So! Recently a writer by the name of Toni Morrison passed away. Apparently she was a big deal. Perhaps not even just a Big Deal, but the way I have been hearing the eulogising getting tossed around on the mainstream media, she was The Big Deal. She won a Nobel Prize for Literature! Which means that she is quite possibly the greatest writer who ever passed a fart!
Here's some examples of her effect on people!
Wow! This lady sure was talented! I wonder if I can find anything she wrote, which might explain why she was so inspiring to so many people!
Okay, I am gonna come clean: I have never heard of this bitch before she died, and I have no fucking clue what kind of writer she was, though that, uh, opinion piece, gives me an idea.
But what am I, but a humble and useless fish? I can't even read!
No! It is you, my fellow, hopefully literate Kiwis, that are called to pass judgement here!
How have you reacted to the death of this Titan, this Literary Atlas? Will writing ever be the same again? What of her bibliography have you read, and how deeply did it affect your life? Will there ever be another of her like, again?
What I am basically asking is: did the life and works of Toni Morrison touch you?
And if so, where?
Some additional links!
Obligatory Wikipedia Article Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
The Root: https://www.theroot.com/nobel-prize-winner-toni-morrison-one-of-america-s-grea-1836995611
Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-laureate-toni-morrison-has-died-11565099219
USA Today: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/enter...d-author-nobel-prize-in-literature/334663002/
Here's some examples of her effect on people!
Article Link: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a28622158/toni-morrison-death-obit-tribute/
The Nobel Prize-winning author has died at the age of 88.
Toni Morrison, the celebrated American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, has died at 88. News of her passing was reported by Knopf, her longtime publisher, who said that she died in New York City after a brief illness.
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, Morrison lived a peerless life in letters. Her literary education began in Lorain, Ohio, where she grew up reading Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. In her youth, Morrison studied English at Howard University, then went on to earn a master's degree from Cornell University.
Before she became a writer in her own right, Morrison was a book editor who remodeled the literary establishment, transforming what was possible for black writers in midcentury America. In 1965, Morrison began working as an editor at the textbook division of Random House. Two years later, she became Random House’s first black female senior editor in the fiction division. Among the first books she worked on was Contemporary African Literature, published in 1972, an anthology that brought Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Athol Fugard to American audiences. She championed a new generation of African American authors, including Gayl Jones and Angela Davis, and published the celebrated autobiography of Muhammad Ali.
Throughout her early years as an editor, Morrison, who was raising two children as a single mother after the dissolution of her marriage, rose every morning at 4 a.m. to write. Those mornings produced The Bluest Eye, her first novel, which was published in 1970. Set in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, the groundbreaking novel explores the insidious evils of internalized racism. In the years to follow, Morrison published prolifically, and her work garnered a number of prestigious honors. In 1973, Sula was nominated for the National Book Award; a few years later, in 1977, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it became the first novel by a black writer selected for the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son was chosen in 1940. In 1983, Morrison left book publishing to write novels and teach at both Rutgers University and the State University of New York.
In 1987, Morrison published Beloved, a novel about a former slave haunted by the ghost of the infant daughter she killed in an effort to save her from a life of slavery. Though the novel was widely celebrated, it failed to garner prestigious awards, leading a group of 48 black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, to publish a letter of protest in The New York Times, stating, “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve.” Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and to this day it remains Morrison’s best known novel, a totemic work of fiction about the psychological toll of slavery and the indelible bonds between mothers and daughters. Jazz and Paradise followed, forming a trilogy.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her commendation celebrated her novels, “characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” and celebrated her ability to “give life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 1996, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a prestigious lifetime achievement honor bestowed upon other such luminaries as John Updike, Stephen King, and Isabel Allende.
When Oprah Winfrey named four of Morrison’s novels to her eponymous book club, Morrison experienced a career resurgence, allowing her work to reach a wider audience than ever before. “It is impossible to actually imagine the American literary landscape without a Toni Morrison,” Winfrey once said of Morrison. “She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller.”
In her later years, Morrison’s life in academia redoubled. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held a prestigious post at Princeton University, where she created the Princeton Atelier, which brought worthy students together with prominent writers and artists. In 2017, Princeton dedicated a building (Morrison Hall) in her honor. Her papers remain part of Princeton’s permanent collection.
