
Toni Morrison, beloved American author and literary scholar, is best remembered for her razor-sharp prose. In the wake of her death in 2019, scholars have revisited her life’s works, revealing a depth of understanding of black American history previously unappreciated. Angela Davis, a lifelong friend of Morrison and a prominent black radical, spoke of her at her memorial: “Toni also understood … that deep radical change happens … because we collectively learn to imagine ourselves on different terms with the world.” And it’s this form of radicalism – learning to re-evaluate the past through change – that she practised best through her writing, reshaping and renewing a black American literary tradition that prefaced her own legacy.
In her essay ‘The Site of Memory’, Morrison reflects as a novelist, saying: “a very large part of my own literary heritage is the autobiography”. The autobiography has long served as a key means to convey the African American experience – beginning arguably with the publishing of popular slave narratives, such as those authored by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. These served a dual purpose – to tell an individual’s history, and to convince a contemporary audience of the inherent humanity of black Americans.
Still, the tradition is continued, if not transformed, in Morrison’s work. Her perspective is that black history is not a history of mourning, but instead one of fugitivity. Subterfuge and escapism are key themes in Morrison’s writing: Sethe, the protagonist of ‘Beloved’, is forced to disobey her ethics to save her children from being raised into slavery, and Pecola, a central character in ‘The Bluest Eye’, frequently evades judgement of any kind, sinking into her own delusions in order to escape her reality. ‘The Black Book’ epitomises Morrison’s dedication to not simply recounting the material conditions of black Americans, but exploring their ‘interior life’; the emotional, cultural, and ruthlessly personal. Her collage-like compilation sheds light on the lives of those who were forced into fugitivity for survival, and similarly those who made themselves publicly visible, to ensure the survival of others.
Building on the work of other radical black thinkers like Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon, Morrison defies the idea that black American history is archaeological, chronological, or fairly represented. Her narratives are therefore as fractured as the histories they aim to tell. She existed in a genealogy of traditions that were irreparably damaged by racism – and yet in spite of this, finds joy in “the part of our lives that was spent neither on our knees nor hanging from trees”. The legacy of her radical revisions of black American history will continue to blossom as we better understand the nuances of such a complex and long-standing scholarship.