Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 19:12 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Wednesday 7 August 2019
8
T
oni Morrison,
who has died aged
88, was the only
African American
writer and one of
the few women
to have received
the Nobel prize for
literature. The announcement of
her 1993 award cited her as a writer
“who, in novels characteri sed
by visionary force and poetic
import, gives life to an essential
aspect of American reality ”. In
her acceptance speech Morrison
emphasised the importance of
language “partly as a system, partly
as a living thing over which one has
control, but mostly as an agency –
as an act with consequences”.
She expressed her own
credo, and indicated the core
preoccupations of her fi ction,
in the fable at the heart of herToni Morrison
Nobel prizewinner and
author whose stories
have a strong historical
and cultural base
of African American women, as
well as men, covering the trauma
of slavery and its economic and
psychological consequences during
and after the 19th century.
Her second novel, Sula (1973),
provides a terse and vivid contrast
between two black women, one a
rebel and the other a conformist,
whose stories and struggle to come
to terms with one another and their
community set the pattern for some
of her later fi ction. Song of Solomon
(1977) is wider ranging historically
and geographically and, unusually
within Morrison’s oeuvre, has a
black male character, Milkman Dead,
as its main protagonist. Here the
elements of magic realism suggested
in Sula are developed and Morrison
draws on the African American myth
of slaves escaping by fl ying away
as an image of Milkman’s discovery
of his roots in a southern African
American tradition. For this novel
Morrison won the National Book
Critics’ Circle award.
Many readers and critics on both
sides of the Atlantic regard her
highest achievement to be Beloved
(1987), the fi rst novel in a trilogy
chronicling black American small
town and urban communities over
the past 150 years. It is based on a
factual incident that she uncovered
while preparing a historical
collection, The Black Book (1974),
and explores the terrible impact
of slavery, its brutality and its
dehumanisation, on a young mother
who murders her child to prevent
her being repossessed by the slave-speech, where she imagines young
people telling an old black woman:
“Narrative is radical, creating us at
the very moment it is being created
... For our sakes and yours forget
your name in the street; tell us
what the world has been to you in
the dark places and in the light ...
Tell us what it is to be a woman so
that we may know what it is to be
a man. What moves at the margin.
What it is to have no home in this
place. To be set adrift from the one
you knew. What it is to live at the
edge of towns that cannot bear
your company.”
When she started producing
fi ction, she was editing other writers
for the publishers Random House in
New York and began to feel the lack
of novels which spoke to readers
such as herself. Beginning with
The Bluest Eye (1969), her novels
portray the psychic and social livesowner from whom she has escaped.
The mother and those who live with
her are haunted by the memory of
the dead child, and the novel is also
a more general representation of
the terrible history that continues
to haunt African Americans, a
history that must be confronted in
all its anguish before black people
can learn to love themselves and
one another.
The New York Times columnist
Michiko Kakutani wrote that
Beloved “possesses the heightened
power and resonance of myth – its
characters, like those in an opera or
Greek drama, seem larger than life
and their actions, too, tend to strike
us as enactments of ancient rituals
and passions. To describe Beloved
only in these terms, however, is
to diminish its immediacy, for
the novel also remains precisely
grounded in American reality- the reality of black history as
experienced in the wake of the
civil war.”
Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer
p rize for fi ction in 1988, although
not before a letter signed by more
than 40 of America’s leading black
writers and scholars had decried
the lack of recognition for this
outstanding novel. However,
the New Republic critic Stanley
Crouch felt the book was over-
written, and at times became trite
and sentimental. Crouch was
among a number of black critics
who dismissed the award of the
Nobel prize as a mark of her ties
to a European literary tradition
rather than an African American
one. Morrison won it following the
publication of Jazz (1992), a novel set
in Harlem in the 1920s concerning
a love triangle in which a husband
murders his teenage mistress, which
employ s a narrative structure akin to
jazz, with the opening statement of
a theme and a series of elaborations.
Paradise (1998) returned to the
small-town setting in rural Ohio
that had featured in Beloved. Like
the two preceding novels, it evolves
from a catastrophic act of violence,
in this case a mur derous attack on
a community of women.
Five years later, she published
Love (2003), a family saga that
has some similarities to The Song
of Solomon in that it weaves its
story around the lasting impact
of a wealthy black patriarch and
entrepreneur, Bill Cosey, the owner
of Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, whose
fortunes rest on the need for a
holiday resort for black people in
segregated America. His character
becomes the focus of various
generations of women’s longing for
father, husband, lover, guardian and
friend. Some critics have cautiously
noted the teasing similarity between
the central male protagonist’s name
and that of the millionaire African
American entertainer Bill Cosby.
Like The Song of Solomon, this
novel records the historical and
cultural changes aff ecting African
Americans from the 1930s till the
80s, before, during and after the civil
rights movement. Although many
Morrison was a
senior editor at
Random House
for 20 years
MURDO MACLEOD/
THE GUARDIANObituaries
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