mattered more than who contributed what. Like editing, a momentary and effectual meeting across difference.
Scholars like Terrell note that when Morrison discussed her work as an editor, she tended to sound like an editor; she tended to say the things editors say. Reading Williams’s book on her editorship reinforces this: Morrison’s editing practices seem reassuringly familiar. The power lies in the effect of the work. Like all great editors, she viewed her work as serving the text, to a nearly depersonalized degree (“Cool. Dispassionate. [Editors] don’t love you or your work,” she said in one interview). Editors don’t claim credit for particular interventions, glory for themselves. It’s not just discretion. The work is so precise yet so collective, responsive and made of relation, it eludes narratives of I did this, I did that. This 2006 letter has an impassioned, non-journalistic voice, distinctive phrases and idiosyncratic em-dashes. This voice belongs to all eighteen writers and none in particular. Together there are few textual effects these writers couldn’t achieve: they choose to end “loud and clear.”
This practice of continual decision-making amid discourses is exactly, we’ll note, where editors live. These writers are saying to media, thus to those in power: despite our differences, we can all see what’s happening and we know it for what it is. We have finished reading the endless texts on the “conflict” you’ve provided, and we deny distraction, both-sides-ism, nuance as alibi. They are saying to readers: you are being distracted; read deeper. One people is being liquidated by another. It’s as simple as that. Loud and clear, we insist that we can recognize genocide. Unceasingly, we resist genocide. We insist on editing the text you want us to believe.
3
Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise is not a novel about Palestine. But it is of use in an era of genocide. Paradise is a novel of models and warnings. It’s concerned with the promise and the dangers of collectivity and with the work that collectivity requires.
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.
This is how the novel begins. In January 2026, I was reading Paradise in my wintry home in Cleveland. As if in conversation, in January 2026 the Cleveland-based artist and writer M. Carmen Lane posted those lines incisively on social media, the day after ICE killed Renee Good.
Paradise starts in a scene of siege. The violence is shocking; the narration witnesses it without explication. We follow the perspective of the perpetrators. The nine men in this scene (“they shoot…”) have appointed themselves killers of women. They have traveled seventeen miles from a town called Ruby to a place called the Convent. This is where the women they’re punishing live together. It used to be a Catholic convent and now it’s a different kind of community, an improvised home for women who can’t belong anywhere else. We’re in Oklahoma, a stolen place, where so many people whose homes and worlds were stolen were forcibly driven.
Ruby is a Black town, founded by a group of patriarchal families and run ideologically. In a reversal of the hierarchies of racism and colorism suffered by its founders and their ancestors, the town privileges the founding families’ dark skin tone, which they call 8-R or “eight-rock, a deep deep level in the coal mines.” In the preface that appears in a later edition, Morrison wrote that she wanted to “explor[e] the reverse” of reality—especially the reality for freed slaves in the late 1800s making new lives, founding new towns—and so she portrayed “exclusivity by the very black-skinned.” It’s in purported “defense” of Ruby that its men unleash a horrific assault on their neighbors at the Convent: women they condemn as outsiders though they’ve known them for years.
The novel starts in this violence that ends a world, violence that claims itself as defense. The men of Ruby are infuriated by the behavior of the Convent’s women at a recent town wedding—this triggers their violence, along with other rumors, shames, fears. Any incident would probably do. They want to destroy a place where women receive each other. The Convent refuses their control and order: women there lack men, they lack God as defined by Ruby’s strict churches, they somehow sustain themselves without Ruby’s banks and institutions. They associate freely, practice their own unruly beliefs, wear “no-fit dirty dresses.”
Each chapter is named for a woman. We move between women who live in Ruby and women who live out at the Convent, exiled from their previous lives. These two communities’ stories convey larger histories: people who have been excluded and exploited come together to build a new place; to shelter one another; or to exclude and kill others in turn.
In this novel, places are haunted not just by the histories its characters know, but worlds beyond that. The convent’s former nuns (now all dead and gone) ran “a schoolroom, where stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget.” Native figures and specters of Native history thread throughout—appearing within and beyond the story that’s being told.
