Front Burner - 'Pick up the book and read': Canadian poets on the legacy of Toni Morrison

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Toni Morrison's literary and academic career was honoured with a Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her writing explored, celebrated, questioned and critiqued the space of black lives in America, up until her death on Monday at the age of 88. Today on Front Burner, we speak with Halifax's former poet laureate El Jones and former poet laureate of Canada George Elliott Clarke about the importance of her work, both as a source of art, and form of activism.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language.

That may be the measure of our lives. That was Toni Morrison accepting her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She was the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She died on Monday night at the age of 88. So many of her books are now acknowledged as among the best American books ever. The Bluest Eye, Sula, and of course Beloved, which she won a Pulitzer Prize for. All books detailing the lives of Black women and girls. Today we're speaking with two Canadian writers about Morrison's life and her incredible legacy. George Elliot Clark, who was Canada's Poet Laureate, and we're welcoming back Elle Jones, an activist and the former

Poet Laureate of Halifax. This is FrontBurner. George, Elle, thank you so much for being with us today. Welcome. Thank you. George, there are some people listening who might have not read Toni Morrison's books. And can you describe what kind of writer she was? She was a capacious, all-encompassing, intellectual, spiritually informed writer. As a matter of fact, I like to think of her novels as being

sermonic manifestos, meant to encourage everyone, especially African-American and African diasporic readers, to ponder the philosophical quandaries created by white supremacism, colonialism, and slavery. Because this is the legacy that she's dealing with in her novels. What she does is she doesn't merely bemoan these evils or vilify those responsible for them. What she does instead, she gives us a whole series of characters who react in very complex and often contradictory ways to the dilemmas in which they find themselves placed because of the unequal, unfair way that society is organized. And do you think that that's why her writing was able to connect so strongly with people?

Yes, because I think no matter what your background is, sooner or later, you have to come to terms with the fact that your own behavior may be informed by social political facts, and that you can't really figure out clearly a way to get yourself free. Elle, what was your first experience with Morrison's writing? So like almost all the black literature I encountered, I stole it from my sister's room. So I don't think I studied a black book until maybe graduate school. So that tells you how little black authors we knew.

But my sister had an interest in black literature, and I used to steal from her room. So I stole Malcolm X from her. And one of the books I stole from her was Sula. I read it when I was too young to read it, I think. Understanding that there was something there that I didn't understand, I was too young to understand in many ways, but also understanding that it was a door that was opening in front of me and that I could go through at some point. And how did that evolve for you over time? So even if you look at the trajectory of her novel, so when you start with The Bluest Eye. I was thinking, no one is talking about the interior life of Black girls. They weren't on

the agenda anywhere. If I didn't do it, I had the impression it would never be done. Something that I can relate to and that my sister also directly used to pretend. A story about my sister is that she used to take the hair from her dolls and wind them into her combs and then tell people my hair is really blonde when I'm at home. I think so many young black girls that struggled with that very basic idea of how you look and craved blue eyes and blonde hair, you know, so moving from there to final books that are talking about the lives of professional black women. So it almost grows with you through your life as you read through her books. As a black woman, I think that's particularly why so many black women really resonated with these books, because it's almost like a telling of your story. And again, a telling that perhaps you didn't know could be told until you read it.

As Lauryn Hill sang, I felt she'd found my letters and read each one out loud. That was, I think, how a lot of Black women probably feel about Toni Morrison now. We're talking about how her books were centered on black experiences, particularly black women. White people are not central in her novels. And this was something that she was often asked about. And I want to play you a clip from an interview. And you will maintain this safe place for yourself, for your art. You don't think you will ever change and write books that incorporate white white lives into them substantially I have done in a

substantial way you can't understand how powerfully racist that question is venue because you could never ask a white author when are you gonna write about black people whether you did or not or she did or not even the inquiry comes from a position of being in the center and being used to being in the same being used to being in the center and saying you know is it ever possible that you will enter the mainstream? It's inconceivable that where I already am is the mainstream. George, can I ask your reaction to that?

Yeah, very simple and direct. So that kind of questioning about why aren't you talking about white people is another way of saying, why aren't you talking about what's really important, which is white history, white people's experiences, and so forth. Yeah, I think what's interesting in that question as well is the idea that it would ever be safe to be a black woman writing about black women, right? So she says, are you ever going to leave that safe space? And of course, as Toni Morrison also identifies, when are you ever considered to be literature or to be enough? So even as we celebrate Toni Morrison today, we can't forget that, you know, Toni Morrison's first book did not sell that well. She was critiqued constantly for creating melodrama, which is also a gendered term.

