Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, USA. She was an American essayist, editor, novelist, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The controversially and critically acclaimed Song of Solomon brought Toni Morrison to national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award
Toni Morrison was an African-American woman who embellished publishing industry in America for the African American budding authors in the 70s, and beyond. Toni was poised, brainy, astute and elegantly ensconced with humble deportment in the department of cognition. She encouraged African Americans to believe in themselves and rise above the stereotypical nuances of racism in America. Toni infused self-confidence in the youth of America who are exploring the status and class superiority complexes in the race nomenclature of America.
Toni was an audacious woman who dared to write to inspire and give hope to the hopeless people. Like our own Iwin and Kongi Harvest Wole Soyinka is to Africa, Toni Morrison was a Kongi Harvest to the Americas. Americas comprise the new world order situated in the Earth’s western hemisphere. The power of healing and imagination gave Toni the edge ahead of her contemporaries. She never gave problems without proffering solutions. She was never in the language of obscurity. Her pens embellished words on parchments for the pleasurable reading of the people around the world.
Some of Toni’s expositions are devoid of quibble lines, and very exciting and enchanting in her prose. To read Toni’s writings, you will be subsumed in the substance they contain and be tempted to want to be a writer. By reading the literary mogul, you are naturally moved to consider the past in order to shape the future. Toni Morrison’s literary sense of reasoning is emulative and mimicry in the literary and ordinary world. Toni was beautifully beloved and universally admired. Her inspirational books are refreshingly referential on the beautiful minds that usually ensued in the ebony of the black Americans.
Meanwhile, Toni Morrison was the epitome of beauty and bewitching mind. She was beautiful inside and effervescent outside with alluring blackness of America and beyond. I feel usually amused by the way black Americans don’t flaunt their robust and fertile minds. The beauty inherent in the cognition of the black people is unfathomable. But Black race and the people have not been able to earnest their rich cultures and beautiful mores. Toni Morrison and other literary black American giants have opened a new discourse in the consciousness of the Black Americans. Black American people should begin to showcase their superiority in the advancement of humanity.
Sumptuously, Toni Morrison’s writings enjoy a network of influential literati and admirers. She was the first black African-American and woman that effortlessly won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the United States of America. The intelligentsia all over the world is musing Toni’s beautiful muse and demise! Also, the community of fertile and infertile minds must be cautioned not to mourn her death but to celebrate this beautiful mind, and the fecundity of her literary works in arts. We should make her books a collective reference for prosocial behavior in humans, and to discourage, if not completely eliminate the dumping of ‘drump’ and antisocial behavior from the darkest part of human minds. World leaders including the former U.S. President, Barack Obama, have been pouring their tribute to this vintage American hero and black American pride.
“In the beginning, was the word. Toni Morrison took the word and turned it into a Song…of Solomon, of Sula, Beloved, Mercy, Paradise Love, and more,” Winfrey wrote on Instagram on Tuesday. “She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words. She used them to roil us, to wake us, to educate us and help us grapple with our deepest wounds and try to comprehend them.” She concluded: “She was Empress-Supreme among writers. Long may her WORDS reign!” In 1993, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Almost 20 years later, then-President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. On Tuesday, Obama reflected on her “captivating” presence. “Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page,” he tweeted. “Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while.” With Toni Morrison as an icon of inspiration, a cerebral image, and quintessence for America and the world, humanity in us must be reordered for reawakening, and for collective hope and optimism of mankind. Our literary enigma has gone to sleep peacefully. She sleeps on but never dies in all of us with unending literary work of art and imagination. Beloved Toni Morrison, rest in perfect peace in the mausoleum of your kindred’s beautiful catacomb!
•Balogun wrote from Arizona, USA.
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