Unapologetically black: the vision of Toni Morrison

Most bios begin, “Toni Morrison was an American writer”, and indeed the nation should thank her for a body of writing that held a

mirror to its soul and social order. The nation should also thank her for being unapologetically black. Without anger, apology or explanation, she moved black life from the margins of American history to the center of stories that excavated American truths. In the process, she reshaped a literature, making it more reflective of the nation that generated it.

We should be grateful to Morrison for undoing storytelling that placed whiteness and maleness at the center of American letters. Instead, she recognized that narratives formerly relegated to silenced fringes can be revelatory. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), an 11-year-old black girl convinced by an American world of Shirley Temple movies, Mary Jane candies and Dick and Jane primers that she needs blue eyes to be loved anchors a heartbreaking portrait of the devastation caused by personal, familial and societal rejection.

In her Pulitzer prizewinner Beloved (1987), black mothers weary of having their babies taken from them and sold – one mother willing to commit filicide rather than see her child enslaved – demand that we confront slavery’s legacies at the human level and feel their full meanings.

A Mercy (2008) is an epic that

through the voice of a black female slave reconstitutes the narratives of a multiracial prenational community to counter the mythohistory that whitewashed America. Rather than being exclusionary, Morrison’s writing from a black place makes space for many American stories. We should thank her for an example of inclusivity that shows rooting narratives in one experience need not mean the exclusion of others.

In an interview with Paul Gilroy, Morrison once spoke of her desire to “develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black”, not because of an author’s race or because of its themes, but because of “something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put together – the sentences, the structure, texture and tone”. She envisioned a strategy of writing stemming from the cultural traditions of a race. Across her novels she realizes this aim with nods to jazz, blues, folklore and the folk. These forms and entities made American culture American, and made her fiction incredibly expansive.

Morrison was an avid reader, and one of the things she read best was the United States. The astuteness and eloquence of her nonfiction made her one of America’s keenest cultural critics. Her dissection of the ways whiteness as an ideology was ill-suited to a nation that was multiracial from the start points to how supremacist thinking only deepens cultural stratification. Her criticism reminds us that when fear becomes the state of the union, when we are encouraged to be afraid of the very diversity that makes us strong, democracy and social justice become endangered species. Playing in the Dark (1992), The Origin of Others (2017), and The Source of Self-Regard (2019) are now must-reads in a cultural moment trying to comprehend the current incarnations of supremacist ideology.

In the opening of Playing in the Dark, Morrison writes: “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World – without the mandate for conquest.” Morrison’s New World is the one that might have been, one where difference wasn’t viewed as a negative but as a source of wonder. As a nation the United States may need that map now more than ever.

Valerie Babb is Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University. She is the author of Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture and A History of the African American Novel