Morrison’s work is characterized by magical realism, luscious prose, and an unflinching eye toward the wounds of history. She unpacked race as a social construct, excavating the profound psychological tolls of racism and sexism.
“The function of freedom is to free someone else,” Morrison once wrote. Her novels have freed so many, as has her service as an editor and teacher who made other writers’ work possible. Her impact will be felt for centuries to come.
The Nobel Prize-winning author has died at the age of 88.
Toni Morrison, the celebrated American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, has died at 88. News of her passing was reported by Knopf, her longtime publisher, who said that she died in New York City after a brief illness.
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, Morrison lived a peerless life in letters. Her literary education began in Lorain, Ohio, where she grew up reading Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. In her youth, Morrison studied English at Howard University, then went on to earn a master's degree from Cornell University.
Before she became a writer in her own right, Morrison was a book editor who remodeled the literary establishment, transforming what was possible for black writers in midcentury America. In 1965, Morrison began working as an editor at the textbook division of Random House. Two years later, she became Random House’s first black female senior editor in the fiction division. Among the first books she worked on was Contemporary African Literature, published in 1972, an anthology that brought Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Athol Fugard to American audiences. She championed a new generation of African American authors, including Gayl Jones and Angela Davis, and published the celebrated autobiography of Muhammad Ali.
Throughout her early years as an editor, Morrison, who was raising two children as a single mother after the dissolution of her marriage, rose every morning at 4 a.m. to write. Those mornings produced The Bluest Eye, her first novel, which was published in 1970. Set in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, the groundbreaking novel explores the insidious evils of internalized racism. In the years to follow, Morrison published prolifically, and her work garnered a number of prestigious honors. In 1973, Sula was nominated for the National Book Award; a few years later, in 1977, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it became the first novel by a black writer selected for the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son was chosen in 1940. In 1983, Morrison left book publishing to write novels and teach at both Rutgers University and the State University of New York.
In 1987, Morrison published Beloved, a novel about a former slave haunted by the ghost of the infant daughter she killed in an effort to save her from a life of slavery. Though the novel was widely celebrated, it failed to garner prestigious awards, leading a group of 48 black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, to publish a letter of protest in The New York Times, stating, “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve.” Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and to this day it remains Morrison’s best known novel, a totemic work of fiction about the psychological toll of slavery and the indelible bonds between mothers and daughters. Jazz and Paradise followed, forming a trilogy.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her commendation celebrated her novels, “characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” and celebrated her ability to “give life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 1996, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a prestigious lifetime achievement honor bestowed upon other such luminaries as John Updike, Stephen King, and Isabel Allende.
When Oprah Winfrey named four of Morrison’s novels to her eponymous book club, Morrison experienced a career resurgence, allowing her work to reach a wider audience than ever before. “It is impossible to actually imagine the American literary landscape without a Toni Morrison,” Winfrey once said of Morrison. “She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller.”
In her later years, Morrison’s life in academia redoubled. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held a prestigious post at Princeton University, where she created the Princeton Atelier, which brought worthy students together with prominent writers and artists. In 2017, Princeton dedicated a building (Morrison Hall) in her honor. Her papers remain part of Princeton’s permanent collection.
Morrison’s work is characterized by magical realism, luscious prose, and an unflinching eye toward the wounds of history. She unpacked race as a social construct, excavating the profound psychological tolls of racism and sexism.
“The function of freedom is to free someone else,” Morrison once wrote. Her novels have freed so many, as has her service as an editor and teacher who made other writers’ work possible. Her impact will be felt for centuries to come.
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ericas-greatest-writer-we-all-owe-her-so-much
Booker nominated author Chigozie Obioma reflects on losing a ‘literary mother’ and her encouragement for generations of black and African writers to come
It was with a heavy heart that I woke up, like many, to the news of the passing of the great African American writer Toni Morrison. As I have mourned and digested the news, my reaction has slowly gone from shock to dismay, then to a sense of inchoate peace.
