Toni Morrison
Toby Brothers, founder and Director of the London Literary Salon, explains her commitment to reading and teaching Toni Morrison’s work (adapted from a tribute to Dr Morrison published following her death in August 2019) and why she believes that it is vital to continue to read and discuss her writing.
Toni Morrison tested me, provoked me and then utterly illuminated me. Her language bridges profundity and lyricism. Her images sear, and make the reader understand pain and struggle freshly, and why it is so necessary that we understand each other’s pain. Her book Beloved started the Salon and continues to be the touchstone, it is where I ground my reading in writing that weaves sublimity with the grotesque to reveal the depths of human experience.
Morrison’s work made me face racism head-on, and shaped a life-long study that I will never complete: to celebrate Black culture and recognise the fingerprints of racial inequity all across American cultural history. Morrison’s fiction and non-fiction has inspired my teaching – I want everyone to read her books and to discuss them, to be blown open by the sharp beauty of her art.
Many of her lines chant in my mind, here is a quote from her lecture ‘The Foreigner’s Home’ at The Louvre in 2006:
“The destiny of the 21st century will be shaped by the possibility or collapse of a sharable world. The arts community is unique: searing and reflective, the arts have the ability to re-interpret views of estrangement – (we are faced with a) question of cultural apartheid or estrangement . . . Belonging vs. Dispossession
(We are in the process of) regulating the children of immigrants into a modern version of the undead – (in reference to the flood in New Orleans) we have a harvest of Shame- this almost Biblical flood (revealed the US government’s choice to leave for dead the poor, the black Americans whom they viewed as disposable) . . . All displacements have transferred cultural riches into foreign soil.
The double meaning of the title of this conference: The Foreigner’s Home is of course purposeful. Either the foreigner’s own home or the foreigner is home . . . the theme: being, fearing or accommodating the stranger.
Art enlightens . . . history instructs.”
Across the years, I can still feel the power of her spoken voice, how every word came through in its full potential when she spoke. Her vocal expression honoured words – the listener became more attuned to both the particular music of language and the voltage of meaning.
I have read, re-read and taught Jazz, Beloved, Sula and her more recent work A Mercy. Every dip into her writing leaves me with joy for the sensually-evocative, knife-sharp phrase, love for the beauty of the world and the human souls who grasp it – and a greater desire to fight racial inequality.
