•Toni Morrison, first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, haunts us with her prose
She was an American heroine. She was the black American empress of letters. She was a bold, if mellifluous voice of black women all over the world. She also transcended her race in this regard as she lit the tinder of feminine freedom for all women of whatever colour, creed or caste. More important, Toni Morrison was a torch bearer of justice of a universal colour. And she did that by putting pen to paper.
The first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature died on August 5 at the age of 88. When she won the august prize, the Nobel Prize committee summed up her literary mission in the following fitting words: “who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
Morrison started her literary journey with her novel, “The Bluest Eye’, and from that seed, she knew what she wanted to tell the world. The story about a girl who hated her identity and sought freedom in the search for a pair of blue eyes, a biological exclusive of the Caucasian race. But she had to suffer paternal rape and social ostracism within her own race and family to learn the futility of claiming an illusory identity. That book, though flawed in some respects in the eyes of her critics, reverberated with promise.
She also stole attention with her second novel, ‘Sula’, a tale of friendship between two women, and signalled by the act of a woman who sets her leg before a moving train. She, however, had grudging adulation until she unveiled her unforgettable novel, ‘Song of Solomon, an effort that earned her the prestigious National Books Critics Circle Award. She became the first black woman to be listed in the Book of The Month Club, and the second black person, Richard Wright with his ‘The Native Son’ being the first in the 1940’s.
But Morrison’s masterwork is ‘Beloved’, a novel of extraordinary pathos and humanity. It is the act of a mother, in the age of slavery, who did not want her daughter to taste, not least endure the savagery of its dehumanising cudgels. Her option was grim. She killed her in one of the most documented passages of filicide either in fiction or non-fiction. The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani described the scene as “so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after in a single unwavering line of fate.”
Yet the story was based on an actual story of an enslaved woman Margaret Garner, but Morrison wove it into an eternal skein that seizes the empathy even of an unconcerned public. In spite of her great work, she had never been given America’s top prizes, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This outraged 48 black writers and activists, including the great Maya Angelou of ‘I know why the Caged Bird Sings’, to fulminate over the discrimination. The heart of the academies was twitched and months later, ‘Beloved’ was decorated with the Pulitzer Prize.
Some have described her as the best American writer since Walter Lippmann. Her writing is unique because of the fidelity to her African American roots, tapping from the ghost stories and folk tales that her parents told her when she was a little girl. Her prose carries the pains, frustrations, castrated hopes of generations of African Americans. Her voice any African can relate to, including her novel ‘Paradise’ penned after the Nobel Prize.
She has been variously decorated. Prominent among them are the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Thomas Jefferson Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.