RIP Toni Morrison

She lived a good, long and prominent life. She’ll be missed.

I envy modern students who get to read Beloved in high school or college freshman lit classes. I didn’t read it until about 15 years ago, and couldn’t believe I’d waited that long. And then I discovered that – I think – I might like Song of Solomon even more.

I’m sorry she’s gone. But man am I happy she was around for so long.

I read Sula in a high school lit class and it pretty much changed my life. Or, at least, what I wanted to pursue in life.

Beloved in college was a tough nut to crack. Reading Beloved as an adult, both pre-and-post Trump, has me convinced is probably the best American novel ever written.

She visited the college I went to before I was enrolled there. The “literary house” on campus had an amazing portrait of her on display. I must have looked at that portrait a million times. It radiated positive energy.

We used to require The Bluest Eye in one of our second year classes where I teach. Even after we stopped requiring it for that class, I kept using it, as it was a very powerful work for what I was doing. Our dean at the time was a Morrison scholar, and she introduced a lot of us to Morrison’s work. I went through school at a time when, let us say, our reading lists were a bit different and, um, very much whiter.

I had never heard of her until the report on NPR I heard on the way home yesterday. She sounds like an incredible writer. Time to put her books on the wishlist.

Edit: Here was that segment:

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/748810955/author-tayari-jones-shares-an-appreciation-of-toni-morrison

I had to think for a while about what I wanted to say about Toni Morrison.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, there was a very big push in English departments around the country, mostly among younger and mostly among women academics, to push back again against the traditional “Canon” of literary scholarship, and a lot of that pushback came in the form of either rediscovering ignored and neglected writers of color from earlier periods, or to discover new writers of color who were being ignored by proponents of the concept of Canon.

Many older writers were “discovered” or “rediscovered,” such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. And living writers were also being “discovered” and promoted. The foremost of these, in the beginning, was probably Alice Walker. Frankly, I’ve never thought she was a very good writer, but she was in the right place at the right time. Another was Maya Angelou. Wonderful poet.

But when Toni Morrison entered the stage, I was blown away. Such an amazing writer. Not terribly prolific, but it was always a celebration when a new work appeared. The Bluest Eye is a painful gift to us all. Beloved is an even more painful read, but worth it. Morrison had a unique and brilliant voice.

Thank you, Ms. Morrison, for your gifts to us.

Here is a great quote from Toni Morrison, “I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

And another, perhaps I should cross post it in the P & R thread ;-)

“Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless … it’s absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."

“I get angry about things, then go on and work.”

I was just reading another thread, and this quote of hers popped to mind:

Incredible orator and writer but man… her expressions told tales too.