If we judge being old as a more feeble state, or characterised by a gradual withdrawal from work, then Morrison, like most great writers, had not become old. At the age of 88, she had continued to give us her stories and thoughts. The Source of Self-Regard – a further exploration on some of the broader themes of race and dignity that she explored throughout her life in novels such as Beloved and The Bluest Eye – was released only a few months ago, published in outside of the US under the title Mouth Full of Blood. And until recently, we have seen a steady stream of novels from her, including God Help the Child, which was published on the same day as my debut novel The Fishermen, in 2015. There was no sign that the end of our constant supply from her reserve of wonderful stories and ideas was anywhere near.
With the death of Morrison, many writers today feel like we have lost our literary mother. Although I grew up in a town in Nigeria, the two first American writers I ever read were black: Richard Wright and Morrison. I read Black Boy around the age of 11 or 12, then Morrison’s The Bluest Eye a year or two later. It is a devastating story of a black girl who is destroyed by the low self-esteem imposed on her by a society in which her race and culture is diminished as ugly and unworthy. As a young boy in Nigeria, then slowly coming to the understanding that Africans were perceived by the rest of the world as being just like the black people in The Bluest Eye, I saw the light in this grim story. I realised that if we begin to look deeper into ourselves and take pride in our heritage, we will see the true beauty of who we are; what the rest of the world says about us, or how they see us, will be unable to kill our spirit. Morrison herself credited the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe for helping her discover this, what she called “the freedom to write.” But it was more a freedom to see that we can tell our own stories – and by so doing, lift our people.
Reflecting on her life, I feel a sense of peace because I know I have learned a lot from Morrison. On the craft level, I believed until this morning that she was the greatest living American writer (an honour Cormac McCarthy now holds), and one of the best prose stylists in the world, on the same plane as Martin Amis, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and others. She set out to do “unimaginable” things with the English language, a language she considered “at once rich and deeply racist.” Counting myself as one of many writers from former colonial states who now write in the English language, which has become our national tongue, we have had to find ways to subdue and conquer it, and bring it into submission to our cultural sensibilities. Part of that conquering is not only writing in the English language the way we desire, but also what we desire. This was exactly what Morrison did throughout her life. In a time when African stories are not seen as important unless they are set outside Africa or created to align with Western sensibilities, Morrison encouraged me to write about African traditional religion, culture and philosophies without reserve, even if the rest of the world – and even Africans themselves – see it as backward and unpleasant. I find peace because a new generation of black and African writers will continue to do just that, encouraged by the great work she has left us – and for this, I thank her.
• Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities is nominated for this year’s Booker prize.
Booker nominated author Chigozie Obioma reflects on losing a ‘literary mother’ and her encouragement for generations of black and African writers to come
It was with a heavy heart that I woke up, like many, to the news of the passing of the great African American writer Toni Morrison. As I have mourned and digested the news, my reaction has slowly gone from shock to dismay, then to a sense of inchoate peace.
If we judge being old as a more feeble state, or characterised by a gradual withdrawal from work, then Morrison, like most great writers, had not become old. At the age of 88, she had continued to give us her stories and thoughts. The Source of Self-Regard – a further exploration on some of the broader themes of race and dignity that she explored throughout her life in novels such as Beloved and The Bluest Eye – was released only a few months ago, published in outside of the US under the title Mouth Full of Blood. And until recently, we have seen a steady stream of novels from her, including God Help the Child, which was published on the same day as my debut novel The Fishermen, in 2015. There was no sign that the end of our constant supply from her reserve of wonderful stories and ideas was anywhere near.
With the death of Morrison, many writers today feel like we have lost our literary mother. Although I grew up in a town in Nigeria, the two first American writers I ever read were black: Richard Wright and Morrison. I read Black Boy around the age of 11 or 12, then Morrison’s The Bluest Eye a year or two later. It is a devastating story of a black girl who is destroyed by the low self-esteem imposed on her by a society in which her race and culture is diminished as ugly and unworthy. As a young boy in Nigeria, then slowly coming to the understanding that Africans were perceived by the rest of the world as being just like the black people in The Bluest Eye, I saw the light in this grim story. I realised that if we begin to look deeper into ourselves and take pride in our heritage, we will see the true beauty of who we are; what the rest of the world says about us, or how they see us, will be unable to kill our spirit. Morrison herself credited the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe for helping her discover this, what she called “the freedom to write.” But it was more a freedom to see that we can tell our own stories – and by so doing, lift our people.
Reflecting on her life, I feel a sense of peace because I know I have learned a lot from Morrison. On the craft level, I believed until this morning that she was the greatest living American writer (an honour Cormac McCarthy now holds), and one of the best prose stylists in the world, on the same plane as Martin Amis, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and others. She set out to do “unimaginable” things with the English language, a language she considered “at once rich and deeply racist.” Counting myself as one of many writers from former colonial states who now write in the English language, which has become our national tongue, we have had to find ways to subdue and conquer it, and bring it into submission to our cultural sensibilities. Part of that conquering is not only writing in the English language the way we desire, but also what we desire. This was exactly what Morrison did throughout her life. In a time when African stories are not seen as important unless they are set outside Africa or created to align with Western sensibilities, Morrison encouraged me to write about African traditional religion, culture and philosophies without reserve, even if the rest of the world – and even Africans themselves – see it as backward and unpleasant. I find peace because a new generation of black and African writers will continue to do just that, encouraged by the great work she has left us – and for this, I thank her.
• Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities is nominated for this year’s Booker prize.
Article Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-death-remembrance.html
When I was 11, my mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. I tried anyway.
For the women in Wesley Morris’s family, a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy.
You need to be able to read to be able to read. Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing. I at least thought I knew what it was for my eyes to sail across and down a page, through a flight of description or a feat of characterization. At 11, I thought I could read. Then I read her. My mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. My Aunt Katie caught my little-boy eye on her brand-new, great big copy of “Beloved” and told me: That’s for grown people. I tried it anyway. Then Toni seemed to tell me: All that reading you did before? That won’t cut it. You have to read me. She was going to make us work, not as a task, not for medicine, but because writing is an art and a reader should have a little art of his own.
I come from a family with a history of zero fanciness. Cleaners and drivers and coaches and catch-as-catch-can. Few diplomas, fewer degrees. But the women liked to read. Gloria Naylor and Sidney Sheldon. Stephen King and Danielle Steel. A man once left my Aunt Marge’s place with her copy of “Roots” like it was a piece of Tupperware, and she cursed him for years. The book wasn’t for dinner.
Reading a novel was entertainment and a point of pride. Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy. My aunts, my mother and her friends would tackle “Beloved” in sections then get on the phone to run things by one another. With all due respect to the recently deceased Judith Krantz, I don’t recall them needing to do that for “Scruples.”
[Read The Times’s obituary of Toni Morrison.]
They admired the stew of a Morrison novel, the elegant density of its language — the tapestry of a hundred-word sentence, the finger snap of a lone word followed by a period, the staggering depictions of lust, death, hair care, lost limbs, baking and ghosts. Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight. The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.
I wanted to feel what my mother felt, to know what made her mouth crack open like that or her eyebrows arch toward her scalp like a stretching cat. So, in my senior year of high school, I stole her new copy of “Jazz,” from 1992, the time-shuffling love story (among a man, his wife, and his dead mistress) that Morrison wrote after “Beloved” and which therefore wilted, unfairly, in its shadow. Much of the writing, seen through the eyes of a wise-weary narrator, is an achievement of attitude. But of all the arresting paragraphs in that book, this one actually cuffed me.
“Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It’s like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people’s blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged.”
My mother is gone now, so I’ll always wonder if this is a paragraph that put a smile on her face. Or maybe it was just the book’s very first words: “Sth, I know that woman.”
That “Sth” is the sound of a woman sucking her teeth. For me, it was the second coolest use of “onomatopoeia” after learning how to say “onomatopoeia.” It was also distinctly black. That the “s” wasn’t a “5” but a syllable of vernacular disdain brought me into a world that I didn’t want to leave. A life spent savoring Toni Morrison, both as a novelist and a scalding, scaldingly moral literary critic, makes clear that almost no one has better opening sentences.
“He believed he was safe.” (“Tar Baby”)
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (“Beloved”)
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” (“Paradise”)
“The woman’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum.” (“Love”)
“It wasn’t my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and I have no idea how it happened.” (“God Help the Child”)
For all of the astonishing edifices she built, the woman knew what to do with a brick.
