Thank you kindly, Ms. Smith, for this moving survey of Toni Morrison's splendid career in letters.
With everything that is unfurling in America today; with a president who is summoning the darkest forces within the human spirit to return black America, brown America, immigrant America, to some kind of glorious past, Ms. Morrison's books should be the grist for white America to take note of a nation that does not--and never did--belong solely to them.
What Ms. Morrison's genius says to us who survive us is that we, even we who are held at arm's length by most of our countrymen, and throughout history have struggled to survive in a culture that was determined to exterminate us, have stories to tell. They are worth hearing and reading and living. We lie to ourselves when we wish that things would just some day return to what was. That "what was" was evil incarnate. Yet we survived and prospered. We have endured far more than other immigrants who sought our shores. We have contributed mightily to the majestic song that is America, its broken notes and its threadbare flags and its days without end and nights without hope.
We have not lost a true American; we have gained. She lives with us still. And always will.
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@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18
Quite well said, Red Sox.
Her works of genius are a literary medicine our whole nation needs to take.
10
@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18 Beautifully written. Thank you. She was quite a magnificent woman. For me, right there with Maya Angelou.
6
@Red Sox, ‘04, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18
Thank you for your beautiful post.
8
I will admit that I was "forced" to read her work.
"The Bluest Eye" was a required read in my
literature class. As a Physics major, I was none too pleased.
I found a dog-eared used edition in the campus bookstore
and took it back and started reading it after my other
homework at 11 pm or so.
At 6am, I realized another day had begun.
Her work was different. They weren't words on a page; it
felt like somebody was sitting across from me telling me a
story. It was close.
And, for the first time, I felt like I was getting truth from
Fiction. A truth from a parallel universe i had existed in, but
never truly noticed. Or could ever experience.
I can say that because of her gift, I felt the power of
language and it's a bit humbling to this day.
God Bless Toni Morrison
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@Jeff Markham
What a fantastic testimonial!
8
I'm a white man in my 70s - a retired cop. I agree with you that Morrison understood this nation better than any other writer - or artist or musician for that matter. She is the only person to encounter Faulkner without flinching. Cormac McCarthy presents us with a vision or ourselves saturated with violence and neurotic mysticism - more pessimistic than Morrison. The great artists have something that the rest of us don't...a greater capacity to love.
18
If only the young people who are reading hate filled diatribes on the internet were, instead, exposed to the writings of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and, most certainly, Tracy K. Smith, perhaps, we, as Americans could heal from the racism, which is the scourge of this country. Like Germany, like Rwanda, we must examine our origins and the sins of our forefathers, the repercussions of which obviously continue to this day, and make reparations.
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I’ve always been amazed that so many black Americans put up with the never ending racism in America.
Toni Morrison is another example of a brilliant artist who, despite her financial success, chose to stay in America rather than move to a more democratic and multicultural country.
The three years I lived in Hawaii and received hateful comments from locals toward my white haole background on the mainland led me to decamp and try another culture in Europe.
Now the large Hispanic community in America is targeted by white supremacists with guns in El Paso. Many Latinos are responding by buying their own guns to defend themselves.
Life is too short to spend ones remaining years living with hate. At 74 years old I’m not willing to spend one moment of my life living in a culture subsumed with hate and anger.
3
@Michael Kittle
I am sorry that your experience in Hawaii was unpleasant. I share your heritage, but not your feelings. Every day I am grateful that 51 years ago I made Hawaii my home.
1
We have brutalized the American black, the only group to come here in chains. This differentiated them and along with the rules of Jim Crowe, had a long impact, always to be valueless and inferior.
But the election of Mr. Obama exacerbated the wound subtly hidden beneath the surface. How could a Black man ever become President, this could not be tolerated. The Republican Party along with their Leader verbalized the anger and granted a megaphone to white supremacy. Today, the genie is out of the bottle and many are ecstatic.
3
I became acquainted with Tony Morrison in a course with the late, beloved, Professor Dr. Katie Cannon, the mother of Womanist Theology. The course, at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, was titled "Codes of Ethics and the Slave Narratives." I was one of three white people in the class and a child of the white racist "christian" south. Dr. Cannon used Tony Morrison's work to bring the experience of slavery and its aftermath into our bones. The experience was shattering, life changing.
