Toni Morrison

AMERICAN AUTHOR
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born
Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 –
August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an
American novelist, essayist, book editor, and
college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye,
was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed
Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national
attention and won the National Book Critics Circle
Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize
for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide
recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1993.
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to
Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She was the second of four children from
a working-class, black family. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and
moved north with her family as a child. Her father grew up in Cartersville,
Georgia. When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two black
businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that
he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for
him." Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated
town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful
employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as
a welder for U.S. Steel. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a devout member
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Traumatized by his experiences of
racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he
would not let them in the house.
“Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of
biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which
leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things
in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a
smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed.“
Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrison's lifelong work has been an
accurate reflection of her and her race's upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her
novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration
of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences - felt both directly and vicariously. To be
more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where
her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of
whether we “read” them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This
mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself - and whose projections “fall” on the
surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded - is not
hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to
question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad
questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs.
Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out,
especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and
feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical
significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact
reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not
intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and
strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The
importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic
value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily
idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve,
resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate
and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation
with mind-numbing senseless conformity. One may never tell where artistry begins
and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but
one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative
techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things.
If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrison's
undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer
scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the
lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity,
conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom.