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Revisiting the ever relevant words of author Toni Morrison

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By Anne W. Semmes

When the August news came of the passing of Nobel prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, bells went off. Hadn’t I once interviewed this extraordinary woman about her Pulitzer prize-winning, most celebrated novel, “Beloved,” that ghost-filled story of Sethe, an escaped slave? I found that file, and Morrison’s words jumped off the page.

Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison shares her still pertinent thoughts shared decades ago stemming from her book, “Beloved.” Contributed photo.

Reading her words, given to me some 30 years ago, the memory of that phone interview returned. Her welcoming warm voice has me sitting with her in her writing room I learned was not far from Greenwich, on the west side of the Hudson River, south of the Tappan Zee bridge.

Morrison’s words resonate as being as relevant today as they were then. Following on are some of the questions I asked her.

How did the idea of the novel “Beloved” come to you?

“I used a little part of a truthful story.”

What did you want the story to tell?

“The problem of digesting history- remembering it and confronting it and still being whole. The book’s principle trauma is a psychological one – in addition to the deprivation of a family, it’s a single human effort to be a caring person…Not only to work and survive, but where there’s beauty, and where there’s a possibility of a bright future. You have to do some pretty clever tricks in the mind in order to stay that way.”

What are the controlling images of the book?

“There are two. In [Sethe’s] trying to negotiate that territory overwhelmed by the misery of life and yearning for its benevolence. And the other is the tools, the chains that suggest the violence of slavery.”

The book takes place in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Was this knowledge handed down or read knowledge?

“I thought I knew a great deal about it. I did a lot of research about details of place, furniture and dress.”

The book has a strong stream of folklore running through it. Was that an inheritance of yours?

“People told stories in my family about ghosts and visions and were on intimate terms with their dream life. My grandmother read dream books for interpretation.”

Your family was very imaginative-rich and strong.

“I was part of a family that included a mother and a father. Having a two parent household then was not rare until World War II. It was extremely important keeping families together at that time after generations of slavery.”

Is the book about the struggles between parenting and being a woman?

“The kind of devastation in the book about families rent asunder does speak to a very contemporary situation. Black women are struggling to be individuals with families, perhaps single mothers or divorced mothers. I wanted the book to focus in some way on the sacrifice that a woman makes in order to protect her children and to suggest at the end of the book that it is a kind of beginning of that movement into modernity, into being ‘one’s own best thing.’

On the one hand there is the necessity, compulsion and desire to nurture, and in some situations that displaces self-nurturing. We can transfer all of the best part of us into nurturing, and literally destruct the self. Today, naming that evil doesn’t elevate it or describe it. It’s something contemporary women have to work out. They have to imagine that post things are possible. There should not be a life of either or – not my children or myself. Those are impossible choices. It must be my children and myself. We have to find ways for both things to flower. It’s unacceptable for women to have to apologize for wanting to be mature individuals.”

There’s a line in the book, “To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire. Well now, that was freedom.” What is your most important freedom?

“The freedom to choose the things I want to be responsible for. These days we have lots of choices. In those days of the book there were not many choices.”

Today, a month and more after her death, Morrison continues to be celebrated across the media. Surely, as one celebrant wrote, “This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.”

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