Toni Morrison – the first black woman to win a Nobel Prize – died during a week marked by senseless gun violence and cringe-inducing vulgarity from a leader whose political career began with his implacable hatred of a black president. It was a sad reminder of how important Morrison had been, during the last 30 years of American life, as an intellectual antidote to the sort of ethno-nationalists whom Trump has empowered. In the telling words of Angela Davis, Morrison’s “canon demonstrates the absolute and destructive absurdity of any position that would claim others lesser than or unequal” and one of her signal achievements was to relocate “our attention from the powerful to those over whom they exert power.”
As an editor at one of America’s leading publishing houses, Morrison opened the doors for writers and activists whose thought would reshape the culture profoundly. Eschewing conventional activism, she focused, presciently, on a dormant authoritarianism in America, using literature to illuminate the country’s dark past. Keenly aware of literature’s power to disrupt the naive, self-congratulatory patriotism which became so fashionable during her lifetime, she staunchly defended freedom of expression throughout her career. In one of her most cited remarks she says: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Her willingness to address parts of American history that many preferred to forget came at a price and she was often criticized for focusing too narrowly on black characters, or for including sexual and violent content in her work. Ten years ago, after her novel “Song of Solomon” was temporarily suspended from a school curriculum in Michigan, Morrison – who had just edited a collection of essays on censorship – memorably said: “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, cancelled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
Morrison’s steady gaze on the past, to render the invisible ink of American history legible offers an instructive contrast with the country’s current jingoism and her unwavering integrity continues to inspire leading contemporary authors, particularly in foreign countries. In one tribute the Chinese novelist Yiyun Li recalls facing an audience member at a local reading who “said how much my writing hurt her pride. ‘Yes, the Cultural Revolution is in our history, but why not write something that makes us feel great about China?’” Morrison understood the importance of resisting empty flattery and always insisted on holding herself, and her work, to a much higher standard. Morrison once observed that “History has always proved that books are the first plain on which certain battles are fought.”
Morrison leaves behind an enviable multinational legacy. In a pitch-perfect evocation of her signature style, Zadie Smith writes: “Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language — inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture — can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the ‘calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science.’”
Morrison’s pioneering role in opening up mainstream culture to black thought and writing also extended her influence well beyond fiction. She was also a brilliant essayist, endlessly quotable and constantly seeing further than her peers. In a late essay on the meaning of home, for instance, she writes “the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perceptions of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery and the reinforcement of siege mentalities.” Compare such a balanced and thoughtful sentence against the current political rhetoric on either side of the Atlantic and the scope and complexity of what we have lost becomes vividly and painfully clear.