But the idea that black women's lives were always just going to be some sort of frivolous thing that wasn't real literature. Right. And that went on and on throughout her career. So even as celebrated as she was, there was always that misogynist and racist critique of her. So the idea that it would ever be safe to tell those stories in a world where black lives have never been safe. When she was working as a publisher, and she worked for many years as one of the few black publishers, but before she even published The Bluest Eye, her first novel, there's a moment as a publisher where a young man, Henry Dumas, is shot jumping a turnstile and he's killed by transit police. And so she sends a letter around to all the literary community and her friends and everybody

she knew and really made a call to celebrate this work and that this work had to be read and that we had to remember him through this work and always understanding that Black writing take place against the background of Black death and black suffering and black dehumanization, and whether or not that's actively in your work. So one of the criticisms of Morrison was often that she returned to the past so often, right? That she wrote a lot about slavery, but she did not write about the contemporary world. But of course, you are writing the contemporary world in writing back. Comment was made, some people criticized her about writing about the past. Guess what? We're all from the past.

We are all from the past. Whatever the future is, it comes from the past. Whatever the present is, it's from the past. You cannot understand right now unless you look at what happened yesterday, last week, last year, last decade, last century. And that's the power of her work, that she's able to articulate through all these narratives the continuous, perpetual, unbroken struggle of people in the African

diaspora right here in North America to finally achieve real justice, real liberty, real equality. And if that day comes, when that day comes, everybody will be uplifted similarly. Toni Morrison juggles so many roles that her life could provide for people with careers. She's a single mother raising two teenage boys in suburban New York. She's an editor at Random House and a university professor. And she's an author. I was in Syracuse, New York. I was recently divorced.

I had two small children. And I didn't have any friends. Can I ask you as well, we're talking about her role as a publisher, can we talk a little bit more about her legacy there? So she did her work in putting Black authors forward. One of the things she said was that I'm not marching, I'm not going to be the person that's protesting in the streets, what I'm going to do is tell the stories of those who are. So I thought, well, I want the voices documented.

I don't want them distorted by this columnist or this political. I want them to say what they say. So she published Angela Davis. She published Gail Jones. She published Muhammad Ali's autobiography. So when you look at how embedded she was within Black stories, she was always bringing that forward. And then we think of a Black woman doing this, again, in the 60s while she was a single mother, also having to teach on the side because the publishing did not pay. And then that she stuck with it for so long. She says to pay the bills, but we can also wonder

how much of it was to also understand how these voices needed to live and needed to be heard. George, her work is about the experience of African Americans. But how do you feel her work connects to the black Canadian experience? Well, it connects readily to the African Canadian, or use my word, Africadian experience, because of the fact that they're similar. Keep in mind, many African Canadians are in fact descended from African Americans who fled slavery

and escaped slavery to enter into somewhat more positive space in fact, the center for African Americans who fled slavery and escaped slavery to enter into somewhat more positive space in Canada, but at the same time still faced many, many uphill struggles and barriers in this country in terms of achieving real liberty, real equality. For me, one of the most important legacies of Toni Morrison's work is the dignity and privileging that she gave to the actual quality of Black speech. The fact that she was invested in vernacular, the fact that she did not hesitate to look for the aphorisms and proverbs coming from the street, from the barbershops, from the beauty salons, from the hairstylists, from the pool halls, from the barbershops, from the beauty salons, from the hairstylists, from the pool halls, from the snooker joints, from the street corners, from the church halls.

These are the places where she threw down her bucket, so to speak, and pulled up. Bon mot after bon mot, golden word after golden word, golden phrase after golden phrase, insight after insight. In other words, her work is an encyclopedia of the profound thinking that people in the African diaspora, in North America, and in the Caribbean, she has books set in the Caribbean, she has Caribbean characters in her books as well, that they were able to profoundly, and in very complex and complicated ways, think about how to survive, how to triumph, how to overcome. She goes into everyday black life and finds in everyday black thinking the elements of resistance,

the politics of resistance, the psychology of resistance, and then articulates all of that in language that is accessible, in language that is true to life, in language that is absolutely based on experience, in language that is, in fact, biblical. And that, for me, has been, is, always will be liberating. Speaking about the past, one thing I wanted to ask you both about, there were these photos that we were looking at today from the 1987 funeral of the great American author James Baldwin. So Maya Angelou is there, Amiri Baraka is there, Tony Morrison is there, and all of these people have now passed.

