The significance of Toni Morrison’s life and work to the black race

Death is inevitable for humans. However, only few go through life actually living it, while many go through it merely existing. Toni Morrison, the iconic American writer and literary aficionado, was one of the few people and wonders of her generation whose death on August 8 literally made the world stood still.

Born Chloe Ardella Wofford in February 18, 1931, Morrison’s 88 years on earth encompasses everything that defines life in a country replete with injustice and prejudice for people of her colour and gender. One of the incidences that portrayed this was when Morrison was two years old and their landlord set their house on fire because her family could not pay the rent. Her family responded to the arson by laughing rather than by despairing. Morrison later said her family’s response to that demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your life in the face of acts of such “monumental crudeness.”

At the age of twelve, Morrison became a Catholic and took after her baptismal name Anthony—which led to her nickname, Toni. As a child, her parents inculcated in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American stories and songs. After her Howard University and Cornell University education where she studied English, she taught at some universities before working as an editor at a textbook division of Random House and later became the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department of Random House.

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Morrison’s literary corpus, which spans almost five decades, is not only overwhelming but also intimidating. Her novels, children’s books, short stories, plays, nonfictions, and academic papers are too numerous to mention that listing and describing them would warrant writing her biography. The drive and philosophy for Morrison’s writings are rooted in her struggle to make the world a justice and save place. She once said in an Observer interview that: “When I began, there was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society—black female and a child”. Virtually all her writings were devoted to this noble goal.

Her works and stellar achievements did not go unnoticed. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the United States federal government’s highest honour for ‘distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. She was also honoured with the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer who has enriched the U.S. literary heritage over a life of service or a corpus of work.

She had been honoured by Harvard, Oxford, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, and Geneva universities, among others. Notable prizes to her credit include National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, American Book Awards, Norman Mailer Prize, Library of Congress Award, and Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison’s achievements opened up ways for other black writers, especially the female ones in the literary world.

Her Nobel Prize citation, as the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize, reads: Toni Morrison “who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In her Nobel acceptance speech, she talked about the power of storytelling, adding that “Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that can pass along to help us start strong?… Think of our lives and tell us your particularised world. Make up a story.” The significance of that moving speech was an inspiration to black people and writers to use their work and life to make the world proud.

Then came the ‘Oprah Effect’. The impact and significance of Morrison’s work on the society prompted Oprah Winfrey to select her novel ‘Song of Solomon’ for her book club in 1996. Later in 2000 when Winfrey selected Morrison’s earliest novel ‘The Bluest Eye’ for the book club, it sold another 800,000 copies. John Young, in his 2001 African American Review article, said that Morrison’s career experienced the boost of “The Oprah Effect… enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience.” Winfrey later went on to select four of Morrison’s novels over a six -year period. Also in 1998, Morrison’s novel ‘Beloved’ was adapted into a movie co-produced by Winfrey, who spent ten years bringing it to the stage and who also starred as the main character in the movie.

Morrison, to some extent, was involved in some form political interventions and struggle for black women emancipation. Writing about the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, Morrison claimed that, since the Whitewater, Clinton was being mistreated the same way black people are treated. She was also vocal during the 2008 presidential race, endorsing Barrack Obama over Hillary Clinton. When Obama finally won, Morrison felt like an American for the first time, saying “I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid.”

After Donald Trump won the elections in 2016, Morrison in an essay titled ‘Mourning for Whiteness’ stated that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by race that they elected Trump. Though Morrison did not identify herself as a feminist, she believed that “In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed.” Her political and womanhood positions signified that she knew her African-American history and that she cared about her people.

Though Morrison’s lofty achievements had immortalised her, the maxim: “No pain, no glory” still applied to her. She had a divorce, lost a son to cancer, experienced various forms of racism and prejudice, endured a lot of criticisms and rejections of her work. But, none of these deterred her. Her life was a message and a lesson for all to emulate. Her work opened the eyes of people and nations to things that matter in the world. Her energy, perseverance and wisdom are virtues that individuals and nation should adopt to make the world a just place. Her death created a vacuum in the literary world and also to the black nation. The world has lost a rare gem, a global colossus.

There is no better way to immortalise Toni Morrison than to invoke the poem of the British novelist, George Eliot, titled “Oh May I Join the Choir Invisible”:

Oh may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence.

Kingsley Alumona is with the Nigerian Tribune