H a p p y H o l i d a y s!
9 Imix
Red Solar Dragon
Circling the Earth
Red Dragon spins –
Dimensional Dichotomies sing of
Being and Becoming
Ordaining Birth
Death and Rebirth
Both Poison and its Antidote –
Soul’s eternal Paradox in Time
Intention carries us
From Cradle to Grave
Love fills the Space between –
In Measures of Rhythm and Rhyme.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Adulthood and editing career: 1949–1974
In 1949, she enrolled at the historically black Howard University, seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. The school is in Washington, D.C., where she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her Master's thesis was Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.
After the breakup of her marriage, she began working as an editor in 1965 for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.
In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of African-American authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered, and she brought out the autobiography of boxer Muhammad Ali, The Greatest. She also published and publicized the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist, and poet who was shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City subway in 1968.
Among other books Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1970s. Random House had been uncertain about the project, but it got good reviews. Alvin Beam reviewed it for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."
First writings and teaching, 1970–1986
Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children alone.
The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 when Morrison was thirty-nine. It did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put the novel on its reading list for its new black-studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. The book also brought her to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Gottlieb would go on to edit most of Morrison's novels.
In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national acclaim. The book was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded to Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, for writing novels that create "a new vision of American life."
Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being black.
In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing and lived in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University: New Brunswick Campus. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York.
Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the murder by white men of black teenager Emmett Till in 1955. It was performed in 1986 at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching.
The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987–1998
In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, a piece of history that Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.
Beloved was a critical success and a best-seller for 25 weeks. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is ''so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate.'' Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for the New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, 'Beloved' will put them to rest."
Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".
Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve," they wrote.
Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.
Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison has said they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."
The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature.
Before the third novel of the trilogy came out, in 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads, Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.
In her Nobel acceptance speech, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? … Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."
For her exceptional writing career, in 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations", began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.
Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."
The third of her Beloved trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-black town, came out in 1997. The next year, Morrison was on the cover of Time magazine, only the second female writer of fiction and second black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.
Beloved onscreen, and the Oprah effect
Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandie Newton as Beloved.
The movie flopped at the box office. A review in the Economist suggested that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape, and slavery." Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy" called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. …Its linchpin is, of course, Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together."
In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey had selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show. An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of the "Oprah Effect, …enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."
Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's novels a bigger sales boost than they got from her Nobel Prize win in 1993. The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'… I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world." Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution."
Awards
1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
1987–88: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
1988: Helmerich Award
1988: American Book Award for Beloved
1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved. A remark in her acceptance speech that "there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States; "There's no small bench by the road," led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first "bench by the road" was dedicated July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.
1989: MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University
1993: Nobel Prize for Literature
1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris
1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
1996: Jefferson Lecture
1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
2000: National Humanities Medal
2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante
2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University
2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee
2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur
2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement
2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva
2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom
2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University
2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle
2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University
2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by The MacDowell Colony
Nominations
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (2008) – Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
Bibliography
Novels
The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN 0-452-28706-5.
Sula. 1973. ISBN 1-4000-3343-8.
Song of Solomon. 1977. ISBN 1-4000-3342-X.
Tar Baby. 1981. ISBN 1-4000-3344-6.
Beloved. 1987. ISBN 1-4000-3341-1.
Jazz. 1992. ISBN 1-4000-7621-8.
Paradise. 1997. ISBN 0-679-43374-0.
Love. 2003. ISBN 0-375-40944-0.
A Mercy. 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7.
Home. 2012. ISBN 0307594165.
God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN 0307594173.
Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)
The Big Box (1999)
The Book of Mean People (2002)
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?, Poppy or the Snake? (2007)
Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
Please, Louise (2014)
Short fiction
"Recitatif" (1983)
"Sweetness" (2015)
Plays
Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)
Desdemona (first performed May 15, 2011, in Vienna)
Libretto
Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)
Non-fiction
The Black Book (1974)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992)
Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997)
Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004)
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)
Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, editor (2009)
The Origin of Others (2017)
Articles
"Introduction." Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [1885] The Oxford Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxxii–xli.*
IMIX
Kin 61: Red Solar Dragon
I pulse in order to nurture
Realizing being
I seal the input of birth
With the solar tone of intention
I am guided by the power of navigation.
When a system reaches its limits, a new evolutionary state is triggered.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Manipura Chakra (Limi Plasma)
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