She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
– Sixo on why he loves the Thirty-Mile Woman in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
A few days ago, as part of my regular and obligatory internet search for anything related to Toni Morrison, I came across a quiz in the UK Guardian, put together to mark the author's 80th birthday on February 22 this year.[1] How well do you know the author?, your score at the end of the quiz was meant to clarify. I scored 9 out of 10 and the verdict was unequivocal: Love - You have a strong feeling for Morrison's work, but some of it is blind. Perhaps. Perhaps not. All I know is that at the moment I would be very satisfied if I woke up and found myself transformed into Toni Morrison. I would settle, and be very happy indeed, even if I was just half of Toni. The metamorphosis, of course, would come up against many obstacles and necessitate many adaption strategies on my part: I am not a woman, I am not American, I am not famous, and I’m certainly not wise, magnificent and 80 years old. But one can work around these inconveniences for desire is a powerful force that gets only stronger when the heart is full of love and willingness.
The yearning has nothing to do with the accolades bestowed upon her, though the woman has amassed some of the most coveted honours in the literary world: the Nobel Prize for Literature (1993), the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Jefferson Lecture (“the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities"), and recently France's Legion of Honour (the country's highest decoration, usually reserved for French nationals but sometimes bestowed on citizens of other nations). If decorations are the measure against which we weigh literary success, of Morrison we can safely say 'Not bad.' Not bad at all. But my fantasy has very little to do with these accolades even though they have decidedly served as cement to her status as "the closest thing [America] has to a national writer"[2] or as "the globally acceptable face of American culture."[3]
My Toni-Morrison desire is anchored by other objectives: the ability to write the way only she does, speak the way she does, and – why not? – look the way she does. When I read a passage from a Toni Morrison novel, I know I am reading a passage produced by Toni Morrison’s hand (or head – depending on how you view the creative process). Moreover, I feel her writing shaping ambivalent internal responses in me that other works almost never evoke. When I read Paradise (1997), her first offering after winning the Nobel Prize, I remember suddenly having to stop reading. Back-track, re-read – now fully awake, stop again. I had experienced a sudden jolt, a movement of upheaval inside; awoken by a visceral command to awareness, a wakefulness that felt as physical as it was emotional and psychological but above all spiritual: a novel had never done this to me. I had just read an excerpt in which the character of the Baptist preacher, Richard Misner, is in prayer, asking God to forgive him for having lost his temper whilst presiding over a tense wedding ceremony a few hours earlier. The passage worked as a notation to some unfamiliar piece of classical music; slow and meditative at first, rising, wavelike, by decibels, to a crescendo...then breaking down, wavelike, to another start point, then up again, following an orchestration so beautiful it left me wondering how a human hand could be responsible for such crafting. When I re-read it, it seemed to evade all attempts at analysis; it was very difficult to see what exactly in it made it so moving, how exactly the arrangement of what was in it made it carry such an impact:
Down on his knees, Richard Misner was angry at his anger, and at his mishandling of it. Used to obstacles, adept at disagreement, he could not reconcile the level of his present fury with what seemed to be its source. He loved God so much it hurt, although that same love sometimes made him laugh out loud. And he deeply respected his colleagues. For centuries they had held on. Preaching, shouting, dancing, singing, absorbing, arguing, counseling, pleading, commanding. Their passion burned or smoldered like lava over a land that had waged war against them and their flock without surcease. A lily-livered war without honor as either its point or reward; an unprincipled war that thrived as much on the victor's cowardice as on his mendacity. On stage and in print he and his brethren had been the heart of comedy, the chosen backs for parody’s knife. They were cursed by death row inmates, derided by pimps. Begrudged even miserly collection plates. Yet through all of that, if the Spirit seemed to be slipping away they had held on to it with their teeth if they had to, grabbed it in their fists if need be. They took it to buildings ready to be condemned, to churches from which white congregations had fled, to quilt tents, to ravines and logs in clearings. Whispered it in cabins lit by moonlight lest the Law see. Prayed for it behind trees and in sod houses, their voices undaunted by roaring winds. From Abyssinian to storefronts, from Pilgrim Baptist to abandoned movie houses; in polished shoes, worn boots, beat-up cars and Lincoln Continentals, well fed or malnourished, they let in the light, flickering low or blazing like a comet, pierce the darkness of days. They wiped white folks’ spit from the faces of black children, hid strangers from posses and police, relayed life-preserving information faster than the newspaper and better than the radio. At sickbeds they looked death in the eye and mouth. They pressed the heads of weeping mothers to their shoulders before conducting their life-gouged daughters to the cemetery. They wept for chain gangs, reasoned with magistrates. Made whole congregations scream. In ecstasy. In belief. That death was life, don’t you know, and every life, don’t you know, was holy, don’t you know, in His eyesight. Rocked as they were by the sight of evil, its snout was familiar to them. Real wonder, however, lay in the amazing shapes and substances God’s grace took: gospel in times of persecution; the exquisite wins of people forbidden to compete; the upright righteousness of those who let no boot hold them down—people who made Job’s patience look like restlessness. Elegance when all around was shabby.