She also knew how to name. Baby Suggs. True Belle. Pallas Truelove. Joe Trace. Sixo. Guitar. Jadine and Son. Stamp Paid. Milkman Dead. BoyBoy. Florens. Ajax (lord, Ajax). Kentucky Derby. Pecola Breedlove. Dorcas. Maginot Line. And, of course, Sethe — no name I’d ever heard before “Beloved,” no name I’d ever pronounced. It described a woman I’d never encounter beyond Euripides, a figure of guilt and rage and anguish, with a name one letter short of “seethe,” a name you, too, can’t pronounce without a suck of the teeth.
This is all to say that Toni Morrison didn’t teach me how to read. But she did teach me how to read. Hers is the kind of writing that makes you rewind and slow down and ruminate. It’s the kind of writing that makes you rewind because, god, what you just read was that titanic, that perception-altering, that true, a spice on the tongue. These spasms of disbelief are so ecstatic that immediate rereading is the only cure — I get them from Nabokov and from her.
Morrison is dead now, her legend long secure. But what comedy to think how the writers and critics who loved her labored to get her mastery treated as majesty when she’s so evidently supreme. The women in my family knew that long before the Swedes threw her a Nobel party. So did the people who took up writing in her wake. She did for generations of writers what Martin Scorsese did for generations of filmmakers — jolt them, for better and worse, into purpose. Morrison didn’t make me a writer, exactly. What she made me was a thinker. She made the thinking seem uniquely crucial to the matter of being alive.
I grew up with a Bible open on a dresser in my bedroom. My mother’s idea. Not a religious one, per se. She felt that an open Bible was an illuminating guide, a protectant, this night light for the soul. From time to time, I read it. But mostly, I let it guide me. Who knows where that Bible is now? What I have instead is some novel by Toni Morrison, kept near my bed, whether or not I’m reading it. A night light for my soul. And, in every way, a Good Book.
By Wesley Morris
When I was 11, my mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. I tried anyway.
For the women in Wesley Morris’s family, a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy.
You need to be able to read to be able to read. Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing. I at least thought I knew what it was for my eyes to sail across and down a page, through a flight of description or a feat of characterization. At 11, I thought I could read. Then I read her. My mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. My Aunt Katie caught my little-boy eye on her brand-new, great big copy of “Beloved” and told me: That’s for grown people. I tried it anyway. Then Toni seemed to tell me: All that reading you did before? That won’t cut it. You have to read me. She was going to make us work, not as a task, not for medicine, but because writing is an art and a reader should have a little art of his own.
I come from a family with a history of zero fanciness. Cleaners and drivers and coaches and catch-as-catch-can. Few diplomas, fewer degrees. But the women liked to read. Gloria Naylor and Sidney Sheldon. Stephen King and Danielle Steel. A man once left my Aunt Marge’s place with her copy of “Roots” like it was a piece of Tupperware, and she cursed him for years. The book wasn’t for dinner.
Reading a novel was entertainment and a point of pride. Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy. My aunts, my mother and her friends would tackle “Beloved” in sections then get on the phone to run things by one another. With all due respect to the recently deceased Judith Krantz, I don’t recall them needing to do that for “Scruples.”
[Read The Times’s obituary of Toni Morrison.]
They admired the stew of a Morrison novel, the elegant density of its language — the tapestry of a hundred-word sentence, the finger snap of a lone word followed by a period, the staggering depictions of lust, death, hair care, lost limbs, baking and ghosts. Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight. The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.
I wanted to feel what my mother felt, to know what made her mouth crack open like that or her eyebrows arch toward her scalp like a stretching cat. So, in my senior year of high school, I stole her new copy of “Jazz,” from 1992, the time-shuffling love story (among a man, his wife, and his dead mistress) that Morrison wrote after “Beloved” and which therefore wilted, unfairly, in its shadow. Much of the writing, seen through the eyes of a wise-weary narrator, is an achievement of attitude. But of all the arresting paragraphs in that book, this one actually cuffed me.
“Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It’s like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people’s blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged.”
