This is a place to talk about Morrison, her work, and who we should look to now.
I read my first Morrison after college (I want to give my degree back), a copy of “Beloved” at a boyfriend’s house, and ruined the trip by taking it everywhere and having the expression of someone simultaneously blown away by the possibilities of fiction and also emotionally devastated.
I wrote my graduate school application essay about something Toni Morrison said: "I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free someone else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower someone else. This is not just a grab bag candy game.'"
Like a week ago I was telling my boyfriend how crazy it was to me that an actual real Renaissance-level genius was probably, like, eating toast in her kitchen at the same time as us. "Beloved" is the greatest horror novel of all time and "Song of Solomon" is both a totally unique and also one of the first works of literary fiction that really got to me on both an emotional and intellectual level - and tons of other kids who first read it in high school. RIP to the world's realest.
I first read Toni Morrison‘s book “Beloved” when I was a junior in college in Utah. I was raised in a naive, very white, tight-knit Mormon community that rarely spoke of such “unpleasantries.” When I read “Beloved”, it crushed my soul. There was no other way but to feel the pain she wrote about. I remember having a physical, nauseous reaction. It (and the social inequalities class) moved me so deeply that I took a totally different path in life...changed majors, moved across country, changed my political affiliation and made a career in social justice. Devastated that this beautiful human being is no longer with us. 💔
My first gut response to Toni Morrison when my best friend was reading her was that Morrison's writing elicited so many strong feelings that she couldn't've been a very serious author; I wrote Morrison off without reading her, and subconsciously categorized her under "embarrassingly passionate, manipulatively emotional, lacking dignified detachment", which is how I think I categorize most things that I think are too feminine. I wonder what makes me so afraid of the things that women feel and say and do.
I read her in my late 20s and was obviously wrecked.
I had a friend who was an english major and a brilliant person. He died young and randomly, killed by a gun. I think about him all the time, and I thought about him as soon as I heard Toni Morrison died. Because he loved Toni Morrison, loved and related to the beauty and pain in her work. I don't know. I just miss my friend. Once, during some late night college nonsense talk he said "Crying is like reading Beloved." We were just messing around with things coming out of our mouth, but now I'm thinking about it - processing trauma in the body, going through it, pain going through me. There's something resonant about how her writing worked in the phrase, not the least of which is that Toni Morrison wrote so good that it's biological processes that get compared to her, not the other way around. Her legacy is both massive and intimate, she was a real genius, and this is a real massive loss.
I took an entire class on the collected works of Toni Morrison in college, and it is not an exaggeration to say it changed my life. Even as an English major, totally shifted how I see the world.
When I first started making an effort to read more after graduation, Sula was the first book I read. The last line has stuck with me ever since, and feels appropriate today: “It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
In addition to her fiction, the literary theory she lays out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is so, so illuminating.
“It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronts of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.”
I did an oral exam on Paradise in college, my final exam before graduation, blubbering tears because I'd just been cheated on and I had an incredibly merciful professor who let me talk through my answers instead of trying to type out coherent sentences; it turned into a conversation where we pulled out themes and symbolism together, which was simultaneously heartbreaking and life-giving.
“Dying was OK because it was sleep and there wasn't no gray ball in death, was there? Was there? She would have to ask somebody about that, somebody she could confide in, and who knew a lot of things, like Sula, for Sula would know or if she didn't she would say something funny that would make it all right."
I literally just finished reading Beloved for the first time last night. A titan.
Also, she writes so cogently on writing-- from her Art of Fiction interview in the Paris review in 1993: "You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness—that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back—without actually wasting anything. You shouldn’t overgratify, you should never satiate. I’ve always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art—a yearning for more—is really very, very powerful. But there is at the same time a kind of contentment, knowing that at some other time there will indeed be more because the artist is endlessly inventive."
I am so sad. I knew she was 88, but I wasn't ready. I feel like my dearest aunt has died.
It had a limited release this summer, but the documentary about her life, The Pieces I Am, is still playing in a few places, I think. I highly recommend it. If it's anywhere near you, please make the effort to go see it. I have read her books for 30 years now, but it blew me away how much I didn't know about her life and her work.
