Toni Morrison, author and Nobel laureate, dies at 88 – TheNigerialawyer

Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who illuminated
the joys and agonies of black American life through breathtakingly
vital works like Beloved, Song of Solomon and A Mercy, died on
Monday night her publisher Knopf confirmed. She was 88 years
old.

Over her six-decade career, she wrote 11 novels, five children’s
books, two plays, a song cycle and an opera. She served as an
editor and professor, mentoring generations of young writers of
color. After being largely ignored as a writer for a decade in the
‘70s, Morrison went on to win accolade after accolade, from the
Nobel Prize in Literature to the Presidential Medal of Freedom to
the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Morrison widened the nation’s literary canon, serving as its
conscience through trying times and establishing herself as the
keeper of its marginalized histories. Through her inventive turns
of phrase, graceful incorporation of African-American vernacular,
textured character portraits, sharp historical gaze and tragic plot
turns, she is one of the most accomplished and impactful writers in
the history of American literature.

“What was driving me to write was the silence — so many stories
untold and unexamined,” she told The New Yorker in 2003.

Her early years
Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in
the rust-belt town of Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four
children born to Ramah (née Willis), a homemaker, and George
Wofford, a shipyard welder. Both of her parents witnessed the
unbridled racism of the south firsthand: her father, as a child,
saw the lynching of two men, and harbored a deep distrust of white
people for the rest of his life. The family’s life in the more
integrated Lorain was nevertheless extremely trying, especially
during the Great Depression: When Morrison was about two, her
family’s landlord set their apartment on fire for not being able to
afford the rent.

Stories were an integral part of family life. Her parents told
her ghost stories and traditional African-American folktales; so
did her grandmother Ardelia Willis, who also lived with them. “She
told us stories to keep us working at tedious tasks,” Morrison
wrote of her grandmother in the foreword to Tar Baby, “picking
through baskets of wild grapes to sort out the bruised; to take our
minds off pain and chickenpox; to split open the dreary world to
expose an enchanted one.”

Morrison was a precocious reader who devoured works by Jane
Austen, Richard Wright, Mark Twain and many more. She converted to
Catholicism when she was 12, and as a teenager she joined her
school’s yearbook staff and debate team. To make money she cleaned
houses for white families and worked as a secretary to the head
librarian at the Lorain Public Library.

When Morrison reached college age she decided to attend Howard
University — her father took on another job in order to afford the
tuition, flouting union rules. There, she studied humanities under
Alain Locke — the acknowledged “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance —
and joined the Howard University Players, the school’s theatrical
group, with which she toured the segregated south. After graduating
in 1953 she went on to Cornell, where she received a master’s
degree in English and wrote her thesis on William Faulkner and
Virginia Woolf.

Launching her writing career
After graduating from Cornell, Morrison embarked on her teaching
career, first landing a job at Texas Southern University, and then
back at Howard, where she taught the soon-to-be civil rights
activist Stokely Carmichael. It was there that she met Harold
Morrison, an architect, and the couple wed 1958; the pair went on
to have two children (Ford and Slade) before divorcing in 1964.

During this era she began work on her first novel, The Bluest
Eye, which depicted a victimized adolescent black girl obsessed by
white beauty standards, and who begs God to turn her eyes blue. “I
wanted to read this book and no one had written it, so I thought
that maybe I would write it in order to read it,” she told The
Guardian in 2015. She hoped to write a novel devoid of the white
gaze, which she felt hovered over the work of even the most
celebrated black writers like Ralph Ellison and Frederick
Douglass.

“I’ve spent my entire life trying to make sure the white gaze
was not the dominant one in any of my books,” she said in the 2019
documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.

The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 to a minimal response,
although the New York Times reviewed it positively, calling her a
“writer of considerable power and tenderness.” To earn a living for
herself and her two children, Morrison worked as an editor at
Random House, encouraging black writers like Gayl Jones and Angela
Davis to embrace their own unique and culturally-specific voices.
“The way black people talk is not so much the use of non-standard
grammar as it is the manipulation of metaphor,” she said in a 1994
interview with Nellie McKay.

In 1974, she published The Black Book, an anthology of
African-American life and history that greatly influenced the
perception of black anthropology and culture. Two years later, she
fought for the publication and marketing of Muhammad Ali’s
autobiography The Greatest, despite his controversial rejection of
the Vietnam War.

Gaining prominence in the literary world
As Morrison held down a full-time job and raised two children, she
wrote whenever she could find time: at daybreak, or in the midst of
a commute. Davis, interviewed in The Pieces I Am, recalls that
Morrison would scribble paragraphs on the steering wheel of her car
while stuck in traffic. Morrison stole enough writing time to be
able to publish two more novels in the ‘70s: Sula (1973), which
traced a black Ohio neighborhood through the eyes of two best
friends; and Song of Solomon (1977), a decades-long epic
chronicling the life of a black man.

