“If you surrender to the air, you can ride it,” is the quote which immediately caught my attention from Beyoncé’s documentary Homecoming. The reason this quote captured my eye was because it was from distinguished author, Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison is a famous author, editor, and novelist born in Ohio. Her education included attending Cornell and Howard University. Toni Morrison is a very prominent figure in African American literature and for women because of her groundbreaking eerie tales such as Beloved and The Bluest Eye. These two of her novels are some of my own personal favorites.
It was about last spring when I was taking my final English class where I noticed Morrison on our syllabus. Our class would revolve heavily around her work The Bluest Eye and our final essay would be an analysis of the novel.
I remember I fell in love with her words. The novel felt as if it reached out and grabbed me. I was thrashed between the past stories of Pecola Breedlove’s parents, hidden metaphors from the children’s book Dick and Jane, and the ultimate madness Pecola had succumbed to.
The novel centers around young Pecola, who is an African-American girl that wishes to have the greatest beauty of all. To her, this means having blue eyes. In the novels it describes Pecola’s loss of innocence and loss of sanity that is robbed from society as well as her own father.
(Courtesy of Amazon)
After declaring my minor in English, I was now brought up to a different work of Morrison. This side of hers was now the supernatural and haunting side I have heard about. We read Beloved for my American Literature class and it very vivid.
Morrison has this sort of magic with her words with captures the reader to whatever story she may be telling. She has various amounts of imagery (auditory, visual, tactile, etc), larger connections in her plot, and a skill for making readers want to race to the end of the book.
Morrison even identifies as her own writing as being left open-ended for questions, so even if you do want to race to the end of her books, there may not be a definitie ending waiting for you.