“She dared to be difficult”: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think | Toni Morrison

THere are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, uncomfortable, stubborn, complex, annoying, confusing, and illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all of these forms of difficulty intersect. I feel like I’ve always known this. I’ve been told more difficult times in my life than I can count. But it was only because of Toni Morrison that I began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my difficulty.

Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything, from literature to politics, from criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art. In 1993, she became the only black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the facts remain: they are difficult to read. It’s hard to teach her. Despite the wealth of profiles, reviews and scholarly analyzes it trails behind it, it is difficult to write about. Most importantly, she is the only black writer we have — and her work is extremely complex.

In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—they were completely removed from his experience.” She replied, “Boy, you must have had a hard time with Beowulf!” Vogue, which lacked wit in this response, commented: “Morrison has no patience with people who claim ignorance; but she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. “I find myself more difficult,” she says. It’s something I really enjoy.” Morrison’s literary difficulty is often translated in this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failure: How dare you be patient! Well, wouldn’t you be?

One of the reasons Morrison felt angry was certainly the stress of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers at once. She was an editor, university professor, writer, critic, and public intellectual. I’ve worked in these fields as well, so I know that expanding multiple branches can be a way to distract yourself from the core profession. Commitment to writing above all else is often viewed as selfish; When gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “It’s hard for a woman to say, ‘I’m a writer,’” Morrison succinctly noted.

She struggled to accommodate these often low-paid forms of literary labor with the unpaid domestic labor of raising two sons as a single mother: “It was very difficult to write and raise children because they deserve all your time, and you don’t have it.” This professional difficulty was exacerbated not only by the fact that she was unique in her fields, but also by the fact that she often deliberately chose to go it alone. For example, at her first job in trade publishing, she didn’t tell anyone that she was writing a novel until The Bluest Eye showed up at another house.

Although it was difficult for her professionally, Morrison was genuinely pleased by the difficulty faced by other black women artists, such as novelist Gayle Jones, whose work she edited and published, and jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. For Morrison, the fact that they were considered difficult was a sign of their insistence that their art be taken seriously.

To read Morrison herself with the seriousness she deserves requires taking into account the complex—or bond—between gender and race that she shared with them. It is not easy to untangle. As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “One must look closely at the black woman herself — a difficult proposition, one that is inevitably doomed to failure, because if anything is true of black women, it is the extent to which they continue (deliberately, I suspect) to defy categorization.”

Morrison’s childhood stories read like negative portrayals of standard American racial narratives. She spoke of her father’s “defensive racism,” which led him to throw a predatory white homeowner down the stairs. She talked about her mother’s insistence that every new movie theater in the city be integrated. She told how when her great-grandmother first saw Morrison and her sister, she said the girls were being “manipulated”, which was racially implied: “We weren’t pure, and she was like that.”

My mixed-race family dynamics didn’t fit the standards either. My black Zambian grandmother, after whom I am named, initially disapproved of my mother’s decision to marry a white man; My mother’s older sister refused to attend the wedding. Our move to the UK, then to the US when I was a child – and then a year in Zambia as a teenager – was punctuated by moments of racist silliness: “Who are you? Black or white?” (As if I had a choice!) But even now, as an adult, my first reaction to racism is surprise.

Despite being born in different times and places (Lorain, Ohio, in 1931; Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980), I think Morrison and I have had the strange privilege of moving away from or bouncing around race. This probably explains why none of us tend to capitalize the word black when referring to people in writing. She is very condescending; He protests a lot.

Morrison temperamentally hated being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a New Yorker profile, “Being a black writer is not a shallow place, but a rich place to write from. It does not limit my imagination; it expands it.” She has often complained that literary criticism is ill-equipped to read black writing, which is read as just writing actorIn symbolic sense and identity: “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.

Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s famous difficulty was not, I believe, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contradictory politics. Her commitment reflected the scope and depth of black aesthetics—as embodied by jazz, which she described as “very complex, very sophisticated, and very difficult”—in her writing.

Her close friend, writer Fran Lebowitz, said of Morrison’s death in 2019: “I know this sounds crazy, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated. Because people always looked at her in terms of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did with her writing that went unnoticed.”

Many still dismiss Morrison’s status as either undeserved or obvious, as if too much praise certainly either begs or settles the question. They justify their aversion to engaging with art itself by pointing to what we might call DEI-fiction or opera breccia, as if Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison through some kind of literary affirmative action plan.

A black novelist on the board is rumored to have voted against “Beloved” receiving the National Book Award in 1987. A white colleague of mine at Harvard once told me that he found “Beloved” sentimental—and it never occurred to him that Morrison was deliberately leaning into sentimentality for effect. I’ve heard prominent black scholars joke about whether she stole the plot of the book about a runaway slave, and about whether her literary ambition made her a bad mother.

Morrison has drawn the ire of all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare you refuse appeasement or translation? How dare you demand to be taken seriously? How dare she be a black artist with real ideas? How dare she ask us to actually read her writing, on her own terms?

It wasn’t easy being Toni Morrison. However, I aspire to that. I long for that freedom you embodied so beautifully: to feel comfortable when you’re hard.