I thank God for the witness of Tony Morrison and of Katie Cannon.
8
What a profound and moving understanding of Toni Morrison's work. She did ask us all to think about how we choose what and who we want to be interested in. She asked us to look at ourselves without looking away when we found something that made us uncomfortable. She insisted we see that we are all in this country together and she did this which language we will not see again.
6
Thank you Tracy K. Smith. Your tribute to Toni Morrison is beautiful, as is your poetry. Through her novels, Ms. Morrison opened a whole world to me, created space for empathy and understanding, inspired me, disturbed me, and taught me to see in new ways. I am profoundly grateful for her life and work.
8
May her works live on as long as Homer's, for her's are a literary equivalent of a higher morality.
9
Let the hagiographies commence ! Morrison was a good, not great writer, contemptuous of us lighter-complected folks. We are now hearing from the usual Amen chorus of black writers and white virtue signalers who would have Beloved and Song of Solomon (a particularly anti white racist work) ranked with Anna Karenina and The Canterbury Tales. (yes folks, whites sometimes took time off from systematically trodding on black folks to write great literature). Toni Morrison the greatest American writer ?
Best black female novelist of the past half-century maybe. Maybe.....
@HBomb Perhaps the "white virtue signalers" who so disavow are perhaps just lovers of the written word and recognize great writing when they see it. That si the power of great writing, be it Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Stephen King or Toni Morrison. The ability to see the world through another person's eye and experiences. I am a black woman and I love the aforementioned authors. Ms. Morrison simply wrote and promoted the writers she felt had stories to tell that did not have a voice before much like white male authors promoted other white male authors.
3
@HBomb Millions of people have read Toni Morrison because her message resonates with them. She presents the exterior and interior lives of individual slaves in America as they were affected by the political, economic and social policies, beliefs and attitudes of those who owned them as chattel. I wonder what is driving your discomfort with Ms Morrison's works and your deflection from the reality she presents.
3
@HBomb
Does it make you feel good to think that?
2
Thank God that NYT has the world's best op ed writers. All the tributes thus far are wonderful, but Margalit Fox just caused Toni to leap off the pages. So delighted the Angelic Morrison walked among us earthlings
7
Toni Morrison is a miracle and like the characters in her novels, she can do miraculous things. She now moves like a benevolent ghost, like a merry-making spirit, beyond the grave. She flutters here and there.
I see her coming into President Trump’s head, as a dream.
Trump sleeps in the White House and Toni Morrison, body and soul, floats into the President’s head.
She pinches him. “Hey, Mr. Trump, wake up.” He tosses and turns. He wakes up. He is spooked. Who is the Black Woman before him?
Toni, smiling a smoky toothy writer’s grin, asks: “Have you read “Beloved” yet?” He nods his sleepy head, “Yes.” Instantly, the finger of her right hand slices her throat. She smells the lie.
“I told you, read ‘Beloved.’ It will show you the source of your misery. Are you afraid to read a book? I thought you were afraid of nothing. How strange you are.”
Trump falls back on his pillow. He’s shivers. He looks into Toni’s eyes. They burn and smoke and smolder with exhaustion and merriment, with courage and tenacity, like a log in a forest fire. He hurts. This Black Woman burns with a love he has never known.
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@Dave Thomas
Dave, if only I could wake and y-o-u were the present occupant of the W.H.--what a world this could be!
2
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South”...Abraham Lincoln.
No matter the issue, what is different in the year 2019 between all Americans and between the 7.7 billion humans on earth???
1
she didn't just love us as black people, she loved us as all poeple. i am as white as someone can be withought being translucuent. she was a master of words that changed llves, mine included
5
Ahhh if only, if only Trump were a reader. Toni Morrison should be first on his list. Your first relationship is with yourself and if that isn't healthy, nothing else will be. Trump does try, saying hate has no place in America--sentiment stays with him for---seconds. This is a guy who just doesn't have a grip on who he is, so how can he lead America when he can't lead himself........