I had an English teacher my sophomore year of high school that really did a lot for me (mainly she really saw a struggling kid and didn’t ignore it but instead fostered my engagement with literature by giving me extracurricular reading). She gave me Song of Solomon when I was 16, and I was so thrown out of my comfort zone in the best possible way. I think that moment was pivotal for my whole life going forward—what I chose to read, and ultimately how I chose to think (and my politics).
I feel very sad after this past week with everything from Greenland to gun violence to, now, this. But Toni Morrison told us that there was not time for despair, only the work, and also that if there is a void in the word for what we want to read, we must create it ourselves. So I guess I will continue to strive. Sending my love to everyone.
I read The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple in 6th grade. My mom had been taking a college lit class and I stole them after the semester was over. Both of them were confiscated by the same shitty teacher. (Later that semester a friend and I started a petition to get her fired because she refused to give A's because only Jesus was perfect. Texas. I got in so much shit over that). These books along with Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison opened my eyes to the idea that other people could have abusive parents, could be poor, could live in trauma, and still be ok. Toni Morrison taught me resilience. And when I decided to begin writing professionally at the age of 36, she taught me how to be brave like she had been. G-d, was she such an important person to my life.
I'm so grateful to have read Beloved in college, surrounded by my peers who were equally rocked by every page, every sentence, every word. Sometimes we read from the book aloud, maybe a section we wanted to analyze and all of us listened and then sat in silence. Other times there was an urgency to say something about what it meant to us, how her writing was changing us, changing our brains in real time. Beloved changed me for the better.
I read "Beloved" for the first time as a senior in high school (when I was *far* too young to understand it) and hated every moment. Reread it again about two years ago and it took my breath away.
So thankful for her legacy. I grew up in a conservative white Christian community, and Toni Morrison taught me so much about the world and how to view my privilege so differently than my culture wanted me to.
My first Morrison was The Bluest Eye. I read it in 11th grade and it taught me a lot as a rich white girl with loving parents about others' experiences. I then read Sula in first year of undergrad and Beloved. I'm so grateful I had teachers who took me on those journeys through her books.
I read Beloved in high school and didn't appreciate it because I was a teenage dirtbag who thought symbolism was nonsense. I've been meaning to revisit it as part of my reading this year, and just added it to my audiobook holds. Can't wait to hear it read in her voice.
At my high school, every year we read a Shakespeare and Toni Morrison in English class. I read the Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz in those classes, and then worked my way through the rest of her books while I was in college. I have favorite passages marked and I go back to them regularly. I'm lucky to have her last two to look forward to. But I just cannot believe she's gone.
"The ocean is my man now...I can watch my man from the porch. In the evening mostly, but sunrise too, when I need to see his shoulders collared with seafoam. There used to be white wicker chairs out here where pretty women drank iced tea with a drop of Jack Daniel's or Cutty Sark in it. Nothing left now, so I sit on the steps or lean my elbows on the railings. If I'm real still and listening carefully I can hear his voice. You'd think with all that strength, he'd be a bass. But, no. My man is a tenor."
I turned 30 today and read Beloved for the first time this last year - it was beautiful and devastating, and even more upsetting when I realized it was inspired by true events. Rest In Power, Morrison.
I read the Bluest Eye when I was about 12 and have subsequsently read a lot of Morrison. I've been thinking a lot about all the terrible bull shit going on in our world and how it seems like everyone has lost their empathy and compassion. Toni Morrison's novels all embodied compassion and reading them can teach you so so much about empathy and being a compassionate person and understanding people. I wish we all got to spend more time reading Morrison and learning from her beautiful, beautiful novels.
I'm feeling lucky I was introduced to Song of Solomon early, in high school. (Which I'm thankful for and slightly astonished since it was a 99.9% white school.) I should probably read it again since I'm sure there's plenty I missed.
reading the bluest eye in high school was the first time I really understood how different my life was from my Black friends and neighbours. I had read and been taught about slavery, but her writing opened a world that made me understand intergenerational trauma. I am so sad
I loved everything she wrote but I felt such guilt for not getting through Beloved in high school, terrible teacher and an English class filled with every bully in my year contributed to my not enjoying it. So I just downloaded the audiobook version with Toni Morrison narrating. It feels like a good decision. Goodbye genius 💜
I read "Beloved" in high school during class, while it was tucked inside whatever large subject book I was in class for, tears silently streaming down my face. After that intro, I read everything of hers I could...
