Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 19:16 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Wednesday 7 August 2019 The Guardian •9
Oprah Winfrey
in Jonathan
Demme’s fi lm
of Beloved
(1998); Morrison
receiving the
Nobel prize for
literature from
King Carl XVI
Gustaf in 1993
ALAMY; APreviewers hailed the publication
of Love as demonstrating a return
to the kind of writing that had
made Morrison a Nobel laureate,
Kakutani wrote in The New York
Times that “the story as a whole
reads like a gothic soap opera,
peopled by scheming, bitter
women and selfi sh, predatory men:
women engaged in cartoon-violent
catfi ghts; men catting around and
going to cathouses”.
Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy
(2008), is set in 1682 in the early
years of colonial Virginia, where
English, Dutch, African, Portuguese
and Native Americans compete to
survive and rule. Her next novel,
Home (2012), moves forward to
the 20th century, portraying the
life of a Korean war veteran in
segregated 1950s America and
his attempt to save his sister from
medical experiments carried out
by a white doctor. It is dedicated
to her son Slade, who died in 2010
aged 45, and with whom she had
written several books for children.
God Help the Child (2015) returns
to the theme of her fi rst novel and
traces the life of a young woman in
the fashion industry tormented by
memories of her mother’s dislike of
her dark skin.I
n an interview recorded
soon after the publication
of Love, Morrison spoke of
her lifelong concern as a
writer to move away from a
notion of writing by African
Americans as sociology,
infl uenced by its awareness
of a white readership, and concerned
with the encounter between black
people and white people. She had
declared in a 1998 interview: “The
black narrative has always been
understood to be a confrontation
with some white people ... They’re
not terribly interesting to me. What
is interesting to me is what is going
on within the community. And
within the community, there are no
major white players. Once I thought:
‘What is life like if they weren’t
there?’ Which is the way we lived it,
the way I lived it.”
Morrison sought to change not
just the content and audience for
her fi ction; her desire was to create
stories which could be lingered
over and relished, not “consumed
and gobbled as fast food”, and at
the same time to ensure that these
stories and their characters had a
strong historical and cultural base.
She also compared her writing
and its technique to music whose
enjoyment and signifi cance can
change on a second hearing, and
which has a style, structure and tone
that is specifi cally African American.
Born Chloe Ardelia Woff ord in
Lorain, Ohio, she was the second
of four children of working-class
parents, George Woff ord, a shipyard
welder, and his wife, the former Ella
Ramah Willis, who had migrated
to Ohio from the south. When she
was about two years old her family’s
home was set on fi re by the landlord
while she and her family were init. “People set our house on fi re to
evict us,” Morrison later told an
interviewer, but her father refused
to be intimidated by white hostility
and told her that such actions
merely demonstrated the inferiority
of white people.
Her parents encouraged her
early interest in literature, which
encompassed Austen, Flaubert
and Tolstoy. But an interest in
narrative and the African American
tradition was also nurtured by her
father, who told her stories and
anecdotes he had heard as he grew
up in the south. She graduated with
honours from Lorain high school
and studied humanities at Howard
University in Washington DC, the
most prestigious of the historically
black universities founded in the
19th century.
At Howard she changed her name
from Chloe to Toni (having taken
the name Anthony on becoming a
Roman Catholic at the age of 12),
apparently because she found that
people constantly mispronounced
“Chloe”. However she later regretted
the name change, saying in 1992: “I
am really Chloe Anthony Woff ord.
That’s who I am. I have been writing
under this other person’s name.
I write some things now as Chloe
Woff ord, private things. I regret
having called myself Toni Morrison
when I published my fi rst novel,
The Bluest Eye.”
In 1954 Morrison went on to
study for an MA in English at Cornell
University, writing a dissertation
on suicide in the works of WilliamFaulkner and Virginia Woolf.
Thereafter she taught at Texas
Southern University in Houston, and
then Howard University.
In 1958 she married Harold
Morrison, an architect. They were
divorced in 1964, and Toni moved
to New York with her two sons,
Harold and Slade, to become a senior
editor at Random House, a position
she held for 20 years. One of her
achievements there was, in her own
words, to help develop “a canon of
black work. We’ve had the fi rst rush
of black entertainment, where blacks
were writing for whites, and whites
were encouraging this kind of self-
fl agellation. Now we can get down
to the craft of writing, where black
people are talking to black people.”
Among the distinguished black
Americans she helped publish were
Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones,
Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.
Her projects at Random House also
included editing The Black Book, an
anthology of items illustrating the
history of African Americans.
In 1989, following the success of
Beloved, Morrison was appointed
professor of humanities at Princeton
University. She was a visiting
professor at Yale University and
Bard College, and found teaching
and being with young people an
important way of “staying current”.
Her 1990 series of Massey lectures
at Harvard were published as
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
the Literary Imagination (1992),
and explore the construction of a
“non-white Africanist presenceNarrative
is radical,
creating us
at the very
moment it
is being
created [email protected]
@guardianobitsand personae” in the works of Poe,
Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and
Hemingway, arguing that “all of us
are bereft when criticism remains
too polite or too fearful to notice a
disrupting darkness before its eyes”.
Twenty-fi ve years later, a few
months after the election of Donald
Trump as US president, Morrison
published The Origin of Others
(2017), essays on the “literature of
belonging” based on her Norton
lectures given at Harvard in- She examined the ways in
which categories of otherness
are invented and reinforced in
literature, the media, and everyday
speech to dehumanise others. And
she analysed fi ction by writers
Flannery O’Connor, Harriet Beecher
Stowe and others, including her
own, to illustrate constructions
of whiteness.
Her play, Dreaming Emmett,
was fi rst performed in 1986. A fi lm
version of Beloved, directed by
Jonathan Demme, scripted by three
other writers, and starring Oprah
Winfrey, was released in 1998 to
mixed reviews. An opera, Margaret
Garner, based on the same story
with a libretto by Morrison and
music by the American composer
Richard Danielpour was premiered
in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2005, and
received much more favourable
notices. Morrison also wrote the
lyrics for André Previn’s song cycle
Honey and Me (1992), for his Four
Songs for Soprano, Cello and Piano
(1995), and for Danielpour’s Spirits
in the Well (1998).
In 2011 she worked with the
opera director Peter Sellars and
the Malian singer Rokia Traore to
create Desdemona, a mixture of
words, song and music premiered in
Vienna. The following year Morrison
was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom by President Obama.
Morrison’s collected essays and
speeches written between 1976
and 2013 were published as Mouth
of Full Blood in February this
year. They explore the history of
enslavement and its consequences,
the power of language and the
responsibilities of writers, the
problem of being a “consciously
raced” writer who is also confi ned
by that category, the signifi cance
of writers such as James Baldwin
and Chinua Achebe. Like Baldwin’s
essays, Morrison’s have a searing
force. As Arifa Akbar wrote in her
review of this collection, “Morrison’s
words possess a contemporary
resonance, delivering unwavering
truths with an intelligent rage that is
almost equal to hope.”
A quotation from Morrison’s
Nobel speech provides an
appropriate epitaph: “We die,” she
said. “That may be the meaning of
life. But we do language. That may
be the measure of our lives.”
She is survived by her son Harold,
and three grandchildren.
Lyn Innes
Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony
Woff ord), writer, born 18 February
1931; died 5 August 2019РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS