One exchange in particular stuck out: her 1993 interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose. “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am,” a documentary released earlier this year, rolls through interview clips between Morrison and various journalists. Here are several lessons to remember about Morrison’s career as a writer. Morrison wasn’t afraid to speak publicly about the themes in her novels and to challenge journalists on their questions. “Morrison is always aware there’s more to life than grimness and oppression, no matter how onerous that oppression is because the joy - or the triumph, rather - is that people survive that oppression,” Wall said. These moments appear in “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” and even “Beloved,” sometimes in between delicious descriptions of food. Wall said no matter what Morrison wrote about, there were always moments of levity in her novels. We tend to cut it down these days - smaller, and smaller, and smaller - to make it fit, I don’t know what, a headline or a room.”Ĭheryl Wall, a distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University, said, for Morrison, “life is never just about the awful situation, not even when she’s writing about slavery, but it’s the little everyday ceremonies of life.” “My characters are not bigger than life, they are in fact big as life,” she said in a 1987 interview. When asked about a talking point of her work “Beloved” - that her characters were “larger than life” - Morrison told the PBS NewsHour that the criticism was evidence of small-mindedness. As an editor, she introduced a slate of new black voices into the American publishing world. Pulling from African literature, slave folklore or black history, Morrison portrayed her black characters as complex, vibrant, and flawed people, transforming American literature.Īs a writer, she recognized the need to capture the experiences of black women, who seldom saw themselves in the center of their own stories. While American society lacked imagination in understanding black lives, Morrison, who died Monday at age 88, filled in the details.

Toni morrison on beloved