The Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, has died at the age of\n88. She was educated at Howard and Cornell Universities\u200b, going on to work as an academic, critic and\nactivist as well as one of the most influential novelists of her own and subsequent\ngenerations. For her writing, she won the Pulitzer Prize\nfor Literature in 1988\u200b\nand the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Morrison\u2019s\nbody of work is concerned with how the unvoiced, the silent and the invisible of history\nbear witness to and give testimony about their\nsuffering and oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This leads us to consider how\nsubsequent generations incorporate the memory of their ancestor\u2019s suffering\ninto their own histories and how they make sense of the present with those\nhistories in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Morrison\u2019s\nbest known novel is Beloved<\/em>, published in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Beloved<\/em> has at\nleast two presents prompts the reader to consider how the past acts on the\npresent and how the traumatic events experienced\nin one can be both supressed and revealed by memory in the\nother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the novel, Sethe struggles\nwith memory as a site upon which the horrors of slavery must be both \u2018beaten\nback\u2019 and negotiated in the present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The horrors of slavery are inscribed upon\nthe bodies of slaves, and so their corporeal, bodily presence in the\nworld stands as its own testament to their suffering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The beating that Sethe receives for\nsending her children to safety, the tree that is inscribed on her back by the\nwhip, is a physical manifestation of the scars of slavery. Many other physical\nscars \u2013 including where the saw cut Beloved\u2019s throat \u2013 manifest themselves in\nthis narrative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But it is the mental and emotional\nscars that are Morrison\u2019s primary concern and the capacity of the tramautised\nindividual and community to come to terms with brutality\nand suffering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A book about slavery read by millions\nof people, studied on a majority of English degrees across the world, puts\nslavery at the centre of a cultural debate in a way that politicians and\ncampaigners had not been able to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It does so by humanising the suffering\nthat had affected so many millions of people. The novel tracks the individual\nexperience of an institution that was industrial in its scale, economic in its\norganisation and supported by federal legislation <\/p>\n\n\n\n The novel itself emerged from a\nfragment of history that Morrison encountered while researching a book of blacks on\nrecord \u2013 in print, song, newspapers, photographs \u2013 a sort of informal history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She found newspaper accounts of Margaret\nGarner who\nkilled her child to prevent her being returned to slavery by vigilante slave\nhunters. The event was immortalised in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s\n1867 painting, The Modern Medea<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The book is almost symmetrical, balanced around the\nrevelation of the incident at the very centre of the narrative \u2013 the\ninfanticide <\/p>\n\n\n\n Morriosn doesn\u2019t use partial revelations, hints and subtle\ndevelopments as conventional aspects of literary suspense, though. Instead, she\nuses these evasions to signal both the unimaginable sadness of the event and\nthe nature of Sethe\u2019s subsequent relation to it \u2013 she can neither\nforget what she has done to her child, but neither can she bring herself\nto recall it. Memory must be a battle between supressing and memorialising. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is another motivation to this structure of repetitions\nand developments. One of the ways in which the slaves communicate with each\nother is through song. Owners and overseers see these songs as the rhythms of\nwork and a sign of a happy slave population, but they are radical challenges to\nthe authority of the oppressor, carrying messages of potential escape as well\nof support for those who can bear their condition no longer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Slave spirituals, as the songs became known, have a pattern\nof repetitions and developments, of call and response. It has become a\nsignature for expression and representation in African American culture. You\nfind the cadences of call and response everywhere in black American culture;\nfrom gospel and blues, to preaching, to the rhetoric of black political leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Morrison did a great deal to raise the voice of African\nAmericans through difficult times, but her presence at Obama\u2019s inauguration\ndemonstrated how influential her own has been in giving voice to the unvoiced.\nHer novels remain as a lasting testament to her influence and genius. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, has died at the age of 88. She was educated at Howard and Cornell Universities\u200b, going on to work as an academic, critic and activist as well as one of the most influential novelists of her … Continue reading