Toni Morrison: Nobel-Winning Novelist

she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison was the first African American woman to win that prize, and The New York Times called her the towering novelist of the Black experience. I'm a land Ververe and this is senecas one d women to hear. We are bringing you one hundred of the world's most inspiring and history making women you need to hear. You may have encountered Tony Morrison's books on the bestseller lists, or in a college class,

or through Oprah's Book Club. Among her best known works are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Doctor. Marilyn Mowbley knows Morrison's books well. She is a former president of the Tony Morrison Society and Professor Emerita of English and African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Listen and learn from doctor Marilyn Mowbley why Tony Morrison is one of Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear. We are speaking today with doctor Marilyn Mobley about the great,

great writer Tony Morrison. Welcome, doctor Mobley. Thank you, it's good to be here. It is such a pleasure to have you with us. I know that you've done much work as studying Tony Morrison, who was an acclaimed writer and editor, and among her many honors, she was awarded the Novel Prize for Literature for books like Beloved, The Bluest Eyes, Song of Solomon, and so many more. In your view, what was her singular achievement and what should she be remembered for. I thank you for that question.

I always wonder about the words singular when I think about Tony Morrison. She always seemed larger than life to me. But for I think she should be known for being a phenomenal writer who made space for two things at once, unapologetically affirming the humanity of black people, especially black women, and of critiquing the racial imaginary and its effect on

the well being of this nation. I think she just did such a wonderful job of holding both of those things in place, unapologetically affirming the humanity of black people and routine mainly critiquing how race and racism operated in this country, and she did it better than some. I think she'll also be remembered for being able to talk about these issues with language, narrative, an eloquence that had

a kind of piercing clarity about them. She was able to talk about unspeakable things unspoken, as she called them, and other people may have tried, but she was able to get our attention in ways that other people could not. And I mentioned the word humanity, and I guess what I would add to that is complexity, because it seems to me, before Tony Morrison, some of the representations of

black people were simplistic and lacking in depth. But after she began writing, many of us felt the complexity that we know to be part of our community suddenly came

to life on the page, and everybody had to take note. Yea, she not only moved despite the way she wrote in her work, but she's certainly broadened our depth in the way that you just said, depth of understanding Now, you mentioned that she brought us in many ways the black experience in America through her writing, usually obviously from a female perspective. So how did being a woman inform her

writing or perhaps make a special in some way? I really liked that question because I believe she recognized how in the works of other people, black women were often marginalized or dismissed or minor characters, and in her writing, black women became center. We were able to see ourselves in writing at the center of the story instead of as add on or as minor characters, as marginal characters.

And even when she wrote and had male characters at the center, such as The Song of Solomon, the protagonists in that book, Milkman did is a as a man. And in one of her later novels, in the novel Home, the character Money is at the center. But even in those novels where men have more of a central role, which was different from most of her works, she still had women being critical to their lives and showing the importance of women even in the character and even in

the lives of men. And I just think for many women readers that was important to understand that we've were the center of our narratives, not always the center of somebody, not always the margin of someone else's narrative. And that was really important for her, and it was really important for her readers, and many of the critics talked about that. Often in my classes, I was teaching her by herself. Sometimes I was taching her in a course for women writers.

Often I taught her of course and a um and of course that was African American literature, American literature. But there was nothing like teaching, and of course that was for women writers, so that women could see how this woman writer treated our stories and our lives. So interesting.

What was it that that drew you to her writing, because you obviously can speak about her with great depth of understanding, Well, I will, I will say the first thing that attracted me to her it's probably not very literary at all, but it's the fact that she was from Ohio. She was an Ohio writer, from Lorraine, Ohio, not far from my hometown of Akron, Ohio. And when I read The Bluest Eye and saw the name of my city in the novel, I said, oh, this is

a wonderful writer. All things are local, that's right, that's right. So I must admit, you know, it's kind of a shameless admission that I was attracted to the fact that she was an Ohio writer and a black woman writer writing about small town life in one sense, and also writing about what it was like to be a black girl in America. I was just totally attracted to that. And even though she was talking about poverty, and I didn't grow up poor and she didn't grow up poor,

we knew poor people in our community. And that's partly what she's doing in that novel is saying there are people who are often other who are other demonized, sometimes stigmatized, and sometimes scapegoating. It was looking at the ways in which people in a community could scapegoat. And even as a college student when I read that, I remember thinking, yes, I saw people scapegoated in my community, and she's really

capturing how that works. But I know, if I'm honest, and I'm going to be this, I was first attracted to oh acrone Is in her novel Okay, well then this is a good writer. Well you know, whatever it takes, and look how it's propelled you into being a extraordinary expert on Tony Morrison. Today was the Bluest Guy the first of her novels that you read. It was the first that I read. And I also was attracted in The Bluest Eye to how she made education front and center.

