Toni Morrison RIP

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Opinion

 

Toni Morrison’s Song of America

Black life is the canvas for her body of work. But her subject is our nation.

By Tracy K. Smith

Ms. Smith is a former poet laureate of the United States.

• Aug. 6, 2019
  
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The first book of Toni Morrison’s that I read was “Sula.” It was a gift from my brother the summer before I started college, his reasoning being that I could not become a literate adult, let alone a black woman in America, without being initiated into Ms. Morrison’s work.

 

The first time I read the novel, I read with a sense of rapt gratitude. Despite all the pleasure that reading had offered me, up to that point in my life I honestly had never encountered black characters depicted with such rich and troubling complexity. I lurched toward the lives of Nel and Sula, the young black girls Ms. Morrison chronicles into adulthood. I recognized them in their girlhood and their dawning sense of selfhood. And I recognized the wishes and the fears and judgments of the community they grew up in.

 

From the stories my parents had carried with them on their journey to California from the Jim Crow South, I even recognized certain conditions governing the characters’ lives in a black neighborhood called “The Bottom.” But what Ms. Morrison’s novel did, by way of its intriguing and indelible characters, was to marry to that general knowledge an intimate firsthand perspective on love, betrayal and the struggle not only to survive in the physical sense but to survive in spirit. “Sula,” then “Song of Solomon,” then “Beloved" and each of Ms. Morrison’s novels as I encountered them, assured me that the lives of ordinary black people in America, both historically and now, exist upon the very same scale as myth. Her body of work insists that these same lives hold the key to something at the very heart of what America is, something that cannot be overlooked or disregarded if sense is to be made of this nation and all of us in it.

 

Black life is the canvas for Ms. Morrison’s body of work. It yields the conditions and the characters that fascinated her as an artist. But I believe her subject is America, this place founded upon conflict and driven by the need to define one group against another. Her work asks: Who are we? What have we built and broken together? What does it mean to regard one another deeply, humbly, hopefully? And what are the consequences for our refusal to regard one another? Across Ms. Morrison’s novels and essays, these questions operate in the intimate spaces — in families, friendships, marriages — that serve to determine the terms of our engagement with the wider world. And the reverse is true as well: The terms of the wider world seep inevitably into the most private regions of our lives.

 

 

 

In “Beloved,” the protagonist Sethe is haunted by the return of her own child, whom she killed in an attempt to protect her from enslavement. But beyond this insular haunting, the family is intruded upon at every turn by the larger specter of a nation whose claims of freedom, power and moral authority are confounded by systems of slavery, submission and the fallacy of racial inferiority.

 

In her essay collection “The Origin of Others,” Ms. Morrison writes, “The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image and experience.” When we encounter the world through Ms. Morrison’s fiction, we are urged to submit to and invest in the feelings and plights of others separated from us by time and circumstance. There is very little else in the world that can so easily afford us such an opportunity. Friendship can do it, and so can love, yet there are limits to the people we befriend and those we allow ourselves to love; we must be willing to see them as worthy of our attention, and we must muster the courage to approach them. But in a novel, we vault “the mere blue air that separates us” instantly.

 

“That’s how much she loved us,” a friend said by text Tuesday morning when the news of Ms. Morrison’s death was announced. “She tried to teach us about love in everything she wrote, but what have we learned?”

 

 

It’s hard, waking up so often to news of the terror unspooling in America. Domestic terrorism. Racially motivated violence. Environmental devastation. Economic instability. It’s tempting to believe that a distinct chapter has only just now begun, one in which some new evil has been unleashed and our national work will be to devise new terms and new tools for understanding and eradicating it. It’s tempting to believe that the work that lies ahead must live on a policy level, in laws and punishment, checks and safeguards. But the living monument of Ms. Morrison’s body of work assures me that the language of peace, justice, safety and stability must enter our imagination as they always have — not through the language of policy, but via our willingness to regard one another as worthy of attention and love. Such ideas must be sat with, moved through, married to our vocabularies for love, desire, loss, resentment, remembering, healing and hope. And those vocabularies are the primary terrain of the artist.

 

 

 

I don’t believe there is a writer who understood America better and loved it with more ferocity than Toni Morrison. Her genius and her humanity invite us to imagine a different sense of who we are, even now, and where, together, we might decide we are going

[hypothetically]

Sad day. Such an icon.

[hypothetically]

Sad day. Such an icon.

[OCClient]

The New Yorker sent one of those 2020 recap emails which included their Fran Leibowitz interview.

For me it was a highlight because I love listening to her.

 

Fran Leibowitz listened a lot to Toni Morrison. They were friends for nearly 40 years.

 

The interview closed by discussing Toni Morrison.