The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. “She is a friend of my mind,” a character in Beloved, a former slave, thinks about the woman he loves. These generational links, her work unfailingly suggests, form the only salutary chains in human experience. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.”īut as Morrison’s writing also makes clear, the past is just as strongly manifest in the bonds of family, community and race – bonds that let culture, identity and a sense of belonging be transmitted from parents to children to grandchildren. “Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. “Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you,” she goes on. It is a world, Morrison writes in Beloved (the novel is set in the 19th century but stands as a metaphor for the 20th), in which “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind”. In her fiction, the past is often manifest in a harrowing present – a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder, recounted in unflinching detail. Throughout Morrison’s work, elements like these coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In Song of Solomon, a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome.” In Beloved, the spectre of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer.
In Sula, a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. Novelist Toni Morrison smiles with US president Barack Obama as he prepares to award her a 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington in May 2012. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday verities, a technique that caused Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez. Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition.
In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. A longtime faculty member at Princeton University, Morrison lectured widely. Her novels appeared regularly on The New York Times bestseller list, were featured multiple times on Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and were the subject of myriad critical studies. Morrison was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Among them were Song of Solomon, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature, whose work explored black identity in America and in particular the experience of black women, died of pneumonia in hospital in New York City on Monday night.
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