1 day ago
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There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.
Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art. In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach. Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about. More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer – and her work is highly complex.
In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books – it was so removed from his experience”. She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented: “Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’” Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?
One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual. I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation. The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.
She struggled to accommodate these forms of often underpaid literary labour with the unpaid domestic labour of raising two sons as a single mother: “It was very difficult writing and rearing children because they deserve all your time, and you don’t have it.” This occupational difficulty was exacerbated not only by the fact that she was unique in her fields but also by the fact that she often wilfully chose to go it alone. For example, she didn’t tell anyone at her first job in trade publishing that she was writing a novel until The Bluest Eye came out at another house.
As troublesome as difficulty may have been for her professionally, Morrison genuinely delighted in the difficulty of other black women artists, such as the novelist Gayl Jones, whose works she edited and published, and the jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. For Morrison, the fact that they were considered difficult was a sign that they had insisted on their art being taken seriously.
To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared with them. It is not an easy one to untangle. As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”.
Morrison’s childhood stories read like photo negatives of the standard American race narratives. She spoke of her father’s “defensive racism”, which prompted him to throw a predatory white landlord down the stairs. She spoke of her mother’s insistence on integrating every new movie theatre in town. She spoke of how when her “pitch-black” great-grandmother had first set eyes on Morrison and her sister, she said the girls had “been tampered with”, which was meant racially: “We were not pure and she was.”
The dynamics of my mixed-race family didn’t match the norms, either. My black Zambian grandmother, for whom I’m named, initially disapproved of my mother’s decision to marry a white man; my mother’s older sister refused to attend the wedding. Our moves to the UK and then to the US when I was a kid – with a year back in Zambia when I was a teenager – were punctuated by moments of racial absurdity: “What are you? Black or white?” (As if I had a choice!) Yet even now, at my grown age, my first response to racism is surprise.
Despite our respective births in disparate times and places (Lorain, Ohio, in 1931; Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980), I think Morrison and I both lucked into the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race. This perhaps explains why neither of us tends to capitalise the word black when referring to people in writing. It concedes too much; it protests too much.
Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses: “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.
Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics. It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing.
Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated. Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.”
Many still dismiss Morrison’s stature as either undeserved or obvious, as if surely so much praise either begs the question or settles it. They justify their disinclination to engage with the art itself by gesturing to what we might call her DEI-fication or her Oprah‑priation, as if Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison through some kind of literary affirmative action plan.
It’s rumoured that a black woman novelist on the board voted against Beloved receiving a National Book Award in 1987. A white colleague of mine at Harvard once told me he found Beloved sentimental – it never occurred to him that Morrison had intentionally leaned into sentimentality for effect. I’ve heard eminent black male scholars joke about whether she had stolen the book’s plot about a fugitive slave, and about whether her literary ambition had made her a bad mother.
Morrison incensed all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare she refuse to placate or translate? How dare she demand to be taken seriously? How dare she be a black artist with real ideas? How dare she ask that we actually read her writing, and on its own terms?
It could not have been easy to be Toni Morrison. Yet I aspire to it. I yearn for that freedom she so beautifully embodied: to feel at ease to be difficult.
