In tribute to Toni Morrison
This year, the world experienced a literary loss like no other. Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, reflects on the legacy that Toni Morrison left behind
Ifirst came across Toni Morrison in the early 1980s, when I was a young writer desperately looking for literature about black British women, which didn’t exist. Eventually, I discovered African American women writers whose books were starting to sail across the Atlantic. Toni Morrison became the one who inspired a life-long love affair with books.
The Bluest Eye, her first novel, was my introduction to her work. It is a haunting fiction featuring a poor, darkskinned black girl called Pecola, who is considered ugly on account of her skin colour. She dreams of having blue eyes, which will make her appear more white and therefore acceptable.
Colourism, which is perpetuated within black communities as well as in wider society, is still rarely discussed, but black women experience it even today. Pecola grows up in a dysfunctional family in a racist society where terrible things happen to her. Morrison’s language is so rich, atmospheric and imagistic;
I was utterly seduced by it. She inspired me not to mimic her style or stories, but to find my own unique voice and subject matter. When I think about her oeuvre, often zipping between the contemporary and historical,
I see that my work also follows this pattern, connecting the past with the present, often in a single novel.
Morrison, the literary stateswoman, was adamant about positioning the complexity of the black experience as equal to any other global demographics’. Through her books, she encouraged black women to be unapologetic about writing from our perspectives – not as something considered lesser in a literary climate that explores whiteness without naming it as such, but as the stimulus for endless imaginative possibilities in our lives.
We know our role models won’t live for ever, and Morrison had a long and great life. Her passing caused me to reflect on the incredible literary legacy she left behind. Her fiction spans 300 years of American history and her essays challenged us to think hard about the kind of society we want to cherish. I never knew her, but I am re-reading her books so I can reconnect to the wonderfully brave and talented soul who wrote them.