Paradise is a scathing critique of the notion of (black) racial purity set in an imaged all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, during the 1970s and it is the last book in the trilogy that began with Beloved (1987) followed by Jazz (1992). The trilogy creatively renders, respectively, the three primary socio-cultural moments in African American history: slavery and Reconstruction; the Jazz Age and the Great Migration; and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The dream of a perfect all-black community turns sour when the men of Ruby decide to attack the five menless women living in the Convent 17 miles outside the town for fear that their presence is the exemplar of the corrupting influence the Founding Fathers had worked so hard to rid themselves of before they came here. The novel is Morrison’s “bravura performance” – it is ambitious, both is scale and themes, and possibly her most difficult work to date. It charts the history and relationships of 15 black families in a town of 360 residents, a Convent with five women each with their own back story, all set to a timeline that stretches over the lifespan of three generations from the 1890s to the 1970s in different American landscapes. Ruby is a town “deafened by the roar of its own history,” and as readers we quickly understand that Morrison actually expects us to understand all the nuanced intricacies of these characters’ complicated genealogies and relationships as well as their correlation to the cataclysms of the broader socio-cultural history that informs them. No doubt, she asks, expects too much from her readers, but thankfully, the novel begins provocatively enough: They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement – rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns.
The “white girl” is never identified in the novel, a particularly frustrating decision for readers hung up on racial classifications as some of Ruby’s blue black “8-rock” (very dark) founding families are. Before settling at Ruby, these families and the generation before them have been chased out of light-skinned black towns for being too dark or too poor to stay, and with the stiff pride that is usually the result of repeated rejection, the “Disallowing” as they call it, they head out to seek their own refuge. This self-imposed isolation of Ruby, an exile from larger America, is utopian and Morrison says the novel is her meditation, if you will, and an “interrogation of the whole idea of paradise, the safe place, the place full of bounty, where no one can harm you.” But because of its separateness there is also the spectre of exclusivity about Ruby, something Morrison also wanted to explore because of the paradox that “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”[4] To the residents of Ruby, the Convent women represent these outsiders; the scapegoats for all that goes wrong in the townfolk's lives, and as such the Convent women must be destroyed.
Paradise has been described as a theological novel, and the above extract of Richard Misner in prayer makes it clear why this description is not entirely untrue. However, the appropriate description, I think, is to call Paradise a deeply spiritual book, with its focus on the interpretation of love between God and human beings in community. (Beloved, the first book of the trilogy, focused on parental love between mother and daughter, and Jazz on romantic love between Joe and Dorcas.) Not that this clarification wins it any particular favours; in a deeply secular age as ours religious or spiritual books (brimming with damning lines such as “He loved God so much it hurt” or “Made whole congregations scream. In ecstasy. In belief. That death was life, don’t you know, and every life, don’t you know, was holy, don’t you know, in His eyesight”) can easily be ignored without much worry even amongst those you’d expect to stand back and offer paeans for sheer literary resourcefulness. Case in point: the British literary critic James Wood (whom I respect on most literary judgements), mistakenly dismisses it as “a novel babyishly cradled in magic,” and continues to desecrate it as being “sentimental, evasive, and cloudy,” a judgement that was reflected in a number of other early reviews that slated the novel for its convoluted plot.
