The theme for this year's Blog Action Day is The Power of We and because it embraces community, equality and freedom, I knew I wanted to focus on writing within a 'community' and this is something Shangwe is all about. So it gives me great pleasure in celebrating and honouring Toni Morrison today.
Identify one writer whose work has been
in some way influential to the development of my own creative writing
process, it has to be Toni Morrison. Why? If there's one writer who
I want to watch and learn from it's Toni Morrison. To start with I'm
already hooked ever since I started reading her works some 17 years
ago and I have collected all of her novels and have even delivered a
Shangwe writing workshop in 2004 on Beloved her master-work
thus far, published in 1987.
I need to state that Morrison was
expected to excel, even though she had to contend with the racial
prejudice that accompanied growing up in an educational system that
ignored the contributions of non-whites. Morrison entered Howard
University in Washington, D.C., changed her first name from Chloe to
Toni, and began studying under strong African-American spokesmen,
including poet Sterling Brown and philosopher and critic Alain Locke,
a Rhodes scholar who edited The New Negro. She graduated with
a B.A. in 1953 and completed a master's degree in English at Cornell
two years later, with a concentration in the works of Virginia Woolf
and William Faulkner.
The Bluest Eye is where I want
to focus, it being her first published novel, and one that I've
re-read over the last few weeks, with fresh eyes. The novel focuses
on Pecola Breedlove, a lonely, young black girl living in Ohio in the
late 1940s. Through Pecola, Morrison exposes the power and cruelty
of white, middle-class American definitions of beauty. Pecola is
driven mad by her consuming obsession for white skin and blonde hair
– and not just blue eyes, but the bluest ones. A victim of
popular white culture and its pervasive advertising, Pecola believes
that people would value her more if she weren't black. If she were
white, blonde, and very blue-eyed, she would be loved. Pecola is
abused by almost everyone in the novel so I urge you to read the book
for yourself as my focus here is with the way that Pecola, a little
black girl in the 1940s, still resides in a few black girls and women
around the globe now, in our modern 21st century.
Moving on now as this blog post is
meant to be a celebratory one! I have to say that Toni Morrison's
works have not only educated and enlightened me, they have made a
difference to my own creative writing choices. It is a subtle
writing process that I'm talking about and when I reflect back on the
compiling of Brown Eyes, my first anthology of black and
mixed-race women's writing, it is here where Toni Morrison's
influence lies. Of course I cannot say that it was only Morrison's
influences that led me to taking the plunge into what was then an
unknown business, i.e. putting a book together, etc. There were many
influences that come to mind, many black female writers from Africa,
the US, the Caribbean and the UK, whose works impressed upon my
writing choices.
However, what made Morrison
particularly influential was that her writing choices of works made
no apology for an all-black cast, for exploring and exposing those
taboo subjects of racial and sexual tensions within a historical
context and from an African-American female perspective. Not only
did this provide me, a Black-British/mixed-race woman living in
London, with a wonderful literary landscape in which to delve - for
Morrison's works have such depth, even a re-read is a 'new'
experience - it gave me the authority, the guts to write exactly what
I wanted, from a black female perspective with confidence and a
vision that this is the work I am meant to do!
My third anthology Hair Power Skin
Revolution through the genre of poetry and personal essays,
explores and captures where black and mixed-race women are with their
perspectives on hair and skin – and again we see similarities to
Pecola Breedlove in that women are still coming to terms with and
battling those Euro-centric perceptions of 'white' beauty, of
straightened versus 'natural' hair, of why over the last 10 years,
skin lightening creams are selling more now than ever before! There
is obviously a huge difference now to the 1940's in that we do
have the freedom to reject those wider notions of what 'beauty' is.
I've long ago stopped buying those glossy women's magazines, since
they aren't talking to, let alone representative, of me and many
women I know.
Much good writing is multi-layered and
complex. It is precisely this diversity and complexity, which makes
literature rewarding and exhilarating. What I love and admire most
about Morrison is that she is a spellbinding weaver of stories, which
mix both the historical real and the magical, supernatural and the
imaginative in people's lives. More importantly, as a key
African-American female writer, Morrison has rewritten and
revitalised a history, which largely ignored African-Americans and
women in particular.
A Nobel prize winner and major voice in
Black writing, Morrison said she set out to write the novels which
she wanted to read, but couldn't find – novels about the joys and
pains of everyday life for African-American people, at different
points in history. Morrison's work is energetic and lively; it is
beautifully, lyrically and dramatically written, and engages the
reader in compelling issues about equality, and racial and sexual
politics. It is also immensely entertaining, tragic, ironic,
amusing, and enriched with fascinating details of people's lives.
Her stories are gripping, emotional, drawn from both a literary and
an oral tradition; they appeal to a wide and international
readership. Not an 'easy' read but Morrison always rewards the
reader by way of her language devices and choices. It's well worth
the 'work'.
That I get so much value as a
writer/reader when I engage with Morrison's works is putting it
mildly. Despite the thousands of miles that separate me from
Morrison physically, I feel connected to her works on so many
different and wider levels. I embrace the similarities and the
differences and share my ideas and perspectives learned along the
way.
