Truth In Toni Morrison's The Onion

The onion believes the human seeks a truth buried in its heart. It believes the human cares for it - why else would the human cry, but out of a sense of guilt? it seems to think- and this is the most basic truth for the onion. From there, the onion expands its truths; the human is fanatical and melodramatic. The human cannot see that what it searches for does not exist. The human is inevitably doomed to a death by emotion. Thinking itself clever, the onion assumes it has built a tower of truths- a magnificently garnished, immortal spire- when in reality, it has built a shack made of twigs, primed to collapse at the slightest upset, and here is that upset: the onion overthinks everything. By way of slight syntactical choices and the situation
that the characters are in, Suji Swock Kim implies that the onion is the one seeking a truth that does not exist.
Suji Swock Kim’s Monologue for an Onion has some prominent themes of hidden truths wrapped under a few layers of subtext. Mentions of discarded “husks” and “skins”, call upon imagery of stripping away walls to reveal one’s true self, while mentions of “veils” alludes to the theme of obscured views. Ironically, the imagery of discarded husks and skins is linked to the onion’s analysis of the human and what is at their core as a subversion of this theme; not the hidden truth, but the hidden lie.
The most basic of the onion’s fabricated truths is that the human cares for it enough to cry, despite there being breadcrumbs throughout the poem that hint that this is not the case. The onion itself seems to know that its shreds are “stinging”, yet it fails to fathom that those stinging shreds are exactly why the human cries (19).