TONI MORRISON'S GIFT
Author:
Date: Friday, October 8, 1993
Page: 22
Section: EDITORIAL PAGE
"Black people had some choices," Toni Morrison once told a Globe reporter.
"They could say life is limited for you, make the best of it; there are
certain things forbidden to you, and you might as well know that now. Or they
said all things are possible and don't let anybody tell you that you can't do
something. I came from a family that said the latter." Nevertheless, even
Chloe Anthony Wofford, known to the world as Toni Morrison, admits that as a
girl growing up during the Depression in a Northeastern Ohio steel town, her
only expectation for the life ahead was that she "just had to get a job."
Even with her gifts of imagination, the most coveted literary honor, the Nobel
Prize for Literature, which she received this week, was not in her field of
vision.
It was in the midst of a stifling marriage, at the age of 29 or 30, that
Morrison found liberation in her pen. "I had no will, no judgment, no
perspective, no power, no authority, no self -- just this brutal sense of
irony, melancholy and a trembling respect for words. I wrote like someone with
a dirty habit."
That habit, that respect for words, has not only spawned six brilliantly
crafted novels but a generation of readers and writers.
Morrison named her characters Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Pilate, Jadine, Milkman
and Guitar. "I didn't really know anyone named Jane or Margie. When I was
growing up, those were the exotic names," she once explained.
Her stories of individual pain and triumph resonate with the African-
American experience. Her trademarks are exquisite detail and a lyrical style.
Morrison, the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
and one of only eight women to be so honored, once said:
"As a black and a woman, I have had access to a range of emotions and
perceptions that were unavailable to people who were neither." Through her
gift of storytelling, she has made those experiences available to all.
RAY ;10/07 NIGRO ;10/08,08:13 EMORRIS08
|
