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Award-winning author Toni Morrison, who will turn 87 on Feb 18., has a variety of works spanning from novels to children’s literature to plays. Many of her works focus on accurately portraying people of color and expanding the American canon.
BY DURE-MAKNOON AHMED ’20
Feb. 18 marks the 87th birthday of celebrated author Toni Morrison. Throughout her writing career, which spans half a century, Toni Morrison has been dedicated to the cause of racial justice. Her raw clarity and courage, coupled with her great writing skills, have earned her many accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Morrison’s most well-known work, “Beloved,” about a slave woman who kills her own child, was the first to bring her the acclaim she holds today. However, it was not granted the National Book Award. According to the New York Times, forty-eight black authors, including Maya Angelou, signed a letter of protest in response. The novel then brought Morrison several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
In 2006, the New York Times Book Review named “Beloved” the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years. Critic A. O. Scott praised the novel for having “inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals.” He pointed out how Morrison, as a living African-American woman, had joined the company of long-dead, highly respected white male authors like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. Morrison wrote the book with the ambition to expand the American literary canon with the voice of a black woman.
But — Morrison does not always enjoy critical and popular acclaim. A Guardian article in 2015 pointed out that, following the adaptation of “Beloved” by Oprah in a box-office-flop film, the author’s work has been criticized for sentimentality. In his review in The New Republic, a liberal American magazine, black conservative social critic Stanley Cronch said that “Beloved” “reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries.” Morrison is among the handful of authors of color whose books are banned the most. The Los Angeles Times in 2016 called for Banned Books Week to be renamed Toni Morrison Week that year, due to the fact that her books “The Bluest Eye,” “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved” were part of a list of the 100 most banned and challenged books in the previous decade. The article pointed out the obvious discrimination that authors of color faced, as they are banned more often than white authors.
Morrison welcomes being labelled a “black author.” In an interview with the Guardian, she said, “I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologize or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people]. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”
It is true that Morrison’s work deals exclusively with the very close, intimate details of how racism affects black people. “Beloved” is a raw account of slavery, while “God Help The Children” centers around a protagonist who attempts to use surface beautification to heal emotional suffering from her childhood. In “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison writes about a young black girl who prays for blue eyes with the aim to point out how, in her own words, “something as grotesque as the demonisation of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child.”
While Morrison passionately writes about black people, and often focuses on the plight of black women, she surprisingly resists the label “feminist.” In a 1998 interview with Charlie Rose, she attributed her distance from feminism to her desire to keep her work free from constraints and open to interpretation. She also said that it might be “off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract.” Her stance on keeping her work isolated from feminism seems to contradict her embracement of the “black writer” label. However, it might be that she finds the label incompatible.
In a 2012 interview with the Interview Magazine, she talked about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s: “Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves,” she said. “They were not the same thing ... Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.”
Morrison has a formidable bibliography that challenges and expands the widely accepted American canon. She brings into it the voice of a living black woman, whose feminism is a post-colonial rejection of white ideals. Her work is radical in its courageous dedication to portraying black people, for black people.