My mother is gone now, so I’ll always wonder if this is a paragraph that put a smile on her face. Or maybe it was just the book’s very first words: “Sth, I know that woman.”
That “Sth” is the sound of a woman sucking her teeth. For me, it was the second coolest use of “onomatopoeia” after learning how to say “onomatopoeia.” It was also distinctly black. That the “s” wasn’t a “5” but a syllable of vernacular disdain brought me into a world that I didn’t want to leave. A life spent savoring Toni Morrison, both as a novelist and a scalding, scaldingly moral literary critic, makes clear that almost no one has better opening sentences.
“He believed he was safe.” (“Tar Baby”)
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (“Beloved”)
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” (“Paradise”)
“The woman’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum.” (“Love”)
“It wasn’t my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and I have no idea how it happened.” (“God Help the Child”)
For all of the astonishing edifices she built, the woman knew what to do with a brick.
She also knew how to name. Baby Suggs. True Belle. Pallas Truelove. Joe Trace. Sixo. Guitar. Jadine and Son. Stamp Paid. Milkman Dead. BoyBoy. Florens. Ajax (lord, Ajax). Kentucky Derby. Pecola Breedlove. Dorcas. Maginot Line. And, of course, Sethe — no name I’d ever heard before “Beloved,” no name I’d ever pronounced. It described a woman I’d never encounter beyond Euripides, a figure of guilt and rage and anguish, with a name one letter short of “seethe,” a name you, too, can’t pronounce without a suck of the teeth.
This is all to say that Toni Morrison didn’t teach me how to read. But she did teach me how to read. Hers is the kind of writing that makes you rewind and slow down and ruminate. It’s the kind of writing that makes you rewind because, god, what you just read was that titanic, that perception-altering, that true, a spice on the tongue. These spasms of disbelief are so ecstatic that immediate rereading is the only cure — I get them from Nabokov and from her.
Morrison is dead now, her legend long secure. But what comedy to think how the writers and critics who loved her labored to get her mastery treated as majesty when she’s so evidently supreme. The women in my family knew that long before the Swedes threw her a Nobel party. So did the people who took up writing in her wake. She did for generations of writers what Martin Scorsese did for generations of filmmakers — jolt them, for better and worse, into purpose. Morrison didn’t make me a writer, exactly. What she made me was a thinker. She made the thinking seem uniquely crucial to the matter of being alive.
I grew up with a Bible open on a dresser in my bedroom. My mother’s idea. Not a religious one, per se. She felt that an open Bible was an illuminating guide, a protectant, this night light for the soul. From time to time, I read it. But mostly, I let it guide me. Who knows where that Bible is now? What I have instead is some novel by Toni Morrison, kept near my bed, whether or not I’m reading it. A night light for my soul. And, in every way, a Good Book.
By Wesley Morris
Wow! This lady sure was talented! I wonder if I can find anything she wrote, which might explain why she was so inspiring to so many people!
Link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/making-america-white-again
Making America White Again
The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.
By Toni Morrison
November 14, 2016
This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.
Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.
In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.
To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?
These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.
It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.
The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.
So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Making America White Again
The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.
By Toni Morrison
November 14, 2016
This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.
Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.
In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.
To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?
These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.
It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.
The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.
So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Okay, I am gonna come clean: I have never heard of this bitch before she died, and I have no fucking clue what kind of writer she was, though that, uh, opinion piece, gives me an idea.
But what am I, but a humble and useless fish? I can't even read!
No! It is you, my fellow, hopefully literate Kiwis, that are called to pass judgement here!
How have you reacted to the death of this Titan, this Literary Atlas? Will writing ever be the same again? What of her bibliography have you read, and how deeply did it affect your life? Will there ever be another of her like, again?
What I am basically asking is: did the life and works of Toni Morrison touch you?
And if so, where?
Some additional links!
Obligatory Wikipedia Article Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
The Root: https://www.theroot.com/nobel-prize-winner-toni-morrison-one-of-america-s-grea-1836995611
Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-laureate-toni-morrison-has-died-11565099219
USA Today: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/enter...d-author-nobel-prize-in-literature/334663002/
-ed when a black woman can write a basic fucking plot.
