Tag: Toni Morrison

Here’s to you Toni Morrison…

Born February 18th, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison would have celebrated her 90th birthday today. She won’t be doing that of course, but very many far and wide will give pause for thought this day and raise a glass in her honour, and remember a most remarkable writer and woman.

And that is what The New York Times does with their “Essential Toni Morrison” today, from which I quote.

…The questions [posed in a 2002 lecture] seem wholly relevant : “To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”

In everything Morrison wrote, she offered narratives that revealed the journeys of characters, specific but universal, flawed and imperfect, with a deeply American desire for freedom and adventure. One might say that because her characters were almost exclusively African-American, the quest to be free — in mind, body and spirit — was the consistent adventure. She was also a masterful crafter of windows; when you opened a book of hers, the worlds you entered were so rich with detail, you could feel the molecules around you change as if you’d just taken a long flight and were descending onto the tarmac in a town or city where you’d never been…

Veronica Chambers, The New York Times, Feb. 18 2021

The fine introduction by Veronica Chambers leads on to a selection of works, each accompanied by equally thoughtful text. For those, especially younger people who are encountering Toni Morrison for the first time, perhaps at college or of their own volition, the piece offers some guidance as to where to start, and for us others a reminder to return to Morrison again and again, and find in one of her stories or essays that which we only now “get” with the passing of time and an accumulation of knowledge and experience.

On Toni Morrison

A few days later and the tributes, and love, for Toni Morrison have no end! Amongst the many, Jesmyn Ward has contributed a longer piece at The New York Times. I have read in the last days so much in this vein from younger, a lot younger, writers – black, women but not only – who Ms. Morrison has touched and inspired, who have learnt her lessons on the power of language to pass on to new generations – beyond her literary greatness this too will surely be an enduring legacy.

And here is her 1993 Nobel Lecture – whereby that latter word can not adequately describe the beauty of her words and the narrative voice she chooses, and in audio to be heard as she delivered it twenty-six years ago.

That this should have been said a quarter of a century before an Internet gone haywire and a President equally so:

…The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…

 Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 13 Aug 2019.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

In life Toni Morrison pleaded with words – the words of her novels, stories and essays – for a greater human language that is universal in its embrace of the individual, the “other” – not in its “sameness”. It was not the cacophony of unintelligible sound that doomed The Tower of Babel, rather an unwillingness to share in the myriad of other languages – cultures, points of view. She says: “…unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction …We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

It was certainly the measure of this most remarkable life.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

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