Morrison had several occasions to defend herself against such criticism, and was responding to such accusations when she said “In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.”[5] (And, as this quote clearly demonstrates: she is as articulate and captivating in speech as she is in writing; her words read like finely chiselled sentences from some sagely text.) Buts she has also said, “For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.” Paradise does leave behind a trail of hunger because its ending is “open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.” But Paradise also does leave some satisfaction or plenty of food for thought; one thinks about it for a very long time after putting it down – in fact, it just never leaves you. Or at least, it never left me at all.
Toni Morrison on the reception of Paradise
As if anticipating this dismissal of her work from such perspectives, already in a 1984 essay, ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,’[6] Morrison contended:
I don’t like to find my books condemned as bad or praised as good, when that condemnation or that praise is based on criteria from other paradigms. I would much prefer that they were diminished or embraced on the success of their accomplishment within the culture out of which I write.
I don’t regard Black literature as simply books written by Black people, or simply as literature written about Black people, or simply as literature that uses a certain mode of language in which you sort of drop the g’s. There is something very special and very identifiable about it and it is my struggle to find that elusive but identifiable style.
Not that writers should be treated – critically – they way they dictate, but Wood’s and other critiques of Morrison’s work sometimes fail to place and evaluate her project outside the already-established criteria of (western) literary criticism towards whose canon Morrison, anyway, has an ambiguous relationship as shown by her analyses in her book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). Not that Morrison’s work fails to measure up when evaluated solely within these “neutral” parameters or that her work isn’t inspired by and even relatable to some of the most canonical of the works valued by the gatekeepers of the literary establishment. As a child she loved Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, at university she wrote a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and today comparisons between her and Noble Prize winning Faulkner are standard in literary criticism concerning her.[7] Commenting on this last trend, Larry Schwartz states that “Faulkner is the leading benchmark against which modern American literary greatness is measured, and it seems Morrison has been declared his successor.”[8] However valuable the gesture, nonetheless, confining criticism of Morrison’s work exclusively with the established modes of literary criticism robs the work of much of its fresh and potent power. Critics such as Wood, well versed in literary traditions of the West and seemingly ignorant of African and African-American (and Latin American) mythologies, fall into the trap of condemning or praising Morrison’s work from a partial perspective. As Connie Ann Kirk points out,
... while elements from biblical and classical Roman and Greek mythology also exist in Morrison’s work, African myths do, indeed, play an especially important role. These mythic elements root the novels in the African Tradition and provide a spiritual and cultural bridge between the history of her characters’ ancestors and the lives of the characters at the times the novels are set in the United States.[9]
However, Denise Heinze reminds us that
But Morrison is also a mythmaker whose ontology, though nebulous, finds meaning in nature, primitivism, the past, the supernatural, and the spiritual love – certainly the stuff that dreams are made of, but not likely to be the equation to satisfy an increasingly hardheaded, advanced, and sophisticated society.[10]
This “magic” that Woods sees and critiques in Paradise, therefore, is integral to Morrison’s literary world and therefore defining of her style, and can’t be dismissed or wished away as irrelevant. It is present in all of her work, including Beloved – which Woods, interestingly, praised.
