It’s my favorite author’s 88th birthday!
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She is an educator and an award- winning author. Her first book, The Bluest Eye was published when she was 40 years old. Although, I don’t want to delay fulfilling my dreams, knowing what she was able to accomplish becoming a professional novelist later on in life is affirmation that there is much that can be accomplished at any age. In 1988, Morrison won a Pulitzer prize for Beloved and in 1993 became the first black woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
Why do I revere Toni Morrison? My February born sister? I love Toni Morrison because I cannot forget the feeling I felt when I was in my dorm room, reading The Bluest Eye. I felt like I was having an intimate conversation with a woman who had lived my life and could relate to how I felt about the different nuances which color the black experience. I wasn’t Pecola, nor was I Claudia… but the narratives woven in this single book somehow managed to feel relatable. I remember reading about Pecola being bullied by black boys, who used her skin tone as a characteristic to be met with contempt and Morrison wrote, “It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult
its teeth.” I was impressed at how eloquently she could describe how we have internalized Euro- centric beauty standards and have used them to damage our own people.
Toni Morrison has also explored the meaning of good and evil which sometimes exist within the same place in the book Sula. I love how she owns what it means to be human. She writes about the thin line between love and hate and humanizes the vilest characters which gives readers the opportunity tto learn more about what makes us who we are as people.
Thank you Toni Morrison for choosing to write and to tell stories which needed to be told. Happy birthday!
N.B.: Toni Morrison’s birthday is February 18th, the day I wrote and published this article. However, my posts are sometimes published with the wrong date for reasons unbeknownst to me.
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