TT literary community mourns Morrison

TONI MORRISON’S writing captured the human condition both in the US and in the Caribbean where her work has been celebrated by literary critics and writers. She wrote about womanhood, race, slavery, violence, oppression, community and culture among other things. She was the first first black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. She died on Monday at 88.

Paula Morgan, professor of western literature and culture at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, described Morrison’s work as an astute analysis of race relations in the US.

“It was revolutionary in its time, and it has become even more significant because of the current scenario. Her brilliant essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination has tremendous currency in terms of understanding both the contemporary crisis in the US and its promise of traumatic outcomes,” she told Newsday on Tuesday after the news of Morrison’s death.

Morgan said her work was groundbreaking for Caribbean writers and theorists, particularly with regard to the role slavery played as influential to modern western sentiments and by extension, as pivotal to Caribbean ideologies of a person’s being and belonging.

Morrison published ten adult novels, essays, and nine children’s books with her son Slade Morrison. Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Remember: The Journey to School Integration were among some of her work. Her most recent novel was Home, published in 2012. She was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio.

Her novel Sula, published in 1973, is a story about two girls coming of age in an all-black community in Ohio. Sula was one of the first novels Dr Jean Antoine-Dunne taught at University College, Dublin, where she taught an all-white class in the early nineties. At that time, Antoine-Dunne said, there were few black women in Ireland.

“The fact that Sula is about female relationships, about the persevering black female and the determination of a black woman to forge her own path, had a profound impact on the attitudes of my students, and certainly had a shaping influence on me. The novel still resonates, in particular in what it tells us about scapegoating.”

Antoine-Dunne has a special love affair with Morrison’s work, particularly Beloved because of her interest in magical realism, a genre of fiction that paints a realistic view of the world while distorting time, space and intertwining magical elements in the text.

“The novel Beloved has a special place in my own research life because it seemed to give legitimacy to our Caribbean belief in spirits and our inbuilt acceptance of another world, a belief that is now becoming a key area and subject of research at UWI, in the Caribbean and in the Americas as a whole. I note that much research is being undertaken on magical realism, and Beloved is often classed as such.”

Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Antoine-Dunne describes Morrison as a pioneer whose work inspired deep critical thought in race relations.

“She was not only a beautiful, evocative and powerful writer, who influenced our own writers, including Walcott, but she was also a theorist.

“Which student of black writing has not read and been influenced by her text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination? The force of this work has done much to make evident the centrality of the black imagination and has given writers, including our writers and our critics, an increased desire to take back their creativity.”

Beloved is taught in TT schools and at UWI.

Dr Geraldine Skeete, lecturer in literatures in English, said Beloved has been a staple in UWI’s African-American Women Writers and African/Diasporic Women Writers courses. Morrison has also been the subject of UWI graduate dissertations.

“Before and after being the only black woman who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Morrison resonated with readers and literary scholars here in the Caribbean because of her representations of race, slavery, history, memory, womanhood, among others, with which we can identify.

“Walcott, Naipaul and now Morrison are gone from the mortal world, but, thankfully, she, like them, will always remain with us in the literary one and continue to impact us through, and yet beyond, the page.”

Poet Andre Bagoo said Morrison has had a major impact on his writing, especially the greatest advice he said she ever gave.

“Her monumental books bristle with the savagery and injustice of histories we are yet to properly grapple, effortlessly veering from the intimate to the epic, the domestic to the social. She has had a huge impact on generations of writers, including myself, because she exemplified her greatest advice to budding writers: write the books you want to read, and she showed, powerfully, how language itself must bend to the shape of truth, must serve justice, must return to the centre the voiceless, the forgotten, the marginal.”