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TALK ING POINTS
while building her own extraordinary career, not to mention
raising her two sons alone (she was divorced from her husband,
Harold Morrison). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published
in 1970, when she was approaching 40, and Beloved, her most
famous work, came out in 1987. It went on to win the Pulitzer
Prize, and Jonathan Demme’s cinematic adaptation, starring
Oprah Winfrey, appeared 11 years later. In 1993, Morrison
became the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
What is clear from Greenfield-Sanders’ documentary is
Morrison’s marvellous sense of presence. Looking straight at
the camera, she is shown laughing, serious, open, truthful,
whether she’s talking about the significance of her work or
about baking (her carrot cake was famous). Halfway through,
she refers to a review of her second novel Sula, which appeared
in 1973. The critic called the book and its characters ‘provincial’,
which seems simply to have been a code for ‘black’. ‘I spent my
writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not
dominant in any of my books,’ Morrison says in the film.
Greenfield-Sanders admits having been very conscious of his
own white, male gaze when he worked on the project – and it is
for this reason that he not only weaves in the work of African-
American artists (in particular the stunning opening sequence,
an animated collage created by Mickalene Thomas and set to a
score by Kathryn Bostic), but also ensures Morrison herself
speaks directly to the viewer. ‘It’s her voice, her ideas,’ he says.
‘It’s really Toni telling her story.’
That story is extraordinarily inspiring, both because of the
wonder and success of her own work, and, as a writer and editor,
the path she laid for others. Interviewed for the documentary,
Oprah Winfrey calls her ‘a friend to our minds’, whose writing
‘allows you to understand that pain is OK; and that through pain
you can come to love’. The scholar and activist Angela Davis
describes the publication of Beloved as ‘an extraordinary turning
point in this history of the United States’, noting that ‘we could
never think about slavery in the same way’ after its release.
This film is a brilliant introduction to one of the 20th cen-
t u r y’s g re ate st a nd most i n fluent ia l w r iters. Ton i Mor r i son never
wrote a memoir and did not agree to a biography, but The Pieces
I Am is probably as close as we’re going to get to her. It offers
a beautiful and important testimony to the power of her work
and her generosity of spirit.
‘Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am’ is released on 6 March.This coming-of-age novel follows Adunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl subject to the whims of
her father and family yet learning to speak for herself. It won the Bath Novel Award 18 months
before publication, and marks the appearance of a strong and stylish new talent. EW
‘The Girl with the Louding Voice’ (£12.99, Hodder & Stoughton) is published on 5 March.BOOKS
The Pieces I Am, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ remarkable film
about the life of Toni Morrison, has been a long time coming.
The pair met 40 years ago when Greenfield-Sanders, who is
both a photographer and film-maker, was shooting the author
for a downtown New York paper. ‘We became friends from that
moment on,’ he says, speaking on the phone from his studio,
a converted rectory on the Lower East Side. He would later
photograph her for her book covers, and she was the first person
to sit for ‘The Black List’, his groundbreaking series of portraits
of prominent African-Americans.
Morrison, who died in August last year, was once described
by The New York Times as ‘the nearest thing America has to
a national novelist’. Born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, she worked
as an editor at Random House in Manhattan during the mid-
1960s, publishing the works of African-American writers such
as Angela Davis and Gayl Jones and the boxer Muhammad Ali, Abi DaréToni
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