Toni Morrison died on Monday. Another of those I discovered later than many – but what is late but the proverbial better than the never to have. I don’t believe she wrote her stories for me nor was she speaking to me, but I listened in just the same, and she stretched my intellect and took my imagination to places I thought unknown, and found places that were always there – a sameness to be shared. Her wonderful essays made me think about things I may never have thought about, and remember what I thought was best forgot.
Tributes are everywhere to be found, from the famous and not so, through all races (a categorisation that Morrison denied and embraced with rage and love in equal measure) and places, genders and generations. And because it is the younger amongst us that will take her the farthest in the passing of time – here is the young Nigerian writer, Chigozie Obioma, in The Guardian, and because I have spent so much time of late with her (her words at least) I quote here Jesmyn Ward in The New York Times, in words as poetic as befits the magnificent Ms. Morrison.
Toni Morrison wrote to us again and again, exhorting our beauty, making us grapple with our pain, reaffirming our humanity. Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together. She loved us when we prayed and sang and made love and danced. She loved us when we lied and sliced throats and disowned our children. She loved us at our best and our broken. She called us forth in her pages and made us experience and understand ourselves with kindness, with deeper knowing of all we had survived, all we had not, all we had made, all we had unmade, all we had become, all we could be. How she knew us! How she sang us to the world! And now that she is gone, how we weep for our Beloved!
Jesmyn Ward, The New York Times, Aug. 6 2019