My UH degree at Bernard was in English and education, and so I was already interested in literature anyway. I just have always been a bookworm. Actually, so Tony Morrison would probably say the same thing about herself. I was intrigued with how it talked about education and those Dick and James primers that we all well, I don't know now that's the case, but many of us were introduced to literacy through that primer. Like Tony Morrison, I went

away to kindergarten knowing how to read and write. And in a couple of her interviews, she talked about that, coming to kindergarten knowing how to read and write, and I did as well. I like the way The Bluest Eye, however, problematized that and and said there are images that you get as early as kindergarten that deny your humanity, that makes you feel less than if you're a black girl. And I just thought it was so important. I quickly caught the bug, and so as soon as Sula came out.

I read Sula because Sula was about female friendship, and many women can relate to this. Sometimes it happens in high school, sometimes it happens in college. But Tony Morrison captured that phenomenon of women starting out the gate as very close friends and then going separate ways, sometimes because one goes to college and one does not, as it happened in that novel, one gets married and one does not.

One makes life toy is that are so different, and then the friendship gets free or intense in a way that it never had been before. And I just think she captured that so well. I was. I was really drawn to that novel for what it said. I had seen it in my own life of having friendships, and once I went away to school, people weren't sure what would happen to the friendship, and Morrison just interrogated that

with with laser focus. Now. I know she died in two thousand and nineteen, but if she had lived, she'd be nine this month. Tell us about her childhood and her young adulthood. You already told us she grew up in Lorain, Ohio. But what was it about her growing up that turned her into a writer. I think that's a wonderful question, because I don't know that she always

knew she was a writer. But when I look back on what I learned about her life from my own reading and even in documentary on her called The Pieces I Am, which came out the same year of her death, there was lots of father There was lots of evidence that she would become a writer. There was a lot of storytelling in her home, her mother saying in the

church choir and was always at home singing. When she was a teenager, she worked at the local library, and she uh finally used to tell that she didn't she didn't really do her job so well because she they would catch her reading all the time. She was supposed to be shelving books, and she was reading. And so I would say, as an English professor, for me, that

was she was getting prepared. She was getting prepared to write by being immersed in books, and by being immersed in the storytelling tradition she heard in her home, and the the ear for music that she got from listening to her mother sing. And I think all of those things prepared her to it ready to write. Even if she weren't writing it. We do know that she began what became The Bluest Eye when she was a college student at Howard University, but it didn't become a novel immediately,

didn't become a novel until later. And I also think the fact that she was part of the Howard Players when she was an undergraduate school at Howard University. So there's an actress in Tony Morrison, and sometimes you can

hear that in her audio books. I personally don't like audiobooks, but I have listened to her read and there's some drama in her reading that says she was attracted to language and literature from several angles, from the sound of it, from narrative and language, and just for what could happen when you brought narrative and language and sound together on the page. I think she was intrigued with all of that. And she had heard about and witnessed how racism acted

in this country. Her father there left the South and went north because of lynching, and she said she had always heard it was racial terrorism, but she had never heard what she called the clarifying details actually until she went with us in the Tony Morrison Society to her father's home in Cartersville, and she heard the historian tell the story of how her father, George Wafford, left the South.

He had heard about another friend who was scheduled to be lynch and I always like to tell my students that were scheduled must have stuck in his mind that it was planned, that was a planned event that people took delight in. Um. But in any event, the stories of lynching that he had witnessed and heard about made her father move north to Lorraine, Ohio. And so I think all of this history and family history and national

history shaped her consciousness. And then her job as an editor at Random House gave her an opportunity to be on both sides of the publishing world, you know what I mean. So she was helping other people come into the spotlight as writers. Claude Brown, for example, she helped publish the autobiography of Angela Davis. And I think sitting at the table as an editor also developed her own ear for writing and for language. And her editor even said at one point he had to say to her,

you need to go ahead and be a writer. And it took her a while before she claimed it, you know. So I think that's a gender issue that he knew she was writing, but she wasn't quite ready to call herself a writer. I think a little bit of timidity may have been part of it early on, but after a while she just fully embraced it. Senecas one hundred women to hear will be back after the short break. Were there particular challenges that she had to overcome, Well,

I think I've mentioned a couple of them already. She had to balance being a single parent, which I think is important because sometimes people don't think of famous people having some of the same challenges that other people have. So she had a period when she needed her family back in Lorraine to help her with with her parenting.

She had to deal with the challenges of manuscripts being rejected at first, even though they had some acclaim, they didn't have the acclaim of her third novel, Song of Solomon. Those first two novels didn't, and so there was just the reality of sometimes you're going to be rejected. Sometimes you're gonna realize you're in a male, downnated rural and expected to write a certain way, and that's not the

way you're going to write. And I think she had some challenges around that, but after a while some of that began to drop away. As I said, she later began to embrace herself as a writer and knew that that's what she wanted to do, and the editing was was less attractive once the writing life really took full force in her. Now you knew her personally, um tell

us what she was like as a person. And I also know that you're the founder and former head of the Tony Morrison Society, and perhaps you can tell us about that as well. Well. I'd like to clarify that

I'm one of the founders. The actual founder of the Tony Morrison Society is Dr Caroline Dennard, who at that time was a Georgia State if I'm not mistaken, Georgia State University, and we met at the car Prince for American Literature, the American Literature Association, and at that conference in this was May of Dr Denard came to me and she said I was the first person she wanted

to tell about this idea. She said, I think it's time for Tony Morrison to have a society named after her, and she would be one of the few living writers most of the society's or after writers who are no longer living, like Zora Nel Hurston and f Scott Fitzgerald and so on. And I agreed with her that it

was time, and we formed the Tony Morrison Society. I think at that time there were about nineteen scholars at the conference who said yes, they agreed that it was time, and we signed on and we just began working after

that to post conferences. That was a conference where she went with us and went down to Cartersville to her father's home, and we began hosting conferences, and she came to every single one, including the one we had in Pair, and if I'm not mistaken, there have been eight altogether. I'm no longer on the board. I'm still a member, but I'm not on the board in any event. The last one was before she died, which was Tony Morrison

and her life as an editor. But we had each of those biennial conferences scheduled so that she could be present, and she was there, and it's at those conferences that we had a chance to get to know her a little bit better. And so we've had a chance to be with her strictly as a writer and as scholars we would at our conferences, we would always give out

a book award. We'd have keynote speakers who were fellow scholars, literary scholars, scholars in the field of African American studies, and we got to see that side of her, of course, the writer, the scholar, the public intellectual. We always got

to see that. But when we had these conferences, we also had downtime with her, and so it was also rewarding at that downtime and when we went to her home just a top almost as sister friends, you know what I mean, of course, and there was something very nice about talking to her and knowing that, like me, I'm also a mother of two sons. We had these conversations about what is it like to raise black male children, and even back in the eighties, I recall we had

a conversation, but maybe it was the nineties. We had a conversation about what we call the talk that black women have with their sons, or that black parents have with their sons. And Toni Morrison said she made both of her sons put a Fraternal Order Police sticker on the back of their cars, and I remember thinking, this is this is so important. It felt heavy on one hand, and yet it brought in her humanity in a way

I hadn't thought of it. I hadn't thought of, well, like other black women, she has to help her sons navigate what America is like racially. I hadn't thought about that. And as soon as she said, I thought, I'm going to tell my sons to put a Paternal Order police sticker on back of their cars, and so on one end.

I heard it in a kind of facetious way, and yet it was very, very serious, and it said that like other black women, regardless of our status or our income or education, we had to think about those things. And then there was just fun. She was just fun to be around. She always had a little something snarkly to say, and we would look at one another and we would go, WHOA. But I just liked it. You know. She wasn't She didn't have herself on a pedestal. And I can't imagine what it was like to be her

student at Princeton. I can't imagine that I would get any work done for being in awe of her. But she was a teacher, and she often talked about how she taught and what she wanted her students to accomplish. So I just think if we only know her as a writer, we're missing out. But if we lean or as a writer, that's the most important thing to know. Because she tried to capture her own humanity without being autobiographical. I think that's important. Sometimes people immediately want to know, well,

did that happen to her? Did this happen to her? No, But she was a keen observer and a keen listener. What a privileged time you had with her. You talked about her just now about being a teacher, and you are a teacher as well in terms of your professorship. And you assigned the Nobel lecture that she gave when she received the Nobel Prize. You assigned that to your students. What is it about the lecture that you want them

