Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 17:01 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Thursday 8 August 2019 The Guardian •
3
J
ust over a decade ago, Toni Morrison sat
down on a steel bench in Charleston Harbo r,
South Carolina. Her writing had inspired
this simple memorial, at the waterway
through which so many enslaved people were
traffi cked. One in two African Americans
is descended from someone who passed
through that harbour.
As the end of the slave trade loomed and South
Carolinians binge-imported black bodies, so many
Africans died there that they were thrown into the water,
their fl oating corpses forming a mass grave. Morrison
wanted people to remember. “It’s never too late to
honour the dead,” she said. “It’s never too late to applaud
the living who do them honour.”
It was Morrison – as I discovered when I fi rst picked
up one of her books – whose work hummed with the
spirit of honouring the dead.
The novel I read then was her fi rst, The Bluest Eye,
the story of a young girl who believes in the ugliness
of her blackness and poverty. It was also the fi rst that
altered my own journey.
I was a teenage girl battling, like many my age, with
a strong sense of self-loathing, and like many others
of African heritage, with a sense that my existence
was wrong. Then I read the story of Pecola Breedlove,
who yearns for the blue eyes she believes confer
beauty, and for the fi rst time I understood how – as
Morrison described it – “something as grotesque as the
demonisation of an entire race could take root inside
the most delicate member of society: a child; the most
vulnerable member: a female ”.
Morrison captured the trauma of slavery and racism
so powerfully that my sense of the world – th e world of
a mixed-race, British-Ghanaian girl, a story so diff erent
from those told in her books – became forever infused
with her narration of the African American experience.
Her writing in novels such as Beloved and Home, rooted
fi rmly in the landscape of the American south, made
the sight of June bugs, the taste of fresh peaches, the
cool of a tin bath, part of the memory of blackness.
She made the pain and power of her ancestors such
a deep aspect of my own consciousness, and – as writer
Hilton Als so powerfully put it – she broke our hearts
with the truth.Toni Morrison at
the Hay festival
in 2014
PHOTOGRAPH: REX/
SHUTTERSTOCKI fi rst read Song of Solomon – the book that
most deeply resonated with me – in that initial
adolescent haze of euphoric thirst for Morrison’s
writing. When I reread it, just a few years ago, I
realised parts of my emotional architecture that I
thought innate had in fact been planted by Morrison’s
words, taking root in my psyche and growing there,
like the maple, fruit and chokecherry trees that
populate her prose.
This is, I think, what Barack Obama meant when he
said Song of Solomon taught him “how to be”. That is
the power of Morrison’s fi ction.
Storytelling was Toni Morrison’s inheritance. Her
parents – both of whom had experienced the brutality
of the deep south fi rst hand, t aught her traditional
African American folktales passed down over years of
enslavement and resistance.
But Morrison’s genius – eventually recognised by the
literary establishment with a host of awards including
the Pulitzer and the Nobel – was also the product of
hard grind.
One of the most inspiring things for me about her
life is that, as a mother of two young children, she
wrote The Bluest Eye whil e working full time as an
editor at Random House.A
s well as incubating the novels
without which – as Oprah Winfrey
put it – American literature as we
know it would not exist, Morrison
was also supporting the work of
other black authors – Gayl Jones,
Angela Davis and Chinua Achebe
among them.
And it was not just her fi ction that resonated
with me. Writing my own book about blackness and
identity – something I cannot conceive of having done
had Toni Morrison not driven me, with urgency, to
write – I found a speech she delivered at Portland State
University in 1975.
“Somebody says you have no language and so
you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody
says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have
scientists working on the fact that it is,” Morrison said.
“Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge
that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms
and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary.
There will always be one more thing.”
When terror struck her city on 11 September 2001,
Morrison spoke directly to the dead. “I have nothing to
give ... except this gesture, this thread thrown between
your humanity and mine,” she wrote. “I want to hold
you in my arms and as your soul got shot of its box
of fl esh to understand, as you have done, the wit of
eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing through
the darkness of its knell.”
Morrison was not afraid to write of death, of spirits,
ghosts, ancestors, destiny and magic. She did more
than any other writer to show the pain of her people
to the world – a suff ering that echoes down the
ages – while cautioning powerfully about the
distraction of racism.
She revealed the sins of her nation, whil e
profoundly elevating its canon. She suff used the
telling of blackness with beauty, whil e steering us
away from the perils of the white gaze. That’s why
she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop
reading them.Ton i Mor r i son’s
stories shaped
me, and made
me tell my ow n
Opinion
Her writing
made the
sight of June bugs,
the taste of fresh
peaches, the cool of a
tin bath, part of the
memory of blackness
Afua
Hirsch
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