3
I met Toni Morrison once by accident at an airport while waiting for a flight to Manhattan, Kansas. I guess we were both headed to the same university. I, for an academic conference on Spanish literature, but she, I don't know. When I realized she was sitting next to me, I was excited. I told her even though she was an English literature writer I always mentioned her to my Spanish students. She ignored me totally. And then put on her glasses as if to build a barrier. I then asked her white assistant if maybe she didn't like to be recognized. Her assistant said yes. But then three young white individuals came over smiling excited to meet her and she smiled back took off her glasses and was friendly towards them in conversation. Since then, I had a low opinion of her. When I entered the plane, she was already seated arrogantly in first class. I got her message.
Beloved is the word that should be put before the President of the United States when is asked what he has to say about our national treasure who was beloved by so many of us.
Americans of every imaginable line of descent who display a basic decency foreign to that man can be told that they were beloved by a great human being, Tony Morrison.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
3
James Baldwin once said, If you want to know me, read my work.”
Clearly, the same can be said about Toni Morrison.
2
Ms. Smith illuminates the dialectic between setting policy and righting the heart as our country and all of humanity encounters evil. As old as the Old Testament, the vision is to unite the two so that the law is written on the heart. Yet in the meantime, there is no need to feel helpless waiting for intransigent policymakers to act. We can, each of us, empower ourselves to work the magic of alchemy on our own hearts. This will be just as viral as the next mass shooting.
3
Beautifully said, Ms. Smith. Although I have read much of Toni Morrison’s work, I have not yet read Sula and plan to remedy that now. Also, thank you for your own extraordinary work. Your poetry is beautiful and revelatory.
6
I also would like to thank Traci K Smith for her own work, as well as her lovely tribute to Toni Morrison. This: ..."the lives of ordinary black people in America, both historically and now, exist upon the very same scale as myth" is both spot-on distillation of Toni Morrison's core message AND lyrical use of the language in its own right. Beautiful.
I organize my mornings around "The Slowdown" (9 am on my local NPR station), just to hear five minutes of Traci's gentle and love-filled voice. Her introductions to the poetry she reads are often as moving and meaning-filled as the poems themselves. She is a treasure.
As for Toni Morrison, I found the power of her talent nothing less than terrifying. After reading her early novels (Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula) and knowing the pivotal storyline of Beloved, it took me literally years to find the courage to pick up that book. I knew it would viscerate me. And...of course...it did.
She had no equal.
Never will.
2
Tony Morrison was able to convey the reality and the voice of the individual better than most. Tracy K Smith's interview on NPR was wonderful. Thanks Tony for bringing out the voice and the experience! You have made this a better world than when you came!
7
Excellent read and very touching. I am white and thank you for introducing me to, so it seems, fhis wonderful artist and hum as n being.
3
I had the pleasure of reading Ms. Morrison’s “Beloved” at Medgar Evers College taught by Dr. Elizabeth Nunez, I fell in love instantly. It was there too through the Black Writer’s Conference, I met her. A woman of grace and humility. When I asked her to autograph the Bluest Eye, she smiled and encouraged me to continue writing, I did. I was able to self published my first and only novel, For Love Alone influenced by her. The tapestry of her work is indeed centered on theme of love as well as the painful realities of what it is to be African American and living in America. You will be missed Ms. Morrison, thank you for touching my life as a writer and educator. Your legacy lives on through print. May you rest in divine peace. Thank you Tracy Smith. Toni is indeed a national monument, whose work will always live in our hearts. It is my hope that we commemorate her by honoring her with a stamp or an actual monument. R.I.P Toni Morrison.
9
@Dr. K Thomas.....good idea for a stamp.
Perhaps a sculptor would volunteer to do a piece of Toni for New York at one of the museums...Guggenheim,etc.
1
Very nice tribute. Well done. Very difficult to think that Ms. Morrison is from the same country as the 'man' in the White House. When I was a kid / teenager growing up in Europe I used to thank God I was not born in places like Biafra or Bangladesh. Now I thank God I was not born in the USA.
4
@Coco I was also not born in America, Coco, but I thank God for the opportunity to be here, and raise my American children here, and participate in our flawed democracy with the hope that we can still find a way toward a more perfect union, with love. That's America's dilemma, isn't it: she can produce the man in the WH and Toni Morrison. At least we're ahead of Europe there.