The latter, in particular, broke through to national audiences,
winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book’s success
convinced her that she could commit herself to being a full-time
writer. In 1981, upon the release of her fourth novel, Tar Baby,
she became the first black woman to appear on the cover of Newsweek
since Zora Neale Hurston in 1954.

Her best-known work, Beloved, was published in 1987. The novel
is based on a true story Morrison came across while publishing The
Black Book — of a runaway slave who kills her infant daughter after
being recaptured by enslavers. An instant sensation, the novel
remained on the best-seller list for 25 weeks and was added to
school reading lists across the country. After its snubbing at the
National Book Awards ensued a heated controversy, the novel won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

“I felt I represented a whole world of women who either were
silenced or who never had received the imprimatur of the
established literary world,” Morrison told The New York Times
Magazine in 1994.

While Morrison became revered, she also became feared —for her
works’ graphic violence or sexually explicit content. Time and time
again, her books were removed from school curriculum; her novel
Paradise was even banned in Texas prisons for fear it would cause a
riot.

“History has always proved that books are the first plain on
which certain battles are fought,” she said in The Pieces I Am.

The 1990s were full of awards and accolades for Morrison. She
was chosen for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the Jefferson
Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1996, and
the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters. She wrote two more novels (1992’s
Jazz and 1997’s Paradise) and extensive essays about the racially
charged controversies of the era, from the Anita Hill hearings to
Bill Clinton’s cultural blackness to the O.J. Simpson trial. She
also developed a famous bond with Oprah Winfrey, who added some of
Morrison’s novels to her influential Book Club, and who starred and
co-produced a 1998 film adaptation of Beloved.

“It’s impossible to actually imagine the American literary
landscape without a Toni Morrison,” Winfrey said in 2018. “She is
our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller.”

Her enduring legacy
But with success also came tragedy. In an eerie example of life
imitating art, Morrison’s home in Rockland County caught fire in
1993 — just like Eva Peace’s did in Sula. Her mother died from
unrelated causes less than a year later.

Morrison appeared on the cover of TIME in 1998 following the
release of Paradise. In the article, she talked about her new novel
and her inauspicious origins: “The world back then didn’t expect
much from a little black girl, but my father and mother certainly
did.”

After the millennium, Morrison released four more novels to
great acclaim and taught at Princeton until her retirement from
that post in 2006. In 2008, she made her first-ever presidential
endorsement, in support of Barack Obama; Four years later, he
reciprocated by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Toni Morrison receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on May
29, 2012 in Washington, D.C.
Toni Morrison receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on May
29, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Leigh Vogel—WireImage
“I remember reading Song of Solomon when I was a kid and not just
trying to figure out how to write, but also how to be and how to
think,” President Obama said at the ceremony. “Toni Morrison’s
prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few
writers ever attempt.”

Morrison’s Medal of Freedom arrived during yet another period of
grieving: Two years earlier, her son Slade died of pancreatic
cancer at the age of 45; the pair had written several children’s
books together. Morrison was in the process of writing her novel
Home, and her grief left her unable to write. She eventually
regrouped and published the novel the same month has she received
her Medal of Freedom, telling the Telegraph that year that she
realized “the last thing my son would want was for me to be very
self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking.”

Morrison remained active in public life through the 2010s,
commenting on political issues, giving interviews, and writing
constantly.

“The writing is — I’m free from pain,” she told NPR’s Fresh Air
in 2015. “It’s where nobody tells me what to do; it’s where my
imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters
more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I’m writing.”

time.com

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JAMB Registrar Donates Books to Central
Mosque

The Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria’s Joint
Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Olarewaju
Oloyede, has donated books to the Ilorin Jummu’at Mosque in Kwara
state.

Presenting the books on Arabic and Islamic Studies, Prof.
Is-haq, who was a former Vice Chancellor of the University of
Ilorin said the gesture was his contribution to knowledge sharing
and development of scholarship.

He was represented at the occasion by Dr. Abubakar Aliagan, an
astute Islamic scholar and a senior lecturer in the Department of
Religions studies of the University of Ilorin.

Aliagan emphasized on the need to equip the library with books
that will be of benefit to readers and expose the youth to core
Islamic teachings.

“It is our responsibilities to support the cause of Islam by
providing religious and educative materials to the society.

“But it is quite amazing that these books are the very first set
of books on the shelves of the library. Many of us may not know of
these challenges as the library seems not to be given wide
publicity” he said.

The Dan-Madami of Ilorin, Alhaji Shehu Abdul-Gafar who received
the books on behalf of the Emir, expressed their heartfelt
appreciation to the donor for his continuous support and
contributions to the development of education particularly towards
religious knowledge.

Alhaji Shehu noted that all the available computers and some E-
Library facilities were donated by Eng. Hamza Usman, from Kogi
State, whose father was once the bursar of Kwara state polytechnic
at its inception.

The Dan-Madami of Ilorin, also called on youths and the general
public to utilize and continuously support in equipping the library
with other useful materials not necessarily restricted to Islamic
and Arabic contents.

By PRNigeria^[1]