Beloved (1987), of course, is Morrison’s most famous novel, made even more so by the 1998 movie adaptation starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Jonathan Demme of The Silence of the Lambs fame. It is also her most unanimously revered work which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and in 2006 a New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it as the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years, outdoing works by Don DeLillo (whom, by the way, James Wood also has problems with), Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike.[11] At the heart of the book is Sethe, a runaway slave woman who decides to kill her children than to see them enslaved. Beloved, a symbol of slaves that suffered and perished in the history of America, is the dead 2 year old daughter who returns from the beyond to haunt Sethe and demand retribution. The book weaves realist and supernatural elements in dealing with some very intense subjects: slavery, brutality, rape, infanticide, ghost haunting, ostracisation, loneliness and depression. Without meaning to trivialise, but the one memorable part of it that for me confirmed the greatness of its author was when Morrison was writing about the coming of winter in Ohio: “In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.” Even when writing about the weather (a traditionally worn out subject both in writing and in everyday speech), Morrison still manages to vivify it. I was very impressed, I even laughed. And then there was the scene in which Paul D, who was at Sweet Home plantation with Sethe, is directed by the Cherokee to follow the tree flowers as his guide from the slavery of the American South to the freedom of its Northern states; the passage rendering this journey to freedom is easily one of the most evocative passages in all of literature:
Alone, the last man with buffalo hair among the ailing Cherokee, Paul D finally woke up and, admitting his ignorance, asked how he might get North. Free North. Magical North. Welcoming, benevolent North. The Cherokee smiled and looked around. The flood rains of a month ago had turned everything to steam and blossoms. / “That way,” he said, pointing. “Follow the tree flowers,” he said. “Only the tree flowers. As they go, you go. You will be where you want to be when they are gone.” / So he raced from dogwood to blossoming peach. When they thinned out he headed for the cherry blossoms, then magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut and prickly pear. At last he reached a field of apple trees whose flowers were just becoming tiny knots of fruit. Spring sauntered north, but he had to run like hell to keep it as his traveling companion. From February to July he was on the lookout for blossoms. When he lost them, and found himself without so much as a petal to guide him, he paused, climbed a tree on a hillock and scanned the horizon for a flash of pink or white in the leaf world that surrounded him. He did not touch them or stop to smell. He merely followed in their wake, a dark ragged figure guided by the blossoming plums.
This is how Paul D’s journey from slavery to freedom is narrated. Nature is his guide; its time, its unfolding; its petals. It is all very beautiful, organic, simple, folksy, rhythmic, unsentimental, profound. And incredibly moving. “There you go about the feelings again.” That’s right – it’s about how it feels; its power to transform you. Beloved is seductive in a way that a straight-up slave narrative can not (and maybe should not) be. The novel borrows aspects from the traditional American slave narratives, but it isn’t one of them. Even though it is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner it is not trying to be a historically faithful rendering of Garner’s life. Its entire strengths lie in what it isn’t – what it doesn’t voice, what it doesn’t show, what it doesn’t do. It is a novel more about forgetting (whilst commemorating) than it is about remembering and perpetuating the memory of slavery. Like Sethe, the novel is partial attempt at “beating back the past,” but of course the past keeps coming back to intrude into the present. The past, when it returns, in the incarnation of the resurrected Beloved, threatens to devour almost everyone in its midst. Key historical events are not discussed, and when raised Morrison quickly glazing past then for preference of the inner and everyday events of the lives of her characters:
No more discussions, stormy or quiet, about the true meaning of the Fugitive Bill, the Settlement Fee, God's Ways and Negro pews; antislavery, manumission, skin voting, Republicans, Dred Scott, book learning, Sojourner's high-wheeled buggy, the Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio, and the other weighty issues that held them in chairs, scraping the floorboards or pacing them in agony or exhilaration.
Another instance is the renedering of the key scene of the novel, when the circumstances of Beloved’s death, the “dark and coming thing,” are finally revealed. It is so brief you almost miss it:
Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere – in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at – the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother's swing.
It takes a while to figure out that this is where Sethe kills Beloved and almost kills her other children. It’s already Chapter 16 of the novel and we have been prepared for what is to come, but when it actually does occur we almost miss it. This attitude to key moments in the narrative and key moments in history is not isolated to Beloved but is characteristic of all of Morrison’s work, including Paradise. The attitude of the narrator in Jazz, for instance, writing about the mood of Harlem in 1926 (the year the novel opens on), is very forward-looking and eager to unburden the shackles of (Southern) history in anticipation of the exciting prospects of the present and the future. “Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.” But nothing is ever entirely ahead: history always comes back, haunted and haunting, but the present and the future are all that the characters ever have for sure and they remain Morrison’s chief preoccupation.
