by MYLES BURKE
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.
“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.
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