It was my intention to write about the Booker Prize Longlist which was released about two weeks ago. However, the death on Tuesday of one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Toni Morrison, hit the world like a blow in the jaw. It was a rude shock. But why should the death of an eighty eight year old be a shock? Well, death is usually what we all don’t think is right to call anyone, no matter how old. So I am going to pay tributes to Morrison this week and leave the Booker Longlist of which our own Chigozie Obioma is once again listed just as he was for his first novel Fishermen.
I must confess that I came late to Toni Morrison. It was only in my first year in the university that I came across her in the eighties. Prior to that I’d encountered other Black American (they were then mostly referred to as Afro American) writers. I had read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and even Alex Haley and a host others, but not Morrison. In fact, her name never featured in any of my reading list. Even at that time despite all my traversing most bookshops in major cities around the country, I never for once came across her book. Or I might have but failed to pay attention to her- blame this not on any chauvinism. I never knew this word existed then.
However, as a first year student at the Bayero University Kano, I was a regular face in the library walking among all those tall shelves of books neatly arranged and looking so sexy and inviting. It was on one of those days that I stumbled on a book with the curious title Song of Solomon! At a first look at the title I thought the librarian must have mistakenly tucked it at that point because it sounded to me like a chapter from the Holy Bible!!
I decided to bring it down to have a closer look. I turned to the blurb. I was mistaken, behold it is a novel by one Tony Morrison. Curiosity took hold of me even before reading the blurb. I saw a picture of a vivacious woman with the then rave of the moment hairdo ‘Afro’. After reading the blurb I saw that it was not a Bible. I decided to peep through it. I was glued. Before I left the library that day I was almost half way through and because I didn’t have my library card with me, I had to quickly dash to the lecture hall and later returned with my card to lend the book from the library. That was my initiation into the world of this great American writer who was to serve as my window into the world and heart of other great raconteurs of her ilk.
That was when university libraries really lived up to their names. It was in the university library that I came across a gamut of world literature and writers of different hues that made reading about this vast world to be my oyster, the window through which I peeped into the possibilities of the human spirit and dynamics. Are university libraries this rich again? Haven’t we turned them into sepulchres and mockery of a building? How many of our undergraduates today can name any writer of note that they have read without scratching their noses? Make no mistake I was not a literature major.
With the death of Morrison, the American publishing world is going to make some more money as more people would be eager to read her books. New readers and those who have read her before would seek to buy her books and reconnect. I won’t be surprised if a few months from now her complete novels, essays etc are published. What have we done with the works of our own writers who have died? I once asked when are we going to have Prof Ola Rotimi, who published almost all his plays in Nigeria, compiled as The Complete Plays of Ola Rotimi, or The Complete Novels of Cyprian Ekwensi etc? Shakespeare’s are still being reissued!!!
So why can’t our local publishers also learn from this, or must we wait for foreign publishers to seize the initiative from us as always under the wrong notion that Nigerians don’t read? That’s a topic for another day.
What a better way to close this tribute than with the words of another award winning writer Ben Okri who described Morrison as “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.”
I love her sense of dignity unlike that of many of today’s writers who pander to the white establishment. She once declared that she writes essentially for Black people and that “the point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder to approve it.” Such bravery.
Farewell, the mother figure of Black literature. Ipade di oju ala, odi arin nako.