The novel’s title bears hope alongside irony. Any history of “paradise” tells of bad deeds done now for some later reward. (Morrison wanted to title the novel War but was declined by her publishers.) The novel documents life at the Convent, but doesn’t idealize it. The women there frustrated each other and fought, they didn’t choose each other—they just chose to keep being together here. They were pushed out of other places toward one another. Most leave and return; so when they’re killed here, they could have been elsewhere. They care imperfectly for each other and they care for others who show up on their doorstep—including the men of Ruby in their states of need. They know one another’s ghosts.
Morrison’s narration is unsentimental and evades ideology or authorial assertions; she stays close to these women’s frictions and desires and abilities, their memories and chores. She doesn’t narrate things they don’t wish to speak of. This challenges expected hierarchies of significance—the reader tries to make conclusions, to sort out events and identities, in the terms and meanings we typically expect. But instead here’s the thick troubled loving partiality of consciousness, the sensations of a body in time, mysteries of death, indeterminate legacy of past genocides. The author doesn’t prioritize our desire to know, our knowing illusions. And so amid these entangled lives and their specific sufferings, readers might nearly overlook the significance of these women’s care for one another. They’re sustaining an improvised collectivity. It may eventually include us, the novel’s readers. We too are “shouldering the endless work… down here in paradise” that the novel’s final passage (not without irony) invokes.
So, this is no utopia. But it’s a place to live and work together.
4
An ugly detour to a different kind of gathering place: the online comment section. When Morrison passed away in 2019, to some publishers, writers, and readers, the short 2006 open letter was, as mentioned, foremost in her oeuvre.
“Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winning author and critic of Israel, dead at 88,” reads the headline of Morrison’s obituary in The Jerusalem Post. According to its website, “The Jerusalem Post is the oldest and largest English-language daily newspaper in Israel and the most-read English news website in Israel and the Jewish world.” The first eight paragraphs of the newspaper’s obituary of Morrison discuss her purported criticisms of Israel. The only source to which they refer is that one letter. “Morrison’s views on Israel were seen as especially painful because she was an iconoclastic figure who had challenged so many conventions about race and oppression,” the article notes condescendingly in the eighth paragraph, before briefly summarizing her writing career and her receipt of the Nobel Prize. The concluding sentence suggests that Morrison may not be welcome in conversations about the Holocaust or Jewish literature: “In 2015, when she was asked to write the introduction to a collection of the complete works of Primo Levi—an Italian Jewish writer and chemist who wrote extensively of his experiences in the Holocaust—the choice generated some controversy.”
Comments on this article, and on similar pieces, are full of racism and hate. We could categorize them: those that describe Morrison’s success as affirmative action; or that mock another Black woman alongside her (Oprah, Ayanna Presley); or that also include frank racism against Palestinians. I’ll spare us the quotations. Some milder illustrative phrases: “She was another in a long line of Black intellectual Jew haters. Her books weren’t so great either”; “She won’t be missed”; “If I knew this notorious antisemite was going to up and croak, I would have ordered a large cake to celebrate. So long and good riddance.”
If this letter triggered hate and racism, it must have “mattered”—is that my argument? Is that a good measure of effect? Despite the intensity of responses like these, Morrison’s fate was not like that of, say, the women in the Convent in Paradise. And she did not share in the fate of the hundreds of Palestinian writers, journalists, and artists in Gaza whom Israel has targeted and killed since 2023. Nor the thousands more displaced, injured, impoverished by occupation and war.
Yet upon her death, in corners of the internet which is also the world, a checkpoint: did you ever criticize the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians?
At a checkpoint, ranks close. IDs are demanded. People with weapons decide who you are.
5
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
This is the start of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea—Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre, Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic” re-envisioned through her origins in the West Indies. It’s a canonical work of postcolonial and feminist literature. Morrison surely knew it. At the start of Paradise, she’s having a conversation: They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.
If you know Paradise, you know I’ve only told part of the story. The beginning is just the beginning. “They shoot the white girl first”: you’d assume that later in the novel, you’ll find out who this is. That’s how plot works, how meaning accumulates. No. The reader learns much about each woman at the Convent, but we don’t learn each woman’s race. So we can’t say for sure who this white girl is.
In the preface to Paradise, Morrison lays out her project: to “disrupt racial discourse altogether by signaling then erasing it”; “to produce something that could be called race-specific/race-free language.” Race and color are fundamental to the town Ruby: the racism that led to the town’s creation; the reversed racial hierarchy they enforce. Over at the Convent, gender is definitive (only women live there), but race eludes the reader. It’s not clearly signified in the many pages we spend with these women. “With that opening sentence,” Morrison writes, “I wanted to signal 1) the presence of race as hierarchy and 2) its collapse as reliable information.”