to know? Thank you for asking that question. It is known at my university that I taught every single class with that lecture. I don't care what the topic of the class was. I began every course once I had the lecture, once I had the recording with it, because I love the way it gave students an appreciation for the power of language and the power of narrative. To tell difficult truths. And I love the way she took

a global stage moment. She was at a moment when she could have talked about anything, and in that lecture she actually talks about many of the issues that I teach. Talks about what it's like to have an encounter with someone who is different from you. The young men and that narrative have an encounter with an older I say young men. They were young people. I don't know what their gender now I think about it, but they had

an encounter with an old, blind black woman. And it starts as a kind of standoff, a kind of narrative standoff, and by the end of that novel, they have come together. They've become uh almost friends, but they at least have a sense of appreciation for the other. And the way she uses that noble lecture to age that and to load it. It's a lecture that's loaded up with ideas about how we other, how we marginalize, how racism acts,

how sexism acts, how fascism acts. She gets so much of the political and cultural reality of our lived lives in that short narrative called the Nobile Lecture, that I want my students to hear it because she says at one point in that lecture, language can only art towards the place where meaning may lie. And that tells you

the power of language right there. It says you're not always going to get it right, but it also says that language can be for good or for evil, And in that moment, in that lecture, she takes you all those places, and it ends on a note of hope for what can happen when you stop marginalizing the other, when you stop seeing the person totally as only different

from you but not connected to your humanity. That novel ends on a note of hope for what language can do to connect, to create community, to create a sense of belonging. So they start as a standoff, but they end finally realizing that the The lecture ends with, look at this thing we have done together, And I just think that is so beautiful, It's so delicious. My students used to look at me, I'm sure, and wonder what

in the world is happening to her? But I just needed them to know that that whole lecture shows the power of language. People can start at a standoff, they can start as antagonists, but if they surrender to language, and if they surrender to the power of the imagination, and they surrender to the ability to see one another as community and interconnected and belonging, then there's a way that language can help us. Well. I feel like I'm a student in your class listening to the fabulous lecture

you just gave about Tony Morrison's Nobel lecture. What a wonderful, wonderful lesson. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Now, if you could read just one of her books again, what would it be? And why, Oh my goodness, She's written eleven novels, and this question always comes to me, and it used to stump me. It doesn't stomp me anymore. It's now beloved, beloved, beloved, and I and the and

the novel only had one title, beloved. But I say beloved because even though it's a hard book, and many people tell me, I just did a book discussion for the emeriti professors at my university last week, and many of them said it's too difficult, they put it down they started it. But I love it despite how differ quote it is, because it such a beautiful, eloquent, powerful statement about the institution of slavery. And I always tell my students the word is enslavement, because it helps you

understand something happened to somebody. To simply call it slavery sound like it always existed. And while slavery is an old institution, even before it happened on American soil, I want them to know what enslavement meant. And I love the way Tony Morrison begins to take us into the interior lives of the enslaved people. She takes us into the interior life of a black woman, and for me that was important. You can't talk about American history without

talking about the institution of slavery. And for a book to do something different from what Frederick Douglas did or any of the other Equiana or any other slave narratives, they didn't have a way, or at least they didn't succeed at showing you what is it like for a woman it when your body is the site of production and reproduction, your body is the site of rape, and when you've endured in dignities of not even being able to marry your husband, but to have control over your

life surrender to the slave master, how it feels to live under those conditions and so Morrison took us away from that linear historical account that we got in the slave narratives, which were very important narratives. I don't discount them at all, nor would she. But when she read them, she said, there was a way they left something out, and there is a way that Beloved gets it as

hard a novel as it is. And then, in addition to being a professor, I'm also a preacher and as a minister, I love the way in the middle of Beloved, there's this character, Baby says, who's a preacher who takes the enslaved community to the clearing, as it's called in the novel. In black history there are places known as

hush harbors. And to see how eloquently Tony Morrison put that in the middle of that novel novel that is so hard, that is so difficult to wrap your mind and heart around, but to have a place where she brings the community together and she says, okay, we're here in the clearing. Here, I want you to love your hands, I want you to love your mouth, I want you to love your neck, and I want you to love your heart. And that whole scene that it's a beautiful sermon.

Number one, but that whole scene is an example of how Tony Morrison wanted to humanize a whole community of people who had been dehumanized, mistreated, scandalized, miseducated, and so on. She did something beautiful in that scene that I will never forget, and so the ways in which it treated masculinity. Paul d comes back and reconnects with her as a friend. They talk about the plantation as sweet home. It wasn't

sweet and it wasn't home. And so there are ways that that novel connects with issues that are in all the other novels. But it takes it to this very fundamental truth about American history that we want to deny. I mean, right now in our country people are so divided on do we talk about slavery? Do we talk about sixteen nineteen? Do we tell the truth about it? Tony Morrison has often said there are things you can do in fiction that you can't do anywhere else, and

so I think that's why I love the novel. It just treats this very difficult topic. And I will confess it took me a few times before I could read it all the way through. But once I've read it all the way through. I loved it. And I also loved that the daughter in that novel saves her mother when her mother is almost about when Setha is almost about to lose her life, she's so consumed with the haunting and the return of the baby she killed in

the form of a ghost and so on. Denver, the daughter realizes she's got to go to the very community that it's forned her mother and say to them, I need you to come help my mother. My mother is about to die if somebody doesn't come help me. And so it's a beautiful scene of community again. And Morrison is always interested in the community of women and the role they play in our survival. She never discounts men, and some people sometimes feel that when a woman counts

focuses on women. But she wants to say there's a special role that women play, and there's a special role that community plays, and Beloved illustrates that that element of community and the community of women and the healing community of women, especially in the sense of storytelling, shows up in all of her novels, but in Beloved it has a special function because the very group of women who had looked own onset that who had in a sense

stigmatized her, come to embrace her and participate in saving her. And I just think it's a it's a it's a beautiful novel. Well, you've certainly given us great insight into beloved. I felt like I'm in lip glass. It's just terrific. Unfortunately, we're coming to the end of our conversation, which is always a sad moment, especially when it's been as exciting and stimulating as this one. You know, you've given us so much inspiration of Tony Morrison as she conveys it

in her work. These are tough times. I think by any definition, I wonder if you could give us a message of hope from her afford today and for the future. I think Tony Morrison would be skeptical of the notion of hope. It is natural, I think, to want to end on a note of hope. And I think in one of her say it's called Home, she talks about a notion of home as a place where there is a sense of belonging that is both snug and wide open.

And I just found that such a powerful phrase that I began using it at my university when I not only was an English professor, but also I was chief Diversity Officer, and I think Morrison wanted us to always think of if hope existed, it was in the form of what home could be. And if home could be both snug and wide open, then there was hope for us as long as there are people struggling for home to be snug, which means you have a sense of belonging, like it is a place for you, and it could

be wide open your imagination. As she says in Beloved, the only grace you could have is the grace you could imagine. I think Tony Morrison always wanted us to think of home as a place that wherever it was a space that was both snug and wide open, where you could have a sense that you belonged and you could reach your full potential. I think she was always writing with the hope that a community that had been demonized would know that the future was, as the end

of that lecture says, in our hands. But it's in all of our hands, not solely the hands of black people. It's also in the hands of white people. Will we reach out to one another to create that idea of home wherever we reside, being both snug and wide open. I think she had some hope. She was very depressed. I think often about how we were living out this

thing we called democracy. But I think in that essay Home, she was expressing the only hope she had as a writer, and that is that there would be what the imagination could do and what she could do in literature. But it was also a hope for us that we would get to that space of snug and wide open. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation, for the insights into Tony Morrison's writings that you so eloquently conveyed. Thank you so much, Dr Marilyn Mobley, scholar and friend of

Tony Morrison. Thank you, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. How fortunate we are to have Dr Mobley give us those insights into the remarkable Tony Morrison. There are three things I took from that conversation. First, at Seneca Women we often talk about the importance of amplifying women's voices. Tony Morrison gave voices to Black women who had gone unheard for generations. As Dr Mobley said, Tony Morrison spoke about what was unspoken. She painted full complex

pictures of people who had been stereotyped and marginalized. Second, in books like Sula, Morrison reminds us of the richness and intensity of female friendship and how our friendships influence us throughout our lives. Finally, Tony Morrison gives us a unique perspective on the concept of home. Our home, says Doctor Mobley, is a place of both imagination and snugness. It's where we belong and the place where we can

reach our highest potential. Tune in next week to hear about our next featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is a collaboration between the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, with support from founding partner Pungi. Have a Great Day.