Section:GDN 12 PaGe:8 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 19:05 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian
8 Wednesday 7 August 2019
‘She loved,
and asked us
to love harder’
From Ben Okri
to Candice
Carty-Williams,
writers pay
tribute to the late
and very great
Ton i Mor r i son
infl ection and the timbre of the
American dream.
But it was with Beloved, in
1987, that her place in US literature
was defi nitively sealed. It is an
unprecedented work, both in its
execution and the incidental
narrative that it engendered in its
appearance in the world. It must
surely be the singular case of a novel
that drew, with justifi cation, the
combined wrath of writers who were
shocked that this great novel had not
been honoured in the highest literary
prize of its land. The roll call of
writers who signed the petition
demanding that the novel be properly
honoured is itself a list of the most
signifi cant writers of the times. But
Beloved is a novel that hovers over
prizes. It was a national epic, breaching
the veil between the living and the
dead, a symphony of voices, a high
watermark, and not surprisingly
voted the best novel in American
literature over the past 50 years.
There is about Morrison’s oeuvre
a remarkable unity of tone and
address, and a moral strength and
integrity. The body of her work is
not vast, but it has remarkable
compression and the fi re of an
unmistakable vitality. When she
won the Nobel prize for literature
in 1993 she had published only six
novels, but they were enough to
etch a new space on the shelves of
the literature of the world.
Her shorter novels are fascinating,
and her essays always enrich in their
elliptical tone. It is common to speakShe was by no means the fi rst black
woman writer to have such a strong
presence on the literary scene in
the US. But when she arrived, with
her fi rst novel, The Bluest Eye,
she immediately re-ordered the
American literary landscape. That
voice had not existed before, those
cadences cutting through the tangled
slices of the American racial
undergrowth, immensely fl uid,
capable of weaving the past and the
present in a manner than was epical
in compression.
In novel after novel, with heft and
an electric charge, she revealed the
brutalised psyche of deep-singing
women, of men upon whom the
appalling weight of slavery and racial
dehumanisation had wrought
destructive traumas. The novels
discharge these traumas, blasting
them out from the secret caverns of
unknown lives, in a prose that is
threaded and shafted with intelligence,
wit, unpredictability, tough truth.
Then, in 1977, a novel appeared
that stood out from the many superb
productions of the age. It was Song
of Solomon, and when we read it
for the fi rst time it was as if some
biblical revelation of prose had been
unleashed in America, and all that
pain, all that magic, had been given a
voice that transcended expectation.
With Song of Solomon, a writer
joined the forefront of the writers of
her land. She was up there with
Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Ralph
Ellison, Philip Roth, James Baldwin –
writers who were challenging theof her as a black writer who wrote
about race and slavery and the
trauma of black female lives. But she
is something more, both a witness
and a celebrant. It would be a pity
to miss the beauty of her language
and her farsightedness in our desire
to anchor her in contemporary
relevance. She was brave, generous
and rhythmically compelling. To
hear her read her work is to be given
another secret dimension of her
appeal. She was a literary warrior in
whose work the US peered into the
black mirror of its untold truths.
But her work spoke to people
everywhere, to their traumas and
their joys, in a language in which
inspiration was at home.Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Editor and critic
In 2009, I was senior editor at
Jonathan Cape, Random House.
I loved my job – I loved my books and
my authors. But sometimes it was
hard. I was consumed with the desire
to publish books that would tell the
stories of black people in Britain,
stories from Africa or from her wide
and varied diaspora. And it was hard,
because nowhere could I see (at that
time) anyone who looked like me
who wanted the same thing. A friend
from New York sent me a book of
postcards featuring African American
writers – James Baldwin, Richard
Wright, Ntozake Shange and Toni
Morrison. In the image, she has an
afro with gentle waves of hair, her
arms spread wide as if in wonder and
joy. And she was sitting at her desk
where she was senior editor at
Random House. The picture has
moved with me from desk to desk.
I looked at her and knew that I was
not only possible, but necessary.Aminatta Forna
Writer
Morrison was one of the greatest of
a generation of writers who helped
to shift the centre of the literary
imagination. She did so in her choice
of theme and character, voicing the
African American experience through
black protagonists, and she brilliantly
subverted expectations by choosing,
at times, to identify only white
characters by skin colour, or erasing
mention of colour from her narrative
altogether. Having lived in the US for
the past four years, I feel her most
signifi cant contribution is to have
memoriali sed the history and horror
of slavery in a country that has thus
far failed publicly to acknowledge or
to off er redress for this original sin.
This task has been left to artists,
specifi cally African American artists.
Morrison’s legacy in commemorating
slavery’s survivors will endure and
uplift for centuries to come.Danez Smith
Poet
The fi rst time I came across her work ,
I didn’t read it. Song of Solomon sat
on my dresser, unopened, until it was
too late and I panicked, plagiari sing
an essay on the novel for my 11th-grade
English class. Thank God I got caught.
My teacher failed me for the paper,
but made me reread the book and
submit an essay anyway. I thought
then that she wanted to teach me a
lesson about following through on aBen Okri
Writer
Toni Morrison didn’t begin writing
late, but she published much later
than most writers, after a career in
publishing as an editor in New York.
This meant she gave the impression
of coming into her literary life fully
formed, with all the infl ections of her
style and the unique jazz-tinged
poetry of her tone that encompassed
the inward textures of black life, seen
from the vantage point of wounded
women who nevertheless have the
strength to be witnesses to the
brutalities of history on black lives
and the unexpected redemptions,
hard-won and ambiguous.
She burst into the world of
literature at a time that needed her
supremely wrought perspective.РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS