Post #5144

🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣ She spoke of her father’s “defensive racism”, which prompted him to throw a predatory white landlord down the stairs. She spoke of her mother’s insistence on integrating every new movie theatre in town. She spoke of how when her “pitch-black” great-grandmother had first set eyes on Morrison and her sister, she said the girls had “been tampered with”, which was meant racially: “We were not pure and she was.” The dynamics of my mixed-race family didn’t match the norms, either. My black Zambian grandmother, for whom I’m named, initially disapproved of my mother’s decision to marry a white man; my mother’s older sister refused to attend the wedding. Our moves to the UK and then to the US when I was a kid – with a year back in Zambia when I was a teenager – were punctuated by moments of racial absurdity: “What are you? Black or white?” (As if I had a choice!) Yet even now, at my grown age, my first response to racism is surprise. Despite our respective births in disparate times and places (Lorain, Ohio, in 1931; Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980), I think Morrison and I both lucked into the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race. This perhaps explains why neither of us tends to capitalise the word black when referring to people in writing. It concedes too much; it protests too much. Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses: “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said. Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics. It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing. Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated. Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.” Many still dismiss Morrison’s stature as either undeserved or obvious, as if surely so much praise either begs the question or settles it. They justify their disinclination to engage with the art itself by gesturing to what we might call her DEI-fication or her Oprah‑priation, as if Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison through some kind of literary affirmative action plan. Morrison incensed all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare she refuse to placate or translate? How dare she demand to be taken seriously? How dare she be a black artist with real ideas? How dare she ask that we actually read her writing, and on its own terms? It could not have been easy to be Toni Morrison. Yet I aspire to it. I yearn for that freedom she so beautifully embodied: to feel at ease to be difficult. #toni#morrison#zambia#nobel#prize#black#narratives 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