BY
Margaretta wa Gacheru (28 August 2019)
If you
hadn’t read The Bluest Eyes, Beloved or Song of Solomon before August 9th, you
might be among the multitude who made book sales of all Toni Morrison’s
award-winning books shoot sky high following her passing on that fateful summer
day in New York City.
Black
America’s first Nobel prize winner (1993) was already renowned in many circles,
(especially literary and African American ones) for her brilliant array of
books before she passed at aged 88.
But it
wasn’t just because she was the first Black American woman to win a Nobel that
she was world acclaimed. She was also the first black American woman to achieve
so many other things: she was the first of her kind to be a best-selling
fiction writer, and as the first black female editor at a leading Manhattan
publishing house, she was first to open literary channels for many more brilliant
black American writers to prove that there are a myriad of powerful stories
about the black experience that are yet to be told.
There are
many more reasons why Toni Morrison has been so widely mourned since she
stepped off humanity’s stage after years of teaching, writing and also editing
some of the greatest English-language writers of our time. Possibly the most
notable one would be in relation to her writing and her specific choice of
subject matter. For she was intent on placing the black experience at the very
centre of her writing. And not only that. She also felt deeply compelled to
remove from her writing any hint or interest in taking heed of what she called
‘the white gaze’ (meaning ‘what will white people think of me?’ which was of no
concern to her)
In the
countless interviews, keynote speeches and dialogues that she had with
scholars, members of the media and colleagues like Angela Davis, Maya Angelo and
Oprah Winfrey, she made clear that the chief concern of her writing was speak
of the black experience to black people, having no need to apologize for
populating all of her books with black people in all of their many facets.
On more than
one occasion, she had to set her white interviewer straight, that she had no
desire to include white people in her literary world. What’s more, she was
clearly offended when a journalist like Charlie Rose would ask her ‘when was
she going to start writing about white people?’
In one
interview, (one of the many that are now surfacing on YouTube), she explained
that she had never really wanted to make the subject of slavery a central topic
of her writing. But because she felt that whole traumatizing experience of
slavery had been so sanitized, even by black writers who she felt didn’t want
to offend their white readership, she had no choice but to address the theme in
books like Beloved, the one that earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
Even a Black
leader like Frederick Douglas who’d led the struggle to abolish slavery in the
US (prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) hadn’t told the full
story of the brutal, dehumanizing and traumatizing experience of those 400
years. And to her, that was because they had a white audience, not a black one,
in mind as they wrote.
“I know [Frederick] Douglas could not tell
white people about the real horrors of slavery,” she said at The Hay Festival
in UK. “It would have been too disturbing for them to hear,” she added. But
then she was pressed by her Hay interviewer: ‘Then where have you gotten your
stories about slavery?” He was genuinely curious since slavery has been a
resounding theme of her writing, especially in a work like Beloved, the book
many people believe is her best novel.
Beloved was
so loved by Oprah Winfrey, for instance that she paid for the rights to produce
the film based on the novel about a woman who killed her own daughter rather
than have her grow up a slave.
The story is
actually about the child that died. In the film it’s a haunting, disturbing
story about the child’s ghost who returns to haunt her mother and inquire why
she had to die. But for me, the film didn’t quite capture the passion,
conviction and depth of feeling that propelled Beloved’s mother into making the
radical and devastating choice to kill her own child.
Morrison
told her interviewer that in that case, she had found a small story about a
real woman, Margaret Carter who was caught having slaughtered her child. Being
a slave who had escaped and then been recaptured, Margaret posed a problem for her
slavers. Would they charge her with murder or theft? For depending on one’s
perspective, she had taken a life that didn’t belong to her. The baby according
to that system was born into slavery and thus belonged, like a piece of
chattel, to the same slave owner as Margaret.
The newspaper
story was incomplete but it set Morrison’s imagination in motion such that she
wrote a dazzling novel, her 4th? After writing first The Bluest Eyes, Sula and
Song of Solomon, she wrote what’s considered her masterpiece, Beloved.
But she
didn’t stop after that. She wrote two more, namely Jazz and Paradise which,
with Beloved, are considered to be a trilogy. Then she continued writing novels
like Love, A Mercy, Paradise, Home, God Save the Child, and many more.
Morrison,
who was born in a rural corner of Ohio, was brought up in a largely black
community, so she says she wasn’t fully aware of racism in America until she
went off to Howard University.
“I was
determined to go to a school where there were many brilliant black minds,”
which is why she chose Howard University, one of the leading historically black
schools in the US. But while she majored in English, she said she gravitated
towards the theatre department because they treated literature differently,
less academically. In their readings, they dramatized writings which brought
the books alife, and that was what she loved.
Yet one
fascinating point she made in an interview she gave towards the end of her
days, she confessed that Chinua Achebe had had a transformative effect on her
consciousness. His creation of an Africa-centric world in Things Fall Apart
impressed her deeply and spurred her on to do the same only within a black
American context.
Born in 1931
as Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, just four years before Achebe (1935),
she read Things fall apart several years after it was published in 1958. She
had already graduated from Howard (1953) and had moved on to Cornell University
where she got a Master’s degree before returning to Howard where she taught
English for a short time. By the late Sixties (after being married and divorced
(1964) and having two sons), she’d moved to New York City and got a job at
Random House where she became America’s first black female editor of fiction.
It was
during her early days at Random that one of her first projects was working on
the groundbreaking ‘Contemporary African Literature’ which featured relatively
unknown writers like Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard.
But it was
also while at Random House that she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eyes in
1970, which brought her national acclaim and made her realize she was meant to
be a writer in her own right. She remained at Random after writing her second
novel Sula, but soon after that, she resigned to write full time.
Some readers
love Sula above all her books, but it was her next novel, Song of Solomon
(1977) which earned her the National Book Critics Circle Award the same year.
And after that, it was Beloved (1987) that won her the prestigious Pulitzer
Prize in 1988 and the American Book Award the same year. Oprah made it into a
film starring Thandie Newton in 1998. And ever since then, Toni Morrison has
been considered a national treasure, beloved for her writing and her wisdom all
over the world.
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