She anticipates the range of responses. Me, I was the kind of reader, a fool, who kept trying to figure it out (so who is the white girl?). I was sure I’d missed something, sure I could solve this mystery—these characters would produce their IDs, if I kept demanding! I looked for answers long past the point when I should have realized what new experience, what new place, Morrison was inviting me into. I was humbled.
In Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, you may recall, the narrator herself is white. It’s just that she and her mother aren’t white in the right way, in the eyes of the right whites: “But we were not in their ranks.” That sentence comes right after the first, destabilizing it. As in Morrison’s novel, this opening shows that hierarchy is relentless; it can and will kill you. Yet the information it relies on may not be reliable; identity itself is not reliable. The right info, the right ID, may not save you.
In Paradise, the residents of Ruby are driven west, onto stolen land, first by the aftermath of enslavement, then by the ongoing dispossession they and their families suffer. Yet their suffering doesn’t save them morally, and it won’t save the women they target. The men of Ruby enforce their own hierarchy and its policing. They become perpetrators of the horrors at the start of the novel.
Readers may find a warning here, and perhaps a lens on the trajectory of Zionism. The perpetrators of today’s genocide enforce the hierarchies within Zionist settlement and occupation through to their conclusion: liquidation. Their ideology metabolizes the extreme suffering of the Holocaust into extreme violence.
I’m thinking too of Renee Good, a white girl whose ID card stopped working. Information doesn’t work like you want. In the video, when Good is still alive, she’s talking to the men filming her through her car’s open window. She’s a citizen, supposedly not the target of ICE agents. Her expression is open, her half-smile warm, maybe a bit ironic. She’s blonde and blue-eyed. She’s both Madonna and child when she says the last sentence she’s heard to say: “I’m not mad at you.” She’s showing the classic face of a white woman, trying to mollify a powerful man in our old mode. He shoots her in the face.
6
Some accounts of Morrison’s career claim that quitting her job at Random House was definitive to her writing. Years after the publication of Beloved, Morrison composed a short preface to the novel. It describes the end of her day job as the novel’s start. Dan Sinykin characterizes this quitting as liberatory. He suggests that Morrison couldn’t have written Beloved until free of that job’s white context, its wearying structures. Indeed, he reads the novel as an allegory that critiques the publishing industry.
Others see the relationship between Morrison the editor and Morrison the writer differently. Dana Williams views Morrison’s editorial work as continuous with her writing. Both are work toward Black empowerment, Black collectivity, Black liberation. To Williams, when Morrison leaves her day job at Random House, it’s mainly practical—she needs more time to write, and she now makes enough from writing that she doesn’t need a day job (and publishing, as Morrison also noted variously, has never paid well). Charlotte Terrell notes that Morrison “tells [Hilton] Als that editing, teaching, and writing are all ‘one job.’”
Lines blur; the theme is continuity and openness, not borders. Terrell traces how Morrison’s accounts of working in publishing are often accompanied by accounts of other work:
she supplements this account [of the low pay at Random House] with an anecdote of how she would send money made from freelance work to editee and fellow writer [Toni Cade] Bambara in the guise of made-up writing prizes; how friends would turn up unannounced to cook her dinner; how she and her friends would watch one another’s children; and so on…
These intimacies, understood as forms of care work, represent a politics of black feminist solidarity and collectivity which were operating in the context of the Civil Rights movement.
These intimacies, understood as forms of care work, represent a politics of black feminist solidarity and collectivity which were operating in the context of the Civil Rights movement.
What can we invent together, as our institutions and professions betray our values, as we work through the days of their slow collapse?
7
Palestine is a mode of living, an experience. But it’s also a position of witnessing, from a position that can teach us. If you are listening, it becomes so natural that you care, and you create a connection of care toward others that is not limited to the borders of the nation-state or to Palestine as such.
This is the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, in an interview from 2021. The mention of “witnessing” in Palestine now bears a monstrous shadow: witnessing atrocity, witnessing genocide. Yet in the Palestine that Shibli describes, which is a mode of living, the word witnessing invokes freedom. This freedom feels responsive and responsible. From the position of witnessing, one is free to listen, to care, to connect, to move through positions of teaching and learning, editing and writing, mourning and creating, marching and publishing. Like how the Convent’s doors, borders, ranks were open. This freedom asks your humility, your work of connecting in turn.
