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The Legend That Is Toni Morrison
What her life story reveals about her genius
Throughout four decades, Toni Morrison has been a griot who bears the weight of multiple black universes in her writing. Her work has exposed the narrow bindings of the literary canon and burst through its seams with her inimitable prose.
In comparison to my peers, I came to Toni Morrison rather late in life — at 22 years old. I had grown up in a household where the main source of literature was the Bible. Maybe a Terry McMillan novel here or there. Or an Omar Tyree novel that I snuck and read while getting my hair braided. But it wasn’t until I matriculated in an MFA program in Vermont that one of my advisors emphatically told me that I needed to read Toni Morrison. My artistic horizons haven’t been the same since I delved into The Bluest Eye. I, as a black woman, felt exposed and acknowledged without any fear that the ugliness and triumph of African-American experiences would be distorted. On the contrary, I felt relief. This is a sentiment that is shared by millions of other readers.
Morrison’s belief in the limitlessness of black life is why she is our greatest living American author. This is no debate. No one else has been able to capture the American experience and pull a whole group of individuals, whose labor was crucial to this country, into the public consciousness with both talent and grit. Greatness cannot only be measured by the presence of a gift but also by how one strives to nurture and maintain said gift despite the odds.
It’s no surprise then, that in one of the earliest scenes of the new documentary film, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the poet Sonia Sanchez makes her feelings plain: “In order to survive, you should re-read Toni every 10 years because every 10 or 15 we have to reimagine ourselves on this American landscape. You won’t survive if you don’t do that.” This reimagining, Sanchez argues, requires self-interrogation and a hyper-subjectivity that not only centers black people, but also those who surround us, and those who came before us.
Morrison’s belief in the limitlessness of black life is why she is our greatest living American author.
