Toni Morrison: Rest in Power, Beloved
At the age of 88, Beloved author, Toni Morrison has died. Words don’t do justice to the impact she had on literature and lives - none, but her own.
Born on February 18, 1931, with the birth name Chloe, Toni Morrison was uniquely placed to write the story of the African American experience. Born during the economic nadir of the Great Depression, she grew up to be an author who would weave her writing into the fabric of American history. Her mark on the world of literature has been indelible, earning her the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Legion d’Honneur, and so much more.
Perhaps her most famous quote, Morrison said in a 1981 speech before the Ohio Arts Council - “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And she did just that. In the Song of Solomon, she wrote, “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it”, and then, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down”.
Her writing style spoke to millions, across racial and socio-economic barriers. Her prose was a flowing river, a running narrative that carried readers on the crest of a visual journey built by words. Her stories were intelligent but never unintelligible; her language was simple but so very beautiful. Her novels were often called poetic, a compliment meant as praise. However, Morrison eschewed this. She didn’t want to write poetry - she wanted to write stories for her people, something accessible, something that reclaimed language for African Americans. She once said, “That’s why I don’t like to have someone call my books ‘poetic’ because it has the connotation of luxuriating richness. I wanted to restore the language that black people spoke to its original power. That calls for a language that is rich but not ornate.”
In 1987, she wrote Beloved, a story of a slave in 19th Century America who kills her baby. It brought her the Pulitzer and a wave of international recognition. It laid the groundwork for her being the first black woman to win the Novel Prize for Literature, in 1993. Even today, Beloved is a novel that is read in innumerable fine art and literature classes around the world.
Words don’t do justice to the light that Toni Morrison shined on this world. None, but her own.
Here are some of Toni Morrison’s most powerful legacies of literature: the words she wrote and said that impacted the world when she was with us, and will continue to shine a light on us.
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” (At her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1993)
“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” (Bluest Eye)
"It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more a leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. ... Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher's palm asking for witnesses in His name's sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don't have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud's eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers." (Jazz)
"Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn — by practice and careful contemplations — the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma." (Paradise)
"You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself." (Song of Solomon)
"Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it." (Jazz)
Her life was a constant reminder of the advice coming from the characters in her novels:
"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another." (Beloved)
And finally, when she gave us hope in 2019:
"Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of 'I' and choose the open spaces of 'we.'" (Mouth Full of Blood)