My own personal history with Morrison is itself another tale I’d like to share. I came into Morrison the same way she came into the literary scene: via her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), about a self-loathing poor black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wants to have blue eyes in order to overcome her view of her ugliness and be considered pretty by her society. “Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike.” (Writers take note: Morrison wrote the novel in the early hours of morning while raising two sons and holding a day job as an editor at Random House.) The novel was a critique of society’s damaging ideas about physical beauty and romantic love, and equating these with desirability and virtue. “In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.” For the widespread dissemination of this contemptible, corrupted and corrupting message, Morrison places a hefty share of the blame on the essentially anti-black popular culture’s door and its avid promotion of “the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.” Socialised by her “education in the movies” about the code of society’s standards of beauty, Pecola was unable “to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.”
Morrison on why and how she wrote The Bluest Eye
I recall my feelings and reactions to this book as if my encounter with it were yesterday. I read it 6 or 7 years ago, when I was the youngest and only black member of a book club and this novel was one of the circulating books in our collection (unlike most book clubs each person read whatever book they wanted to read each month). I had a vague knowledge of who Morrison was, possibly via reading bell hooks, with whom I was starting to get obsessed and who, in turn, was an avid Toni Morrison fan, The Bluest Eye being her particular favourite. The book was the first of ‘unlike-anything-I’ve-come-across’ experiences in connection with Morrison; it was unlike anything I’d ever read and I was not left entirely comfortable with what I felt nor did I have the language to convey what my thoughts were about this book. It was the first time, really, that I read a book that so invigorated me but for which I had so little to say. I remember thinking, “They probably think I haven’t read it, that I am talking about a book I have no knowledge of.” No doubt, some of it was difficult; it really was work to get through it and I am now certain there were parts where I had not fully understood what was going on. But the main obstacle was that it was difficult emotionally most especially; I felt I was working through so many issues I had not prepared myself to have to work through as the (black, no doubt) reader of the novel.
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding swept through him, but was quickly replaced by anger. Anger that he was powerless to help her. Of all the wishes people had brought him – money, love, revenge – this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.
It was a book, yes, about me, somehow; definitely; and people like me, written by one like me and – this being most important but totally foreign and the most uncomfortable element at that time: also written for me. Nothing had to be explained; I understood. Well, nothing was explained; Morrison knew we would understand. In bell hooks’ work I had already began trying to draw parallels between or lessons from the American black situation and the South African black condition – even if on just a psychological level – and this novel came and showed me just how deep the roots went, how dark and thick the blood in all our veins. I was not prepared for that – emotionally, psychologically; even spiritually and intellectually – and the memory of the book, Morrison’s name and her oeuvre were glacially shelved, never to be consciously evoked until my encounter with Beloved 3 or 4 years later. Interestingly: my interest in Beloved and in Morrison in general was (re)awakened by none other than bell hooks, with whom I had thankfully maintained and deepened a text-based teacher-student relationship during my period of un/willed segregation from Morrison.
It was easier, I suppose, to be with hooks during my development into early adulthood than it was to be with Morrison; with hooks the emotion and passion of devastating truths were there too but they were governed and controlled by the strictures of an intellectual (academic) argument, making them easier to penetrate the psyche. With Morrison on the other hand the emotions were left raw, in thrall only to the rhythmic structure and musicality of the language, lightly wrapped with this transparent but beautiful veil of black aesthetics: all that could bring you to tears and you might feel you’ll never emerge. But needless to say, my return to Morrison become a permanent one, populated with life changing encounters I quickly learnt to open myself to, willingly offering myself for the transformative episodes it offered me in abundance.
