Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison dies

THE first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, Toni Morrison, has died at the age of 88.

Morrison died on Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, according to her publisher, Alfred A Knopf.

Toni Morrison was born as Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. She was the second of four children in a black working-class family and grew up in an ethnically mixed neighborhood with African-Americans, Poles, Italians, and Jews.

As a child, she enjoyed reading classic novels by Tolstoy and Jane Austen and listening to the African-American folk tales her father, George Wofford, told her. Later, he took a second job to support her through college.

She studied humanities at Howard University in Washington DC and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her academic career included teaching at Texas Southern University, Howard University, Yale, and Princeton. As an editor at Random House, she published the works of talented black writers such as Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara.

Morrison wrote about the horrors of slavery and racism with compassion and fury, questioning any simple notions of good and evil. Her most famous novel, ‘Beloved’ (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award in 1988, was inspired by a harrowing true story which Morrison first thought was “inaccessible to art”. In the 19th century, a runaway slave named Margaret Garner killed her baby daughter to spare her a life of captivity and abuse when they were found by the slave masters.

“The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom,” the author wrote in the foreword to a later edition of ‘Beloved’.

The protagonist Sethe and her teenage daughter are haunted by the ghost of the child: “Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage?” To Sethe, killing the baby girl was an act of love, because she wanted to protect her from what was “worse than death” – that the white slave masters “could not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. […] Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. […] She could never let that happen to her own.”

Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.

– Deutsche Welle

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