Toni Morrison: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
I started Tuesday with an anonymous essay I’d been editing: Performing Grief. It was supposed to be a good day; I wore a twentysix dress with several round colours, and flats that made me feel like I was a ballerina or a butterly. As I read the essay, I asked, how do you grieve? Publicly, for publicity? Publicly, because it’s the right thing to do? etc. I arrived at no answers because I had nothing much to feel \aggrieved about at the time, well except Nigeria.
Unfortunately, in the afternoon, about the time I’d just eaten my second apple for the day (you know what they say about apples), Ruka sent a text to ask if I’d been on Twitter. Typically, I asked if my nudes had leaked and laughed to myself. If I'm being honest, I was scared. “Have you been on Twitter?” has become the new “have you seen the news?” — words to herald bad news.
It was such a busy day, that I’d had no chance to go on one of those Twitter breaks that do nothing for the brain and productivity. I had three DMs when I opened the app. They were all about Toni Morrison. I opened the one from Amaka, the one with a lithub link, and an announcement of her death:
“‘Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.’ Rest in peace, Toni Morrison”
- What the fuck did any of these mean?
It took a while — which in retrospect, was nothing more than a minute — to process the headline and caption.
Toni Morrison, I texted Ruka back.
Yes, I’m sorry, she wrote back.
I stopped everything I was doing and stared. My skin grew warm in an airconditioned room. My fingers, now “asdfcolonlkj” over my computer keyboard started to shake. Goosebumps spread across my skin, and I couldn’t breathe at some point. Eventually I cried — short, quick tears — only because I was alone in the coworking space. I gathered myself enough to check through every trending tweet that had mentioned her name. I tried to retweet every one of them without reading, or stopping to tweet my feelings. I was overwhelmed.
Later on, my sadness, or whatever it was I felt as I processed her death turned to anger — that she dared to die. I’ve been told now that she lives even more in her death (in a poetic, and maybe ingenuine sense). I also realise I had no right to my anger, given she was the one who said:
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
When Fope called her our grandma, I felt peace for a bit. On my writer’s group, Clementine wrote “I refuse it,” and I refused Toni Morrison’s death with her. A few hours later, all I wanted were shoes, coffee brown brogues precisely.
I never expected that her death would affect me the way it did. For years, I've grappled with understanding death; the finality of life or the beginning of a new journey? Till date, other than my maternal grandmother’s death which I still haven’t gotten over, no death has affected me so deeply. I told myself that I didn’t know Toni Morrison personally, but later realised, I did. Through her books, her writing: her description of breast milk in Beloved that has stayed with me (that whiff that I catch on my breath on some mornings), the thickness of the tree on Sethe’s back in Beloved that feels the same as the scar beneath my wrist, the secret of Eva’s missing leg in Sula that gives me sleepless nights, my imagination of Pecola and Bride’s dark skins from the Bluest Eye and God bless the child respectively. Through these and a lot more, I knew her, and she knew me.
I formed a connection with her that is not exactly rare for reader/writer relationships. It’s one that is founded on the authenticity that comes with a writer’s art. After all, I did spend the whole of last year searching for her: reading and rereading her, bonding over with friends and in an interview with TJ Benson. There’s a concocted memory of me sitting with her as she read the newspaper clipping that eventually become the storyline for Beloved: runaway slave, her capture imminent, slashes her infant daughter's throat rather than see the child in chains. The scene in my head, is based off interviews she'd had and a foreword I read from one of her books. I let my imagination run wild because I knew her, and she knew me.
Toni Morrison did humanity in a way that was delicate and yet brazen. She said it was blackness, and it's described as a new way to think about being black in America, but I think it transcends that. I think she challenged what it is to exist, to be, in any colour, shape or form. This challenge seemed like a direct confrontation at my being and writing. It challenged me to break norms and stereotypes and to just write.
In her essay, the “Dead of September 11”, Morrisson writes, “Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood.” It’s difficult, but I haven't even started to speak to her. This is perhaps because it’s difficult to imagine her as dead, not boisterous, full-of-life, always dancing Toni that I knew near and afar. The essay reminds me of the ways in which we perform grief. Is this me performing grief?
Where Toni Morrison’s life and words gave me voice, her death gave me courage. You know that novel I’ve been stalling on… now’s the time; you heard it here first: Ope is writing a book. What's it about? I don’t know. I guess that’s the wonder of Toni Morrison - the gift that keeps giving.
Once when Tesiro told me I had my hair (faux locs) like Toni's hair, I tried not to blush, but couldn’t help myself. It’s not inspired by Toni Morrison, I tried to counter, straight-faced. It wasn’t, but my heart fluttered. The Toni Morrison effect.
On Friday, while giving my HER interview, I spoke about her; it didn’t make the cut, but I did. I talked about how Toni Morrison inspires me as an editor. Everyday at my job, I think about the ways in which I can bring about a phenomenal change to the way my writers write and the way their readers engage with their work. In her capacity as senior editor (fiction category) at Random House, Toni Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. Beyond even this, Toni Morrison inspires me as a writer. Her work is revolutionary in that she wrote what she wanted to read and refused to pander to any audience.
I have never been in a rush to publish because she published Bluest Eye at 39 and believes time is a human concept, as I do.
“Any attempt to distill the impact of Toni Morrison’s into a few paragraphs is sure to be futile.”
She has given us so much and we have taken it all; I’m immensely grateful that she existed, that she gave several gifts without expecting more than we be decent humans, and that I lived around the same time that she did.
One curious dream I’ve always had was that she’d live long enough to read my first book. It didn’t happen, but at least, she’s inspired it, and that’s such an honour for me.
Literature as the gift that keeps on giving:
I'm in conversation with Lesley Arimah who I love so much this weekend. It still feels like I'm dreaming.
Next week, I'll be writing to you from Kampala.
The best thing I read this week was a profile on Billie Eilish whose music I completely love. Here's Chimamanda reminding the world that women do not need to be extraordinary to be admirable. Do you know the story of Hong Kong? How a war on opium led Britain to secede the territory? If you didn't, you'll find out here. Pretty interesting stuff.
Listen to Toni Morrison's powerful Nobel Prize speech here.
Cheers to the freakin' long weekend and warmest wishes this Eid-eL Kabir to my Muslim brothers and sisters. I pray it brings you peace, joy and happiness.