Original and challenging literary voice
Toni Morrison February 18, 1931-August 5, 2019
Toni Morrison, who has died at 88, was in 1993 the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and one of the 20th century’s most original and challenging literary voices.
Though she took up writing relatively late in her career — to “postpone the melancholy” of a failed marriage — her work came to enjoy great critical and commercial success, prompting the New York
Times to describe her as “the nearest America has to a national novelist”.
Drawing heavily on her own experiences growing up poor, female and black, Morrison sought to convey the experiences of AfricanAmericans through a prose style of lyrical simplicity that could also be unsettling in its intensity. She was forthright when describing her writing, and its intended audience: “I want to participate in developing a canon of black work,” she once declared, “writing about black Americans, for black Americans.”
Despite favourable reviews, her first two novels, The Bluest Eye and
Sula, did not sell well, and it was not until the Song of Solomon in 1977 and, particularly, the Pulitzer Prizewinning Beloved a decade later that her reputation was guaranteed.
Paradise was published in 1998 to a mixed reception — yet the book sold more than a million copies, thanks in no small part to being endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, and confirmed Morrison’s status as one of the foremost talents of her generation.
Unsurprisingly, she was no stranger to controversy.
Though the Nobel panel praised a “literary artist of the first rank”, some critics felt Morrison was the fortunate beneficiary of the new climate of “political correctness”. Beloved was panned by Stanley Crouch in New
Republic as being “written in order to enter American slavery into the bigtime martyr ratings contest”.
Morrison fiercely rejected such accusations, and saw her writing as based on intensely personal experience. Not as political as Alice Walker, she also resisted the temptation to sensationalise her own history like her other great black US contemporary, Maya Angelou.
Her admirers (who included not only Winfrey, but also President Bill Clinton and even Marlon Brando: “He found my novels funny — no one finds my novels funny”) felt she transcended the politics of race and gender. Salman Rushdie wrote that her books, though “created out of black experience”, “enrich the whole of literature”.
Morrison never forgot her roots. Of winning the Nobel, she declared: “I felt representative. I felt American. I felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever.”
The second of four children of George and Ramah Wofford, Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in the gritty steel town of Lorain, Ohio (“neither plantation nor ghetto”, she would later write). She changed her name at college because Chloe was hard to pronounce, but later rued that as pandering to convention.
The family had moved to Ohio from the southern states to escape racial tensions. But George Wofford, an intensely proud man and a shipwelder by trade, was forced during the worst of the Depression to work as a car washer and road construction worker to support his family.
Morrison would later recall the jubilation when he returned home one evening with his first steel job.
But she also recalled the Wofford household as “basically racist”. George believed whites were “genetically evil”, and distrusted “every word and every gesture of every white man on Earth”.
Her mother Ramah, though, was fired by the belief that the power of the community could overcome man’s inhumanity to man. A brave and determined woman, she would tear off the eviction notices put on the Wofford house, and write to President Roosevelt if there were maggots in her flour — an attitude which would prove influential to her daughter’s narratives.
Morrison attended the multi-racial Lorain High School, then moved to Washington DC to enrol at the allblack Howard University, but her hopes of finding a stimulating intellectual environment “full of brilliant black students” were disappointed: “We were treated like defective kids on the one hand . . . and ladies of the night on the other.”
Having graduated with a BA in English in 1953, she went on to a master’s degree at Cornell University, submitting a thesis on the theme of suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
After two years of teaching English at Texas southern University she returned to Howard as an instructor in the same subject in 1957. There she met the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison; the couple married in 1958, and had two sons. But the marriage was not a happy one and Toni turned to writing as a means of escape.
“It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination,” she recalled, “no will, no judgment, no perspective, no power, no authority, no self — I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.”
Joining a small, informal group of poets and writers, and one day finding herself short of any material to take to the meeting, she dashed off a story about a little black girl named Pecola Breedlove who wanted blue eyes — the genesis of The Bluest Eye.
She resigned from Howard in 1964, the year of her divorce, and took a job as a textbook editor for Random House. She soon found herself forced to juggle the various demands of fulltime employment with raising two sons, and she would rise at 5am to fit writing into this crowded schedule.
The Bluest Eye was finished in 1969; the novel, praised for its emotional range and poetic lyricism, explored the destructive consequences of what Toni Morrison saw as the most superficial aspect of human identity, aesthetic beauty.
The relationship between women was a theme Toni Morrison continued to explore in Sula.
Morrison turned to a new challenge for her third novel, Song of
Solomon, which concerned the personal odyssey of Malcolm “Milkman” Dead Jr.
It was a triumphant success, carrying off both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1978.
In recognition of her achievements, President Jimmy Carter appointed Morrison to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. The following year she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby.
The story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who in 1851 tried to kill her children rather than “have them suffer as she had done”, formed the basis of Beloved, commonly considered Morrison’s masterpiece. It was dedicated to the 60 million who died as a result of the slave trade, and powerfully explored the brutality of, in James Baldwin’s words, “this past, the Negro’s past, of rope, torture, castration, infanticide, rape”.
In addition to her novels she published two plays, and an influential critical work on race relations in literature.
In 2012 President Obama awarded Toni Morrison the Medal of Freedom.
She is survived by a son. Her second son predeceased her.
It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Toni Morrison, of her start in writing