To Soar A tribute to Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
– Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

I love silence ­– but never to be silenced. I love the spirit(s) of the night but never to be deceived by darkness. I cherish creativity – but it must always find positive expression. And as for love…

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
– Toni Morrison (Beloved)

Dedicated to the sixty million and more lost in slavery, Morrison’s novel Beloved slices open the raw truth. Inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave caught escaping from Kentucky to freedom in Ohio in the 1850s, Morrison reveals the atrocities of slavery. Rather than return her baby to the slave master, Sethe slits the throat of her 3-year-old daughter. Another slave at Sweet Home, silenced by a metal bit forced in his mouth, Paul D can’t even cry out when he witnesses a horrific act perpetrated on Halle. Haunted by the ghost of the murdered child, the last incantation of the novel will forever echo in our consciousness. “Beloved.”

By creating a fictional microcosm of individual black lives, rather than a factual account of many, Morrison immerses us in an emotional and psychological experience, one that ensures a far more profound impact than all the history books on slavery every written.

And like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
― Toni Morrison (Sula)

A tale of doubling, riddled with racism, and bathed in symbols of fire and water, the protagonist Sula acts on impulse with a blatant disregard for social conventions. The opposite of her obedient friend Nel, Sula defies traditional morality with her feminist independence. The town views Sula as the personification of evil – her strangeness symbolized by a birthmark “that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose.” In an ironic twist, the town’s labeling of Sula as evil provides the community with the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. With Sula’s death, that harmony disappears. A complex novel of inversion, creativity and destruction, Sula poses unanswerable questions. An artist without an art form, Sula’s unexpected and unthinkable behavior will make your head spin. And challenge your expectations.

If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.
― Toni Morrison

Morrison’s work opens up the infinite power and possibility of words. Her novels taught me to be a better reader, a more critical thinker, a more acute listener. She challenged me to write about matters that matter – to investigate, to expose the truth. She showed me how to prioritize and synthesize. An artist and single mother, disciplined and driven, Morrison raised two sons writing her first novel (published at age 39) while her children slept before heading to her day job as editor at Random House where she worked for 20 years. There she performed her magic on the autobiographies of Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali, fiction by Gayl Jones and many others responding to the social and political times.

The first black woman to win the Nobel prize in Literature (1993), Morrison also received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon, the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 presented by Barack Obama. “One of our nation’s most distinguished storytellers…Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while.” (Obama)

In her eloquent acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, Morrison warned of the dangers of “oppressive language [that] does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge” and instead offered her vision of “word-work” which “makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.”

On hearing the news of her death, Margaret Atwood called Morrison a “giant of her times and ours …That her strong voice will now be missing in this age of the renewed targeting of minorities in the United States and elsewhere is a tragedy for the rest of us.”

A fierce feminist, full of verve and vision, her incantatory language lifts the often-violent subject matter off the page, as it simultaneously seeps into our consciousness, never allowing us to turn away. In times now contaminated by conspiracy theories, racist rhetoric and escalating violence, we cannot turn away. Let us celebrate the legacy of Morrison’s courage and creativity. Let us honor her life and life’s work. Let us keep her spirit alive. To soar!

You are your best thing.
― Toni Morrison (Beloved)

  

NOVELS & QUOTES

Morrison, “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” (The Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize)

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)
Love is never any better than the lover. 

 SULA (1973)
In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

SONG OF SOLOMON (1977)
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

TAR BABY (1981)
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

BELOVED (1987)
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

JAZZ (1992)
Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

PARADISE (1997)
Love is divine only and difficult always. 

LOVE (2003)
Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.

A MERCY (2008)
We never shape the world she says. The world shapes us. Sudden and silent the sparrows are gone. I am not understanding Lina. You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

HOME (2012)
Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.

GOD HELP THE CHILD (2015)
I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.