Despite all these profound exposures, with time I also began to appreciate that Morrison is also a very funny trickster, an aspect to her work that is often commented on in passing with the word “comedic” or, more aptly I suppose, “tragicomic.” Bearing in mind the kind of subjects she writes about it is actually an amazing, if necessary, feat that she can also manage to make the readers laugh – out loud – amidst all the pain and destruction she exposes them to. Her funny bone knows no bounds and is refreshingly uncurtailed by political correctness. In fact, it can be positively cruel. But delicious. Take for example the relationship between the female characters in Love (2003).
Heed lifted the casserole lid, then replaced it.
“Anything to annoy me,” she said.
“Looks delicious,” said Junior.
“Then you eat it,” said Heed.
Junior forked a shrimp into her mouth and moaned, “Mmmm, God she sure knows how to cook.”
“What she knows is, I don’t eat shellfish.”
Like Bill Cosy, the male character in Love around whom all the women’s lives exist, as editor at Random House in the 1970s Toni Morrison created a “playground for black people” where before there had been a begrudged presence. She was responsible for some of the most fascinating titles in to print in black writing. Some of the works she commissioned and/or oversaw included the works of Toni Cade Bambara (Gorilla, My Love – 1972, The Seabirds Are Still Alive – 1977, The Salt Eaters – 1979, Those Bones Are Not My Child – 1999); Chinweizu (West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slaves and the African Elite – 1975); Henry Dumas; Leon Forrest; Gayle Jones; James Haskins’ The Cotton Club; Muhammad Ali’s The Greatest (1975); Huey P. Newton’s To Die For the People; Ivan van Sertimer’s They Came Before Columbus (1976), Angela Y. Davis’ Women, Race and Class (1981), and The Black Book (1974), the famous but eccentric anthology of anything historical to do with black American history (maps, sheet music, slave auction notices, recipes, photographs, whatever) and beautifully compiled by Middleton A. Harris, Ernest Smith, Morris Levitt and Roger Furman. I concur with Lovalerie King in that this list of titles “is impressive in terms of sheer numbers, but more important in terms of the variety of genres and subgenres represented therein, and even more important in its inclusion of so many authors and texts of enduring significance and popularity.”[12] Also, working as an editor must have been of huge benefit to Morrison in ways that are probably not yet fully apparent. Four of her novels: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981) were published – by other publishers – whilst she worked at Random House. For instance, Morrison and Harris were instrumental in putting together The Black Book, and it was during the compilation of this book that Morrison came across the 1856 article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child” about Margaret Garner, who was the inspiration of Sethe in Beloved. Possibly there were other such moments of eureka or maybe just the honing of her own skills as a writer from working with and critiquing that of others.
Toni’s social criticism and political commentary: Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality (1992), Birth of a Nation ‘hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case (1997), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word (2009). Bill Clinton “black president” saga.
Toni Morrison (right) outside her Random House Office (which was then on 50th Street) with her younger son, Slade, and Angela Davis on March 28, 1974. Slade passed away on December 22, 2010 aged 45.
Toni’s social criticism and political commentary: Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality (1992), Birth of a Nation ‘hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case (1997), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word (2009). Bill Clinton “black president” saga.
Toni as literary critic: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
The only published short story: Racitatif (1983) In Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women ed. by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka.
No personal discussion of Morrison can be complete with saying something about her hair – I love Toni Morrison's hair! I find it scorn that people pretend not to notice it and therefore never ask her anything about it. Of course she would probably retort to such questions with some razor sharp comment about how racialised the question is (“Do you ever ask a white writer how they get their hair to be the way it is?” – I imagine her saying), but still, it is impossible not to notice it and find it striking. Even Zadie Smith has publically wondered about it: "The coils of her hair, winding black to grey and black again - they remain mysterious to me. Maybe she dyes it that way. There's just no way of telling." The hair lends Morrison an aura of a wise keeper of secrets or the personification of the old woman – “blind but wise;” who is the representation of “both the law and its transgression;” with a voice that is both “soft and stern” – that Morrison invoked in her Noble Prize Lecture.[13] In a simultaneously round-about but also direct manner the hair testifies to her formidable self-belief, her own sense of worthiness, and then maybe amplifies it. Especially in a time when black women are still not particularly pleased with the form of their natural hair and opt instead for hair extensions, relaxers, etc. But each to her own. Writing about Morrison’s legacy, Beaulieu has said that one “might argue that Morrison herself has become one of the ancestor figures she privileges in her work, guiding her readers to a much-needed understanding of the past in order that they might recognize the urgent promise of the future, and doing so with a wisdom and eloquence unparalleled in American letters,” and for me I think that assessment is not impaired at all by or complete without that shock of hair on her head. (Think of Einstein’s hair: Einstein, for me, is not Einstein without his 'electrified' old age hair.) If I ever wondered what an ancestor looks like – I don’t think I ever did, but if I ever did – Morrison comes close to providing a walking visual representation.
