The world-renowned author Toni Morrison died at the age of 88 on 5th of August, 2019. She has helped shape modern literature and she will live on in her novels, essays, poems, and through the people. She has touched and inspired. She was the recipient of many awards including the Nobel prize in literature, Pulitzer prize, and Presidential medal of freedom.
When Morrison had visited Northeastern University’s Boston campus in 2013, she had the audience of nearly 1000 people. “Evil and violence take the stage —all of it. It needs so much to call our attention,” she said, “But goodness doesn’t need anything. If it says anything at all, it’s a whisper”. Nicole Aljoe, who is the director of the African and African American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Northeastern University, said she knows herself as a scholar, as a black woman in academy, she looked at Toni Morrison as a model, “I hope that I’m able to be a bridge for others the way she was for so many”,she said.
Morrison’s works examined the experiences of black people, especially black females. She was the author of 11 novels, including Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1993, she became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. “There’s almost no degree of hyperbole one could offer for the effect of her writing career that would be an overstatement,” said Carla Kaplan, who is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature and a scholar of modern, African-American, and women’s history and culture. “She has done for the modern novel what Shakespeare did for theater,” Kaplan said. Almost no one rises to her stature; her work is in a world of its own. Toni Morrison’s particular genius about history, large and small, is unmatched.
Mayuri Talgaonkar