Read Song of Solomon in school, and it was transformative—both stylistically and substantively. But it was Beloved that changed my life, that led me to listen to and be a student of people of color. I have been comforted for so long that her voice was among ours. RIP
the bluest eye was the first assigned text in my college intro to lit class. i went to college convinced i wanted to study literature without ever having been taught it, really, and i had no idea what to expect. it was the most powerful, unsettling, unforgettable experience, and it sealed my choice of major within the week.
I read beloved the summer before 8th grade because my parents had just read it and it was around and I was that kind of annoying advanced reader. I recently questioned them "why the fuck did you let me read that in 8th grade, I KNOW I didn't get it even though I thought it was incredible" and my mom replied "like we could have possibly stopped you." Touche.
I read The Bluest Eye for a literature class in my senior year of high school. I am forever grateful to my teacher that year for assigning that book - for giving a room full of smart, diverse, troubled teenage girls something that would truly make us think and feel in a way we never had been asked to before.
I read Toni Morrison in high school--Sula in tenth grade English & Song of Solomon in eleventh. I will always remember our teacher explaining the masturbation scene in Sula & being shocked that we didn't get it. We were in awe. Song of Solomon was my favorite though--I wrote my best paper of high school on it.
Beloved honestly changed my life. My husband just said that he'd never read Toni Morrison and was like, I think she wrote too late for me to read her in hs and college. I told him her first novel was in 1970 and Beloved was in 1987. He said, "How come I was never assigned her?" and I said, "I guess black women weren't really on the curriculum in the 80s and 90s unless you were expressly taking classes in feminism." I mean, she SHOULD be as widely read as all the old white guys.
I read Song of Solomon the summer after my senior year of high school. I'd read Sula and knew it was good, even great, but it didn't plow into me the way that Song of Solomon did. I read it in an absolute fever. I couldn't put it down. When Milkman hears the kids singing for the second time and starts to write down what they're singing, my heart started racing. I read the final page of the book four or five times in a row, and then I wept. I still can't articulate why-- I'm a white woman-- but something about the hugeness of the story made me understand the term "epic" for the first time on a visceral level. It was the same way I felt the first time I saw the ocean.
Shockingly, I first heard of Toni Morrison my first year of college -- technically the second, but I dropped out and started English Philology, and Beloved was on the list. I never read it (and then I dropped out again for other reasons) but I know how much she meant to people.
I read her for the first time in college when one of my favorite professors assigned Sula and I was undone. I love and admire her work so much. My coworker and I were just saying how we wish we could abandon our work for the day and talk about Toni.
My favorite high school english teacher introduced Toni Morrison to us in 11th grade, when we read The Bluest Eye. It was the first time I'd really interrogated the concept of beauty, and whiteness, up until that point. I recently learned that the book has come under fire from parents in the district in the past few years, which makes me sad. It's a critical piece of fiction and something that should be taught in schools. She and her words will be deeply missed.
The most recent book of hers I read was Home, and it moved me so deeply. The horror of the medical abuse, the long journey with its terrors, and the final place of peace and community, something very like heaven.
She is someone who has taught me, moved me, exhorted me to do better. I'm in loss today.
I didn't know what else to do, so I sent a little thank you note to my incredible, life-changing high school English teacher, who taught The Bluest Eye in the most compassionate and rigorous way.
"Simultaneously blown away by the possibilities of fiction and also emotionally devastated" was also my reaction to reading Toni Morrison, also as someone who came to her unforgivably late.
I suppose everyone else will have already said this, but I can’t stand that she did not live to see the end of the Trump era. Even though we obviously have generations of healing and reparations to do, today is just so bleak and hopeless, and that’s the world she died in. We still need her prophetic voice!
I was just saying to a friend that I cannot bear the thought of someone today writing something nice and bland for Trump to say about her.
I wrote my graduate school application essay about something Toni Morrison said: "I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free someone else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower someone else. This is not just a grab bag candy game.'"
This is not just a grab bag candy game.
