In History: Toni Morrison on why ‘writing for black people is tough’

BBC culture / By Myles BurkeFeatures correspondent

One of the great 20th-Century novelists, Morrison consciously aimed her work at black American readers. In a 2003 interview, she told the BBC about why that made her writing sing.

At the start of her career, Toni Morrison determined that she would write for her “neighbourhood”. And so began the remarkable literary career of an author whose work tackles the complexities of identity, race and history with beguiling language and deep humanity.

By identifying herself as a black writer, and consciously writing for a black American audience, author Toni Morrison felt freed to find her voice, she said.

“When I began to write, I was thinking, suppose I just wrote for my neighbourhood and just that, and it just opened up everything. It was clearer, it was pointed,” she told the BBC’s Kirsty Wark in November 2003.

But with that framing came an added responsibility: a need for the stories, rhythms and phrasing to sound true and authentic to readers from those communities.

When Toni Morrison began writing for her ‘neighbourhood,’ American literature transformed.

“You know it was like listening to jazz musicians, black people in music were very, very critical. They hated the mediocre. So I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be so good, where the judgement of people who knew the community was so powerful, that I could not play.

“I knew how to play up to a white reader, I knew how to manipulate that, that was easy but writing for black people is tough. Really tough, if they take you seriously.”

And while her writing needed to resonate with those readers about the complexities of the black experience, she was careful to not succumb to any expectations about how people wished it to be portrayed.

“Now some of them thought ‘well we would like a little more best foot forward here. You are always writing about violence, you are always writing about depraved people, why are you so gothic?'” she told the BBC.

“And I would always say ‘whose eye is looking at this? Is it you or are you telling me to shape up because there is a white reader out there who might get the wrong impression of you?’ Now once you get rid of that you are home free, you can just write.”

Her origin story

Although she was known and celebrated globally as Toni Morrison, she was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, on 18 February 1931. She grew up in the small Midwestern town of Lorain in Ohio, one of four children in a working-class family.

Her early life was shaped by the sharp end of the racial violence and discrimination that her family experienced while she was growing up. She would later recall how a landlord set fire to their family’s home while they were in it, in order to evict them.

But that childhood was also imbued with the rich cultural tapestry and lyrical storytelling of her parents and their community. Both of these early influences would feed into her writing and literary style.

“My family in those days, people didn’t have televisions and things, they told stories, and we told stories and we were called upon to tell stories. We had to shape them, reinterpret them, perform them,” she said.

“So the habit of that, it means I hear it. And it has a rhythm, it has silence, it has rest. It has some combination of reality and magic.”

Getty Images
Morrison is most famous for her 1987 novel Beloved, a haunting, supernatural tale about slavery and the ghosts of the past (Credit: Getty Images)

“So, when I think of writing as I was very determined to do, is write in the language of African Americans. The language I heard. That language had always been comic, or dismissed or you know discredited in some way.”

A voracious reader at an early age, her passion for literature and gift for writing were encouraged by her parents. Upon graduating high school, she first went to study at the prestigious Howard University in Washington DC, before completing her master’s degree at Cornell University in 1955, with a thesis on suicide in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

She returned to Howard to begin a teaching career, where she met and married Jamaican-born architect Harold Morrison in 1958. They had two sons, and his surname would form part of the name she would become globally known by. Her first name came from Anthony, the name she took when she converted to Catholicism at the age of 12 and which university friends would later shorten to Toni.

The making of a literary legend

In 1963, in the wake of the break-up of her marriage, needing to support herself and her children, she took a job as an editor at Random House publishing company. While working here she would edit and champion the works of black authors, bringing attention to books by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.

It was also here that she would write her first novel, The Bluest Eye in 1970. The book contains many of the themes that would come to define much of her writing. Set in her own hometown of Lorain during the 1940s, it is a devastating examination of the effect of racism, poverty, abuse and damaging ideas of beauty upon a black American girl, called Pecola.

The narrative puts this young black girl at the centre of the story, with an unflinching look at the trauma and challenges faced by her. Toni Morrison wanted to couple this with a lyrical literary style that captured the speech, rhythms and expressions of the conversations she remembered overhearing while growing up.

“It was everything, it was memorable and the metaphors were stunning, so I really wanted to use those characteristics in my work.

“So, when I changed the first sentence of the book The Bluest Eye from whatever it was to ‘Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall 1941’, ‘Quiet as it’s kept’, it’s not hard to understand what that means, it just means ‘shhh’ but I hear those women in the backyard, at the fence, getting ready to gossip on somebody, you know, [saying] ‘Quiet as it’s kept’ then they tell some terrible tale.

“So, it’s that quality of the spoken language that is extremely important in the work,” she told the BBC.

In History

In History is a series which uses the BBC’s unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.

She garnered more critical acclaim, three years later with her second novel, Sula, which was nominated for the National Book Award and 1977’s Song of Solomon, which won her the National Book Critics Circle award.

But it is perhaps her seminal 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning-novel, Beloved, that remains her best-known work. A story that mixes horror, history and poetry, it was inspired by the true story of runaway slave Margaret Garner who, when facing recapture, kills her infant daughter rather than see her suffer a life of slavery.

Beautifully written, filled with complex, conflicted characters and intense, haunting imagery, the novel is an exploration of trauma and guilt, folklore and motherhood. It challenges its readers to confront the harrowing cruelty of slavery, its sexual violence, its brutal dehumanisation of people and its destructive lasting legacy.

The granddaughter of a slave from Alabama herself, she dedicated the book “to the 60 million who died as a result of slavery”.

In 1993, her achievements were recognised with a Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the first black American woman to be awarded one, cementing her status as a literary icon, and giving her a platform which she would use to speak out on issues of race, feminism and societal injustices.

The Swedish Nobel Academy said she was an author “who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”.

A prolific writer, she penned plays, essays, children’s books, even song lyrics. Through her empathic, elegant storytelling she was able to bring overlooked voices and untold stories to the fore, allowing them to resonate across cultures and different generations.

In 2012 she was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony, President Barack Obama said: “Toni Morrison’s prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt.”

In History is a series which uses the BBC’s unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.

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