6
@Grace
In what way are you ahead of Europe? In what way is exceptionalism ever a creed to be embraced, extolled, emulated? Part of Morrison’t greatness was precisely to call out her birth country on the original exceptionalist sin that promoted whiteness over blackness and is now embodied in the current tenant of the White House. Yes, the arc of the US is broad, accommodating the very worst (Trump) and the very best (Morrison). I assure you @Grace that those contrasts, those antagonisms are to be found in all nations. They are not the sole preserve of yours.
3
@Grace Certainly, well said. And good luck to you.
1
Thanks for a lovely tribute. I shall read some more of Morrison’s work in hopes of experiencing what Ms. Smith has so wonderfully described.
I agree with Smith’s assessment of how things need to change in this world filled with fear and hate right now. I hope we can make some significant progress towards accomplishing these goals. For the sake of our children and grandchildren we must reverse these hateful and destructive processes.
9
Thank you for your beautiful tapestry of an extraordinary soul.
4
I remember the day her Nobel Prize was announced. It really made me happy because she writes so beautifully. Her writing really pierces the soul. If you have never read her, please do. Just have a box of kleenex nearby. You will be well rewarded.
R.I.P. Toni Morrison.
14
I'm doing a research on a novel by Faulkner, who we know has been associated with Morrison many times. I agree that the new chapter we are entering looks unpredictable in many ways, but I'm sure that as Faulkner stated, Morrison's works and spirit and love must prevail.
6
I can imagine that the timing of Toni Morrison's death could be perfect. Her legacy and hope for a better world, as depicted in her writings, if celebrated properly over the course of, not just 1-2 days, several weeks could inspire many to find solutions to our many social problems.
8
When I think of Toni Morrison the word that comes to mind is magnificent. She had an grasp of language, place, culture and heart. Each of her novels grabbed me and never released me until the last page and then would haunt me forever. Rest is peace beautiful lady, I am going to miss you.
14
She was an national and international treasure who will be sorely missed. RIP Ms. Morrison.
6
Thank you Tracy Smith! I love you. Keep translating, reading the world and sharing your poems.
Love this:
It’s hard, waking up so often to news of the terror unspooling in America. Domestic terrorism. Racially motivated violence. Environmental devastation. Economic instability. It’s tempting to believe that a distinct chapter has only just now begun, one in which some new evil has been unleashed and our national work will be to devise new terms and new tools for understanding and eradicating it. It’s tempting to believe that the work that lies ahead must live on a policy level, in laws and punishment, checks and safeguards. But the living monument of Ms. Morrison’s body of work assures me that the language of peace, justice, safety and stability must enter our imagination as they always have — not through the language of policy, but via our willingness to regard one another as worthy of attention and love. Such ideas must be sat with, moved through, married to our vocabularies for love, desire, loss, resentment, remembering, healing and hope. And those vocabularies are the primary terrain of the artist.
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@Tim C
Amen
1
Ah, listen to her audio reading of “Beloved.” One of the most beautiful books I have both read and heard.
20
The portrait of Toni Morrison by Bebeto Matthews is exquisite. She lives.
13
Right on sister!
I love the magical literary writing works of Toni Morrison. And I particularly enjoyed debating and talking with black women regarding their interpretation of her literature.
Toni Morrison felt and knew our deepest black while complicated and conflicted and confused and conflated African and American yearnings history.
A uniquely enslaved ' species of property with no rights that any white man is bound to respect ' history plus a separate and unequal physically identifiable minority is an expose critique of America's white European American Judeo-Christian majority immigrant mythology.
Toni Morrison lives in her literature.
8
A voice spoken in words, hymns and psalms of lands and peoples. Ephemeral winds of words tugged at the bindery of her books.
Who has not crafted marginalia in one?
Gossamer strands of thoughts and connections, of place and time that transcends a moment.
A gift whose time has come, gone and carries forward.
Thank You!
11
Tracy K. Smith's tribute to Toni Morrison is in the spirit of her beloved subject: real. As a person and as an artist, Ms. Morrison was—one word—real. She wrote novels about people's lives, of course, and she wrote them in richly original and inventive ways: a superb achievement. But it's important to remember that Ms. Morrison used what she painstakingly pieced together, or “invented,” to convey what she unflinchingly perceived as real—as true. She worked very hard at creating characters and stories for one essential purpose: to move herself and her readers closer to the truth. The truth about what? Briefly put, about such profound and terrible varieties of human experience as slavery, racism, and violence—varieties of experience that sometimes led to heroism, that often ended in tragedy, and that, while explicitly American, were, alas, fundamentally universal.