Like a week ago I was telling my boyfriend how crazy it was to me that an actual real Renaissance-level genius was probably, like, eating toast in her kitchen at the same time as us. "Beloved" is the greatest horror novel of all time and "Song of Solomon" is both a totally unique and also one of the first works of literary fiction that really got to me on both an emotional and intellectual level - and tons of other kids who first read it in high school. RIP to the world's realest.
I first read Toni Morrison‘s book “Beloved” when I was a junior in college in Utah. I was raised in a naive, very white, tight-knit Mormon community that rarely spoke of such “unpleasantries.” When I read “Beloved”, it crushed my soul. There was no other way but to feel the pain she wrote about. I remember having a physical, nauseous reaction. It (and the social inequalities class) moved me so deeply that I took a totally different path in life...changed majors, moved across country, changed my political affiliation and made a career in social justice. Devastated that this beautiful human being is no longer with us. 💔
My first gut response to Toni Morrison when my best friend was reading her was that Morrison's writing elicited so many strong feelings that she couldn't've been a very serious author; I wrote Morrison off without reading her, and subconsciously categorized her under "embarrassingly passionate, manipulatively emotional, lacking dignified detachment", which is how I think I categorize most things that I think are too feminine. I wonder what makes me so afraid of the things that women feel and say and do.
I read her in my late 20s and was obviously wrecked.
I had a friend who was an english major and a brilliant person. He died young and randomly, killed by a gun. I think about him all the time, and I thought about him as soon as I heard Toni Morrison died. Because he loved Toni Morrison, loved and related to the beauty and pain in her work. I don't know. I just miss my friend. Once, during some late night college nonsense talk he said "Crying is like reading Beloved." We were just messing around with things coming out of our mouth, but now I'm thinking about it - processing trauma in the body, going through it, pain going through me. There's something resonant about how her writing worked in the phrase, not the least of which is that Toni Morrison wrote so good that it's biological processes that get compared to her, not the other way around. Her legacy is both massive and intimate, she was a real genius, and this is a real massive loss.
I took an entire class on the collected works of Toni Morrison in college, and it is not an exaggeration to say it changed my life. Even as an English major, totally shifted how I see the world.
When I first started making an effort to read more after graduation, Sula was the first book I read. The last line has stuck with me ever since, and feels appropriate today: “It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
In addition to her fiction, the literary theory she lays out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is so, so illuminating.
“It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronts of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.”
I did an oral exam on Paradise in college, my final exam before graduation, blubbering tears because I'd just been cheated on and I had an incredibly merciful professor who let me talk through my answers instead of trying to type out coherent sentences; it turned into a conversation where we pulled out themes and symbolism together, which was simultaneously heartbreaking and life-giving.
“Dying was OK because it was sleep and there wasn't no gray ball in death, was there? Was there? She would have to ask somebody about that, somebody she could confide in, and who knew a lot of things, like Sula, for Sula would know or if she didn't she would say something funny that would make it all right."
I literally just finished reading Beloved for the first time last night. A titan.
Also, she writes so cogently on writing-- from her Art of Fiction interview in the Paris review in 1993: "You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness—that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back—without actually wasting anything. You shouldn’t overgratify, you should never satiate. I’ve always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art—a yearning for more—is really very, very powerful. But there is at the same time a kind of contentment, knowing that at some other time there will indeed be more because the artist is endlessly inventive."
I am so sad. I knew she was 88, but I wasn't ready. I feel like my dearest aunt has died.
It had a limited release this summer, but the documentary about her life, The Pieces I Am, is still playing in a few places, I think. I highly recommend it. If it's anywhere near you, please make the effort to go see it. I have read her books for 30 years now, but it blew me away how much I didn't know about her life and her work.
I had an English teacher my sophomore year of high school that really did a lot for me (mainly she really saw a struggling kid and didn’t ignore it but instead fostered my engagement with literature by giving me extracurricular reading). She gave me Song of Solomon when I was 16, and I was so thrown out of my comfort zone in the best possible way. I think that moment was pivotal for my whole life going forward—what I chose to read, and ultimately how I chose to think (and my politics).
I feel very sad after this past week with everything from Greenland to gun violence to, now, this. But Toni Morrison told us that there was not time for despair, only the work, and also that if there is a void in the word for what we want to read, we must create it ourselves. So I guess I will continue to strive. Sending my love to everyone.