Questions, however, remain: How did a black, divorcee woman from Lorain rise to become one of America’s most revered voices via novels, literary criticism and contributions as a commissioning editor that are bent on unseating all of America’s most beloved illusions such as “the cult of domesticity and true womanhood, romantic love and ideal standards of beauty, capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, western culture and its obsession with technology, Christianity and science, and the collective notion of reality”? For instance, Baby Suggs’s parting wisdom in Beloved is to declare “There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks,” and I have often wondered how that reads or feels like to a white reader... To be sure, her acceptance in America was not immediate, and not withstanding Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic support of her work, it was winning the Nobel Prize in 1993 – six novels in her bag – that finally granted her the “license to strut.” Schwartz also argues that “Morrison simply takes for granted the evil of white racism, and tries to provide access to Black life without feeling compelled to explain it, without sparing feelings, and certainly without concern about white permission.” But he adds, “Morrison is imaginative enough, and the community is tough and sophisticated enough, to withstand and absorb all of the stories.”[14] So America cherishes her now, a display of so deep a devotion it leads Denise Heinze to wonder
... if Morrison’s novels function in the same way that the ghost of Beloved does – to haunt and torment a guilty conscience in need of absolution and redemption,” “for in each of her works Morrison launders one American ideal after another, while a huge contingency of Americans – male and female, black and white, rich and poor – wildly cheer her on. She is a mythbasher in a country where writers have been canonized for creating and perpetuating the myths that form the foundation of the American way of thinking.[15]
Yet,
If Morrison can Signify upon traditional American values, apparently without alienating her white readership, she does so because she employs traditional recognizable, often comfortable modes of storytelling, and because much of what she does write eventually leads back to the universal condition of being human. But for her, having witnessed the corruption of human values in the dominant society, that leading back or rediscovery of those values is best effected in black culture.[16]
However, not everyone is convinced: “In Morrison, oppression will be vilified, but it seems that capitalism and its elitist values are safe, just as they were with Faulkner.” Schwartz continues, and concludes, his essay by wryly noting that:
It is comforting to have a literary “genius” in the romantic tradition who gives voice to individual salvation in a racist, sexist, and duplicitous world -- an epic storyteller, a mythmaker, a seer. In short, Faulkner was anointed in 1950 to reconstitute literature as an aesthetic endeavor. Fifty years later, Morrison is elevated for fiction that does similar work. As Faulkner helped to carry the banner of individualism into the literary nationalism of the Cold War, Morrison represents the voices of Blacks and women in the cultural upheavals of the last quarter-century. For Morrison, racism and sexism are psychological disorders. And in each of her novels the central characters who do survive, find redemption, liberation, and justice in individual resistance, not as group or community even.