25
Ms. Morrison was as erudite a writer as any writer of English literature in modern times. She could zoom in and pan out of a character's insanity, fragility or humanity with her rhythmic prose and syncopated turns of phrase. There was a electric quality when she wove in and out of scenes. And while her characters spoke to all people, her easels were unapologetically black. With a definite awareness, she placed a fully body mirror in front of the white gaze and helped many to see themselves more clearly without ceding an inch of her stage to whites. By not privileging whites, she made her readers think about the complexity, moral goodness and badness and total humanity of her black subjects.She made her readers think profoundly. What more could an artist ever aspire to do or be?
31
What a loss to our country and to the world. Thank you for articulating so brilliantly what it is that Ms. Morrison gave to us, and what we will so profoundly miss with her passing.
10
Thank you for this beautiful eulogy. I count Beloved as one of the two or three most life-changing books I've ever read. To wrench that much compassion out of my gut, in strings of 20 or fewer words, was true wizardry.
17
We will be reading her works in a thousand years. Only one word needed: Magnificent.
37
This is a brilliant tribute, which captures Ms. Morrison's style, purpose, and moment. The manner in which she depicted the complexity of individual lives beset by circumstance--both those beyond one's control and those of one's own making--was unparalleled among contemporary authors. In many ways, she invoked Dostoyevsky's craft, who similarly chronicled 19th century Russia, where political and social realities are understood through the success and failure of how one personally copes.
As with many great writers, she also edified the use of language: in her case, with a lyricism that was only to be found in her work. What a gift she gave the world, not only in the literature she produced, but also through sharing her contemporaneous gift of understanding the human condition.
Thank you, Ms. Smith, for your own perspicuity in remembering this literary giant and American master.
17
Her genius and her humanity invite us to imagine a different sense of who we are, even now, and where, together, we might decide we are going. - Amen!
18
@professor I was going to refer to this same sentence. It is stunning and so exactly what we need in this world right now. Thank you Ms. Morrison and thank you Ms. Smith.
7
Thank you, Ms. Smith, for distilling in a beautifully written piece the multipart greatness of one of America’s, and the world’s, giants of letters. For good, and tragically for evil, no person is “an island “. In order to survive this profoundly disturbing present we must see ourselves fully reflected in those stigmatized others.
9
Thank you, Ms. Smith for a wonderful piece on a remarkable person. You summed up everything that I am feeling, but do not have to gift of language like you do.
22
Toni Morrison’s legacy, including as represented in her writing, is a national American treasure. Her rendering of the African-American experience taught universal lessons about resilience and love. She would have been special without the international attention, but we are the better for it because her art is the type of American export we should be striving to increase. May Toni Morrison rest in peace.
26
Her subject is hardly representative of our nation as a whole. It was a myopic vision.
5
@K. Smith
I respect your experience of Beloved. But I fail to understand how trauma can be made an absorbing and edifying subject. Trauma is "universal" in the same way emotional and mental paralysis are universal: we all experience shock, but we can evaluate it only after it has passed. Anyone who imagines they are observing or analyzing trauma is deluding themselves. Trauma is by definition self-alienating.
5
@Simon What would you consider a novel that represents our nation as a "whole"?
21
@Simon
Just sad.
13
"But the living monument of Ms. Morrison’s body of work assures me that the language of peace, justice, safety and stability must enter our imagination as they always have — not through the language of policy, but via our willingness to regard one another as worthy of attention and love."
Thank you, Ms. Smith, for this excellent tribute.
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I have never read anything she has written but can feel its impact in the many endless ways I have witnessed others empowered by her works....in a society where instant gratification is to easy with a youtube video or internet fix ...her 10 million books sold is a reminder how much the power of Books should not be sold short!
16
What a beautiful tribute to one of greatest writers and poets. She was African American and told us of her history and culture with powerful language. So sad this day has come for such a National Treasure.
34