I read The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple in 6th grade. My mom had been taking a college lit class and I stole them after the semester was over. Both of them were confiscated by the same shitty teacher. (Later that semester a friend and I started a petition to get her fired because she refused to give A's because only Jesus was perfect. Texas. I got in so much shit over that). These books along with Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison opened my eyes to the idea that other people could have abusive parents, could be poor, could live in trauma, and still be ok. Toni Morrison taught me resilience. And when I decided to begin writing professionally at the age of 36, she taught me how to be brave like she had been. G-d, was she such an important person to my life.
I'm so grateful to have read Beloved in college, surrounded by my peers who were equally rocked by every page, every sentence, every word. Sometimes we read from the book aloud, maybe a section we wanted to analyze and all of us listened and then sat in silence. Other times there was an urgency to say something about what it meant to us, how her writing was changing us, changing our brains in real time. Beloved changed me for the better.
I read "Beloved" for the first time as a senior in high school (when I was *far* too young to understand it) and hated every moment. Reread it again about two years ago and it took my breath away.
So thankful for her legacy. I grew up in a conservative white Christian community, and Toni Morrison taught me so much about the world and how to view my privilege so differently than my culture wanted me to.
My first Morrison was The Bluest Eye. I read it in 11th grade and it taught me a lot as a rich white girl with loving parents about others' experiences. I then read Sula in first year of undergrad and Beloved. I'm so grateful I had teachers who took me on those journeys through her books.
I read Beloved in high school and didn't appreciate it because I was a teenage dirtbag who thought symbolism was nonsense. I've been meaning to revisit it as part of my reading this year, and just added it to my audiobook holds. Can't wait to hear it read in her voice.
Read beloved in high school, and I remember the feeling of “mind blown” to how powerful literature could be. Unreal. Forever changed after it
At my high school, every year we read a Shakespeare and Toni Morrison in English class. I read the Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz in those classes, and then worked my way through the rest of her books while I was in college. I have favorite passages marked and I go back to them regularly. I'm lucky to have her last two to look forward to. But I just cannot believe she's gone.
Two of my favorites, from Love; https://sharanyamanivannan.tumblr.com/post/97943879301/wild-women-could-never-hide-their-innocence-a
"The ocean is my man now...I can watch my man from the porch. In the evening mostly, but sunrise too, when I need to see his shoulders collared with seafoam. There used to be white wicker chairs out here where pretty women drank iced tea with a drop of Jack Daniel's or Cutty Sark in it. Nothing left now, so I sit on the steps or lean my elbows on the railings. If I'm real still and listening carefully I can hear his voice. You'd think with all that strength, he'd be a bass. But, no. My man is a tenor."
I turned 30 today and read Beloved for the first time this last year - it was beautiful and devastating, and even more upsetting when I realized it was inspired by true events. Rest In Power, Morrison.
I read the Bluest Eye when I was about 12 and have subsequsently read a lot of Morrison. I've been thinking a lot about all the terrible bull shit going on in our world and how it seems like everyone has lost their empathy and compassion. Toni Morrison's novels all embodied compassion and reading them can teach you so so much about empathy and being a compassionate person and understanding people. I wish we all got to spend more time reading Morrison and learning from her beautiful, beautiful novels.
I'm feeling lucky I was introduced to Song of Solomon early, in high school. (Which I'm thankful for and slightly astonished since it was a 99.9% white school.) I should probably read it again since I'm sure there's plenty I missed.
she was so incredible as a novelist but even more as a thinker of our time
reading the bluest eye in high school was the first time I really understood how different my life was from my Black friends and neighbours. I had read and been taught about slavery, but her writing opened a world that made me understand intergenerational trauma. I am so sad
I loved everything she wrote but I felt such guilt for not getting through Beloved in high school, terrible teacher and an English class filled with every bully in my year contributed to my not enjoying it. So I just downloaded the audiobook version with Toni Morrison narrating. It feels like a good decision. Goodbye genius 💜
Beloved was the first book that truly shook me to my core. I was devastated.
I read "Beloved" in high school during class, while it was tucked inside whatever large subject book I was in class for, tears silently streaming down my face. After that intro, I read everything of hers I could...