I worked on two of Shibli’s novels in translation as a young editor. A big responsibility, but at that day job I had a mentor who always invited me further into literature and its making, taught me how to do the good work. I first encountered the wonder of Shibli’s writing in a 2007 Words Without Borders anthology, which includes an essayistic story of hers, “Faint Hints of Tranquillity,” translated and introduced by Anton Shammas. The story takes place in Palestine in 2002 and ends with the beginning of the siege on Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. In the distinct way of Shibli’s work it progresses through an intense, defamiliarizing focus on oblique details that become sites of new meaning. In Shibli’s fiction, sensory detail often seems surer than thinking. Thinking may be a path that betrays you, a fever that can’t burn off the unthinkable. Information—rationality—isn’t reliable. At a key moment a woman whose house has been destroyed by the Israeli military—whose husband has been brain-damaged by their violence—is looking, above all, amid the loss of everything, for her ID card. As the narrator traces the so-called cycle of violence (camp incursions; suicide bombings), “outrage follow[ing] outrage,” she notes the failures of linear narrative, the writer’s own lack of control: “Chekhov says that a pistol hanging on the wall in act 1 must eventually go off in act 3. But, in reality, when the smell of blood spreads out here, it’s bound to spread out there.”
These days—the smell of blood spreading—the title War seems more fitting than the title Paradise. Irony can’t be dark enough. I think the role of writer/editors is still to look toward the potential, the text that may exist beyond and within the text in front of us. In this interview, Shibli points toward her Palestine, a place like the Convent, where the openness of borders exists because it is practiced. Moment by moment, people listen. They don’t need your ID card; they don’t close ranks. But if you’re there, you have to keep doing the work of caring, in the face of any trouble. If you’re there, you’re witnessing, listening, day by day, task by task, sentence by sentence, book by book, open to what’s happened before you, the horrors committed and suffered that shaped the path of each person including yourself, a person you can’t always specify. You stay open to the fact that this place is collective, not yours, though you contribute your work and yourself. Sometimes you’ll find yourself elsewhere (suddenly back in Ruby, perhaps), having closed yourself off.
This place, this position, it may be beyond one name as such; writers represent it differently, inviting themselves and you into this mode. I’m still learning how to get there. I would be nowhere without the work of these women. These days I keep a phrase close at hand, try to put it to use, stay loud and clear: Free Palestine.
Works Cited
“A Letter from 18 Writers.” The Nation, August 18, 2006. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/letter-18-writers/tnamp/
Brown, Hannah. “Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Winning Author and Critic of Israel, Dead at 88.” The Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2019. https://www.jpost.com/international/toni-morrison-nobel-prize-winning-author-and-critic-of-israel-dead-at-88-597870
Mahdawi, Arwa. “‘Gaza Must Be Eliminated’: Israel’s Airwaves Are Filled with Pro-Genocide Propaganda.” The Guardian, June 27, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel-gaza-propaganda
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Knopf, 1997. Foreword by the author appears in the 2014 Vintage International edition.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. W.W. Norton, 1982.
Shibli, Adania. “Faint Hints of Tranquillity.” Trans. Anton Shammas. Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers. Eds. Samantha Schnee, Alane Salierno Mason, and Dedi Felman. Anchor Books, 2007.
———. “Palestine as a Position of Witnessing: An Interview with Adania Shibli.” Interview by Claudia Steinberg. World Literature Today (Summer 2021). https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2021/summer/palestine-position-witnessing-conversation-adania-shibli-claudia-steinberg
Sinykin, Dan. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2023.
———.“Why Toni Morrison Left Publishing.” Literary Hub, October 24, 2023. https://lithub.com/why-toni-morrison-left-publishing/
Terrell, Charlotte. “Reading with Toni Morrison: Literary Publics, Editing, and the Work of Authorial Persona.” Narrative 29, no. 2 (May 2021): 239–257. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nar.2021.0016
Williams, Dana A. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship. Amistad, 2025.
Hilary Plum
Hilary Plum is a writer, editor, and teacher in Cleveland. Recent work includes the novel State Champ, the long poem Important Groups, and the essay collection Hole Studies.