Raqqa is there, Toni Morrison is there, and all of these people have now passed. And some people are saying this is the end of a seminal era in American literature. And I would be interested to hear both your thoughts on that. Elle, let's start with you. I suppose the sort of response to that is generations always live in us. So the question is never, I mean, eventually all generations end in turnover. So I don't see really how you could ever say that that generation of people has ended. In fact, what you see is the new ways that people have been picked up. And we've quite literally seen this in the recent interest, for example, in movies that are re-exploring their work. So

I Am Not Your Negro that came out a couple of years ago. I met Baldwin as a writer a long time ago. The work of Baldwin influenced my whole life. The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story. The recent movie on Toni Morrison that has been playing. I know you're sick unto death of being labeled a black writer. I prefer it. Oh, I thought you probably were tired of it. Well, I'm tired of people asking the question. Oh, yes, of course.

So I think what that says is that we're speaking back to the same issue. So I talked about Henry Dumas jumping a term style and being killed by police. Well, we're fighting those same issues right now with fair policing, right? We're fighting these issues against policing. So it's those ancestors that articulate these issues for us in ways that clarify them. Even if we disagree sometimes, that idea of history was embedded in her works. George, anything to add there?

I would just say that, to me, I look at time as being a great soup. And at different points, certain elements rise up in the soup, and then other elements recede. And I think about it in that way. I think when I dip my spoon in the soup of African diasporic literature and so on, I come up, given whichever spoonful I choose to take up, I might have Toni Morrison at one point, I might have Gene Toomer at another.

I might have Henry Dumas over here, I might have Gene Tumor in another. I might have Henry Dumas over here. I might have Malcolm X over there. And then put my spoon back in that great big soup of time, that great bowl of soup that is time, and pull up yet another voice, or another voice, another voice. It's easy to look at birthdates and deathdates and say, the century begins here and ends over there, or so-and-so, the school of writing begins over here and ends over here. But the point is that writers especially, and readers for that matter, are constantly picking up the overlapping of one voice to another. And voices that you continue to come back to.

Every time I dip my spoon in that great big bowl. You're making me want to just think about time exclusively as a soup from here on in. You know, what should everybody read from Toni Morrison this week? If you had to just pick one thing. I mean, it's difficult.

I think one place to start would be the essay that she wrote upon the election of Trump, Mourning for Whiteness, where she absolutely skewered and understood the role that white supremacy has always played in America and the way that white fear and white anger has always motivated the way that white people move through America and the way that black people have lived in America and throughout the diaspora. to start. I would say for the book, Sula, My First Encounter, remains for me my favorite book in just the power of Black women's friendships and also the struggle of that and sometimes the ugliness of that. So those are my two choices. George, any recommendations or maybe even just what you're picking up this week? I think one of the most profound interventions that Toni Morrison made

academically is with her collection of Harvard speeches, Playing in the Dark, Whiteness, and the Literary Imagination. And what she does in that book is she reviews, if I remember off the top of my head, five or six great white American writers and points out that each of these writers, Hemingway comes to mind, can only be understood, really understood, by the readers, by the critics, if they understand that these writers are all responding to the black presence in America. By the way, it's relatively short, only 90 pages, with good-sized print, so easy to get into. And in terms of literary fiction, the work, hands down, I would nominate for everyone to read A Song of Solomon.

I knew you were going to say that. And the reason why, that work is an imaginative reconstruction through characters of the two major tensions in the African diaspora. And that is the question of integration, exactly what do we mean by that, and then how much. And then the question of nationalism or separation, again, what exactly would that look like and what do we mean by that, and how our roots continue to inform our struggle. I want to thank you both so much for being here today. This conversation has really inspired me. It makes me want to go straight home, really, and go back to her writing. Thank you so much for being here. Totally like it, as St. Augustine says, pick up the book and read.

I think that's a good note to end on. It was black, by the way. George L., thank you so much. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, Jamie. Thank right. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Take care, Elle. Bye, Jamie.

Thank you. Thank you both. Okay, so before we go today, I want to play you one more clip. In 2012, former President Barack Obama honored Toni Morrison with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his speech is very much worth a listen. Toni Morrison's prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt. From Song of Solomon to Beloved, Toni reaches us deeply using a tone that is lyrical, precise, distinct, and inclusive. She believes that language arcs toward the place where meaning might lie. The rest of us are lucky to be following along for the ride. That's all for today. I'm

Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.