Sunday 11 May 2008

TONI MORRISON: ON LIFE, WRITING & OBAMA

Here’s where I stand with Toni Morrison: she has my utmost respect and admiration as the first, and so far only, black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, I must confess that I have some difficulty in naming her as my ‘preferred writer’, for the simple (difficult) reason that her books, generally, don’t make easy reading for me. Her fictional writing is so complex that in the end I’m never quite sure that I really understood what she meant to convey to the reader. Of course I can always rely solely on my own presumed understanding of it, on my own take – and isn’t this all we can claim to get at the end of any reading, anyway? But I wish I could make more sense of it all.

I mean, I enjoyed reading Song of Solomon, Sula, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, but always came out of the last page of any of them with that sense of ‘unfulfilled promise’, of ‘unscathed bewilderment’... Then, a strange phenomenon, which only happened to me once before (that was with Memoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar
– another writer with a special place in literary history, as the first woman to be elected to the French Academy), happened with Paradise: for the last 10 years I’ve been trying really hard to read this book, without ever managing to get too far into it; I close and set it aside for a while, then restart it again only to get stuck somewhere all over again… Needless to say, to this day I’m still ‘bewitched, bothered and bewildered’ by both Memoires d’Hadrien and Paradise

But what really made me bring Toni Morrison here today was a recent interview she gave to Time readers, from which I’ve extracted the following passages:

(…)
Different books arrive in different ways and require different strategies. Most of the books that I have written have been questions that I can't answer. In order to actually put down the first word—I don't really have a plan—I sometimes have a character, but I can't do anything with it until the language arrives.
(…)
I thought about voting for Hillary at the beginning. I don’t care that she is a woman. I need more than that. Neither his race, his gender, her race or her gender was enough. I needed something else, and the something else was his (Obama’s) wisdom.
(…)
I have two (dreams yet to fulfill). Well, three, really. Two involve novels that I'm going to write and haven't written. The third is immortality. [Laughs.] I don't mean my work. I mean me.

[Read More Here]
Here’s where I stand with Toni Morrison: she has my utmost respect and admiration as the first, and so far only, black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, I must confess that I have some difficulty in naming her as my ‘preferred writer’, for the simple (difficult) reason that her books, generally, don’t make easy reading for me. Her fictional writing is so complex that in the end I’m never quite sure that I really understood what she meant to convey to the reader. Of course I can always rely solely on my own presumed understanding of it, on my own take – and isn’t this all we can claim to get at the end of any reading, anyway? But I wish I could make more sense of it all.

I mean, I enjoyed reading Song of Solomon, Sula, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, but always came out of the last page of any of them with that sense of ‘unfulfilled promise’, of ‘unscathed bewilderment’... Then, a strange phenomenon, which only happened to me once before (that was with Memoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar
– another writer with a special place in literary history, as the first woman to be elected to the French Academy), happened with Paradise: for the last 10 years I’ve been trying really hard to read this book, without ever managing to get too far into it; I close and set it aside for a while, then restart it again only to get stuck somewhere all over again… Needless to say, to this day I’m still ‘bewitched, bothered and bewildered’ by both Memoires d’Hadrien and Paradise

But what really made me bring Toni Morrison here today was a recent interview she gave to Time readers, from which I’ve extracted the following passages:

(…)
Different books arrive in different ways and require different strategies. Most of the books that I have written have been questions that I can't answer. In order to actually put down the first word—I don't really have a plan—I sometimes have a character, but I can't do anything with it until the language arrives.
(…)
I thought about voting for Hillary at the beginning. I don’t care that she is a woman. I need more than that. Neither his race, his gender, her race or her gender was enough. I needed something else, and the something else was his (Obama’s) wisdom.
(…)
I have two (dreams yet to fulfill). Well, three, really. Two involve novels that I'm going to write and haven't written. The third is immortality. [Laughs.] I don't mean my work. I mean me.

[Read More Here]

2 comments:

BRE said...

Lovely. I have read only one of her novels ("Song of Solomon") and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I know what you mean about the feeling of not fully comprehending what you are reading right up to the very end. Authors like Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie leave me feeling that way sometimes, but I still buy and read everything these guys write and publish.

Toni Morrison's interview with TIME magazine was a real treat. At 77-78 years old she is still as sharp as a person half her age. She says what she thinks and means what she says, without a trace of ambiguity in her choice of words.

Koluki said...

Hi BRE,

So good to have you here!
I wonder if your difficulties with Eco and Rushdie and mine with Morrison and Yourcenar are not because of the ‘cultural distance’ from which we read them…
Anyway, thanks for calling my attention to the interview, I hope she manages to win your support for Obama… “without a trace of ambiguity”!

;-)