Read Song of Solomon in school, and it was transformative—both stylistically and substantively. But it was Beloved that changed my life, that led me to listen to and be a student of people of color. I have been comforted for so long that her voice was among ours. RIP
I know you're mostly off Twitter, but I thought you'd love this thread https://twitter.com/sjjphd/status/1158753180311785472
the bluest eye was the first assigned text in my college intro to lit class. i went to college convinced i wanted to study literature without ever having been taught it, really, and i had no idea what to expect. it was the most powerful, unsettling, unforgettable experience, and it sealed my choice of major within the week.
Our junior year English teacher had his faults but thank god he had us read Beloved.
I read beloved the summer before 8th grade because my parents had just read it and it was around and I was that kind of annoying advanced reader. I recently questioned them "why the fuck did you let me read that in 8th grade, I KNOW I didn't get it even though I thought it was incredible" and my mom replied "like we could have possibly stopped you." Touche.
I read The Bluest Eye for a literature class in my senior year of high school. I am forever grateful to my teacher that year for assigning that book - for giving a room full of smart, diverse, troubled teenage girls something that would truly make us think and feel in a way we never had been asked to before.
I read Toni Morrison in high school--Sula in tenth grade English & Song of Solomon in eleventh. I will always remember our teacher explaining the masturbation scene in Sula & being shocked that we didn't get it. We were in awe. Song of Solomon was my favorite though--I wrote my best paper of high school on it.
Toni Morrison has been on my to read list forever and now I’m wondering which of her works I should start with?
Beloved honestly changed my life. My husband just said that he'd never read Toni Morrison and was like, I think she wrote too late for me to read her in hs and college. I told him her first novel was in 1970 and Beloved was in 1987. He said, "How come I was never assigned her?" and I said, "I guess black women weren't really on the curriculum in the 80s and 90s unless you were expressly taking classes in feminism." I mean, she SHOULD be as widely read as all the old white guys.
I read Song of Solomon the summer after my senior year of high school. I'd read Sula and knew it was good, even great, but it didn't plow into me the way that Song of Solomon did. I read it in an absolute fever. I couldn't put it down. When Milkman hears the kids singing for the second time and starts to write down what they're singing, my heart started racing. I read the final page of the book four or five times in a row, and then I wept. I still can't articulate why-- I'm a white woman-- but something about the hugeness of the story made me understand the term "epic" for the first time on a visceral level. It was the same way I felt the first time I saw the ocean.
Shockingly, I first heard of Toni Morrison my first year of college -- technically the second, but I dropped out and started English Philology, and Beloved was on the list. I never read it (and then I dropped out again for other reasons) but I know how much she meant to people.
Beloved is one of the most powerful books I've ever read. She has influenced so many people and been so important to so many.
I think about Pecola Breedlove all the time.
I read her for the first time in college when one of my favorite professors assigned Sula and I was undone. I love and admire her work so much. My coworker and I were just saying how we wish we could abandon our work for the day and talk about Toni.
My favorite high school english teacher introduced Toni Morrison to us in 11th grade, when we read The Bluest Eye. It was the first time I'd really interrogated the concept of beauty, and whiteness, up until that point. I recently learned that the book has come under fire from parents in the district in the past few years, which makes me sad. It's a critical piece of fiction and something that should be taught in schools. She and her words will be deeply missed.
The most recent book of hers I read was Home, and it moved me so deeply. The horror of the medical abuse, the long journey with its terrors, and the final place of peace and community, something very like heaven.
She is someone who has taught me, moved me, exhorted me to do better. I'm in loss today.
Love and hugs to everyone mourning. She was truly iconic in every way.
I didn't know what else to do, so I sent a little thank you note to my incredible, life-changing high school English teacher, who taught The Bluest Eye in the most compassionate and rigorous way.
"Simultaneously blown away by the possibilities of fiction and also emotionally devastated" was also my reaction to reading Toni Morrison, also as someone who came to her unforgivably late.
I suppose everyone else will have already said this, but I can’t stand that she did not live to see the end of the Trump era. Even though we obviously have generations of healing and reparations to do, today is just so bleak and hopeless, and that’s the world she died in. We still need her prophetic voice!