In The Pantheon of Literary God(esses)
Today, one of our heros passed away.
In the black literary canon, only a few are known by one name:
Dunbar
Wright
Baldwin
Walker
Hughes
Butler.
Most recently… Coates….
…. and , of course, Morrison.
Toni Morrison passed away today at the age of 88. And while I could rattle off all of her accomplishments as a Pulitzer winner and Nobel laureate… I do not want to do that. That is a small fraction of who she was and what she meant to the ethos of American literature (not just African-American literature). She was not only a writer and a professor, but also an editor at Random House. Introducing us to some other powerful black writers (my fave being Toni Cade Bambara).
I must admit. I’ve wrestled with my relationship to Morrison but I above all else, respect her work. As a younger person, my introduction to Toni was through The Bluest Eye. I read it when I was 9 years old. While I couldn’t relate to Pecola Breedlove, I surely knew girls like her. Girls that longed to be beautiful and would do anything to ascertain it. In Beloved, we saw what the haunting of ghost, figurative and literal, can do to the black psyche as displaced Africans in America.
Again, I’ve wrestled with Morrison. Personally, I found her writing to be obtuse for just obtuse sake. I always felt she was writing to the white, ivory tower masses and not the black folks she so aspired to elevate. I found it often out of reach and circular. As an editor, she was a gatekeeper of white supremacy at times, even though she introduced many new black authors, she shunned many others who were also amazing. I remember saying this out loud in one of my African-American literature classes in grad school and you would have thought I spit in the eye of my sisters. They were horrified as if I was a traitor to the black, female collective. How could I call myself a womanist.. a feminist. and not like Morrison? (I liken this to my dislike of Beyonce… but I digress). But my professor thought that I, indeed, had a love of Morrison. If not, how could I critique her flaws and achievements equally? That is the mark of a true scholar.
In later years I think my favorite book by her was A Mercy. About the early days before slavery was formalized and structured, I really liked the story it told, about what selfless motherly love really and truly looks like when the odds are stacked against you. As black women, the odds are often stacked against us. We have the “double debt” of being both black and a woman. Things like that didn’t stop Morrison at all. It seemed like she transcended and yet elevated the status of what a black woman could be.
I will miss the wisdom and words of Morrison. As I journey deeper into my writing and my hope to become an author, I will remember the words from “A Mercy”
“I dream a dream that dreams back at me”
Rest well, Sista Toni.
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