BLACK WRITERS IN PRAISE OF TONI MORRISON January 24, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 36, Column 1; Book Review Desk
LEAD: I will call them my people which were not my people: and her beloved which was not beloved. - Romans 9:25
I will call them my people which were not my people: and her beloved which was not beloved. - Romans 9:25
With this passage, Toni Morrison leads her readers into ''Beloved,'' a universe of complicated, sweetly desiring, fierce and deeply seductive human beings hitherto subsumed by, hitherto stifled by, that impenetrable nobody-noun: ''the slave.''
That same scripture might well stand as the cradling text or tight-lipped summary of the chaotic, chimerical and frightening task America imposes upon any one of us chosen to be or choosing to become a black artist in this freedom land.
For example, even as we mourn the passing of so legendary a writer as James Baldwin, and even as we may revel in the posthumous acclamations of his impact and his public glory, how shall we yet grieve, relieve or altogether satisfy? How shall we explain the exile of this man who wanted to be loved so much at home? How shall we forget the declaration of this native son who once said, ''I'm worth more dead than alive.''
Celebrity is not a serious embrace. It is a fact that James Baldwin, celebrated worldwide and posthumously designated as ''immortal'' and as ''the conscience of his generation,'' it is a fact that Baldwin never received the honor of these keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: never.
And so we have buried this native son, Jimmy Baldwin, with a grief that goes beyond our sorrow at his death. We also grieve for every black artist who survives him in this freedom land. We grieve because we cannot yet assure that such shame, such national neglect will not occur again, and then again.
From that actual and emblematic death we turn, determined, to the living: 18 years ago the living black writer, Toni Morrison, demanded our collective and our private confrontation with the power of her work. Her first novel, ''The Bluest Eye,'' published in 1970, irreversibly abraded our responsible, unwilling consciousness with tragedies of absolute, interior dislocation: the unbearable self-loathing of one black child, Pecola Breedlove, who could not es-cape America. From that austere, that chiseled moment of publication here, among us, the written wizardry of Toni Morrison has earned her several books, best-seller popularity and a required reading presence on every respectable campus of the United States.
Throughout, she has persisted in the task of calling ''her beloved / which was not beloved.'' She has insisted on the subjects of her sorrowing concern: ''my people / which were not my people'' - black children and women and men variously not themselves, variously not yet free from an inexplicable, mad, impinging hatred that would throttle or derange all village/family/sexual love. And devoutly, she has conjured up alternatives to such a destiny: political and skin-close means to a transcendent self-respect. Today, all the literate world knows Toni Morrison.
June Jordan Houston A. Baker Jr. STATEMENT
Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: she has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. We, the undersigned black critics and black writers, here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy.
The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied. We, therefore, urgently affirm our rightful and positive authority in the realm of American letters and, in this prideful context, we do raise this tribute to the author of ''The Bluest Eye,'' ''Sula,'' ''Song of Solomon,'' ''Tar Baby'' and ''Beloved'':
Alive, we write this testament of thanks to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and persevering, magical. Among the fecund intimacies of our hidden past, and among the coming days of dream or nightmares that will follow from the bidden knowledge of our conscious heart, we find your life work ever building to a monument of vision and discovery and trust. You have never turned away the searching eye, the listening ear attuned to horror or to histories providing for our faith. And freely you have given to us every word that you have found important to the forward movement of our literature, our life. For all of America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people.
Your gifts to us have changed and made more gentle our real time together. And so we write, here, hoping not to delay, not to arrive, in any way, late with this, our simple tribute to the seismic character and beauty of your writing. And, furthermore, in grateful wonder at the advent of ''Beloved,'' your most recent gift to our community, our country, our conscience, our courage flourishing as it grows, we here record our pride, our respect and our appreciation for the treasury of your findings and invention.
Robert Allen, Maya Angelou, Houston A. Baker Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Amina Baraka, Amiri Baraka, Jerome Brooks, Wesley Brown, Robert Chrisman, Barbara Christian, Lucille Clifton, J. California Cooper, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Thulani Davis, Alexis De Veaux.
Mari Evans, Nikky Finney, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paula Giddings, Vertamae Grosvenor, Cheryll Y. Greene, Rosa Guy, Calvin Hernton, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Gloria T. Hull, Gale Jackson, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Nellie McKay, Louise Meriwether.
Louise Patterson, Richard Perry, Arnold Rampersad, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Hortense Spillers, Luisah Teish, Joyce Carol Thomas, Eleanor Traylor, Quincy Troupe, Alice Walker, Mary Helen Washington, John Wideman, Margaret Wilkerson, John A. Williams, Sherley Anne Williams.