But Heinze insists that,
Though she validates the aesthetic qualities of the black community, Morrison is anything but apolitical. [...] By combing political consciousness with aesthetic sensibility, Morrison achieves a very delicate balance: without directly denouncing white society, she illustrates the demise of blacks who have adopted the corrupting influence of the white community. By indirection Morrison avoids the polarization of black and white humanity – one as inherently good, the other irrevocably corrupt – and thus allows all people to vicariously experience a rebirth through the black community.[17]
Yet with all of these precious gains absorbed and reabsorbed, what, nonetheless, remains as the most pertinent bit of Morrison’s to me at the moment is her counsel to other writers, the aspiring ones. What she has to say inspires and fuels me at present. Her reflections on the writing craft are very generous, inviting. For instance, at her banquet speech at the Nobel Prize she spoke of her joyful anticipation of “the company of Laureates yet to come. Those who, even as I speak, are mining, sifting and polishing languages for illuminations none of us has dreamed of;” those who “do not blink nor turn away.” One of her often cited quotes, “If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” is a testament to this generosity of spirit in encouragement. My personal favourite, however, is the following:
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for house and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding.’
So let this be the final wish - to ‘flood’ away – because though one might admire her much, and wish much to be like her, there is only one of her and there can never be another. My gratitude is deep for one who has given so generously to a stranger, and many others, oceans and many shores away.
When I teach creative writing, I always speak about how you have to learn to read your work; I don’t mean enjoy it because you wrote it. I mean, go away from it, and read it as though it is the first time you’ve ever seen it. Critique it that way. Don’t get involved in your thrilling sentences and all that.
Photos credits: Morrison, Slade and Davis: © Jill Krementz; Morrison dreadlocks: © Wattie Cheung, Camera Press; Morrison teaching at Yale University, 14 April 1974: © Jill Krementz
Photos credits: Morrison, Slade and Davis: © Jill Krementz; Morrison dreadlocks: © Wattie Cheung, Camera Press; Morrison teaching at Yale University, 14 April 1974: © Jill Krementz
[1] Guardian. February 22, 2011. Toni Morrison at 80 – quiz: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz/2011/feb/22/toni-morrison-80-quiz (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[2] Wendy Steiner. April 05, 1992. The Clearest Eye. The New York Times (Arts). URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/05/books/the-clearest-eye.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[3] Stuart Evers. October 31, 2008. The perils of being a literary superstar. Guardian (Books Blog). URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/oct/31/toni-morrison-oprah-winfrey-stardom (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[4] Conversation: Toni Morrison with Elizabeth Farnsworth. March 9, 1998. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript. Available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/morrison_3-9.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[5] Zia Jaffrey. Feb 1998. Toni Morrison: The Salon Interview. Salon. Available at: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_02int.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[6] In Mari Evans (ed.) Black Women Writers (1950 – 1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Doubleday
[7] See for instance: Phillip Weinstein. January 01, 2006. Faulkner 101: Toni Morrison and William Faulkner- Meditating on Race in America. Available at: http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Faulkner-101-Toni-Morrison-and-William-Faulkner (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[8] Larry Schwartz. 2002. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: The Necessity of a Great American Novel. Available at: http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/schwartz.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011). This is a thought provoking, wry, sarcastic but brilliant short and easy-to read essay.
[9] In Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu (ed.) 2003. The Tony Morrison Encyclopaedia. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. pg.1
[10] Denise Heinze. 1993. The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. pg. 3
[11] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html?ex=1305864000&en=d3f9cc78ce4c00b7&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[12] In Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu (ed.) 2003. The Tony Morrison Encyclopaedia. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. pg.110
[13] Listen to it here: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1502 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticXzFEpN9o (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[14] Larry Schwartz. 2002. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: The Necessity of a Great American Novel. Available at: http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/schwartz.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011)
[15] Denise Heinze. 1993. The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. pg. 3
[16] Ibid, pg. 8.
[17] Ibid, pg. 9.
The Zadie Smith quote on Toni Morrison's hair is from Smith's lecture, On the Road: American Writers and their Hair presented in Philadelphia on July 26 2001 at Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theatre and Music. Avalaible at: http://www.eyeshot.net/zadie.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011).
The Zadie Smith quote on Toni Morrison's hair is from Smith's lecture, On the Road: American Writers and their Hair presented in Philadelphia on July 26 2001 at Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theatre and Music. Avalaible at: http://www.eyeshot.net/zadie.html (Accessed: 09 September 2011).
