Morrison, Toni

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor. She was the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1993). Morrison is the author of nine novels: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1999), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), and the short story “Recitatif” (1983). She has also authored several non-fiction works, including, The Black Book (1974), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Raceing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992), Birth of a Nationhood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (coeditor) (1997), and Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004).

Motherhood is a central theme in Morrison's fiction and is a topic she returns to time and time again in her many interviews and articles. In her reflections on motherhood, both inside and outside her fiction, Morrison articulates a fully developed theory of African American mothering that is central to her larger political and philosophical stance on black womanhood. Building upon black women's experiences of, and perspectives on motherhood, Morrison develops a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different than the motherhood practised and prescribed in the dominant culture. Morrison defines and positions maternal identity as a site of power for black women. In a 1989 interview with Bill Moyers, Morrison describes motherhood “… as the most liberating thing that ever happened to me.” Motherhood for Morrison is a site of liberation and self-realization, because her standpoint on motherhood is developed from the African American tradition of motherhood, in which motherhood is a site of power for black women.

Scholarship on African American scholarship demonstrates that there exists a distinct African American tradition of motherhood that is distinguished by two central premises or perspectives. First, mothers and motherhood are valued by, and central to African American culture. Second, it is recognized that mothers and mothering are what make possible the physical and psychological well-being and empowerment of African American people and the larger African American culture. This viewpoint, in turn, is composed of five interconnected themes: othermothering and community mothering, motherhood as social activism and a site of power, matrifocality, nurturance as resistance: providing a homeplace, and the motherline—mothers as cultural bearers. Building upon this tradition of African American mothering, Morrison takes the traditional conceptions of black womanhood, what she terms the ancient properties and traditional black values, or the funk, to transform motherwork from a private maternal task to one that is communal, political, and culturally central and valued.

In Morrison' fiction this theme of maternal power may be organized under three interrelated themes. The first is Morrison's concept of woman as “ship and harbor.” Mothers, in both Morrison's worldview and in her many fictional representations, simultaneously inhabit the private and public realm and function as both nurturer and provider, thus collapsing the gendered schism on which patriarchal, Western motherhood is constructed and maintained. The second theme is “other/community mothering.” In her many interviews, Morrison stresses the centrality and importance of other community for African American culture as apparent in her oft-cited quotation: “I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two people can raise a child. You really need the whole village. And if you don't have it, you'd better make it.” Aditionally, as readers of Morrison can attest, her fictional world is populated by numerous community and other mothers. The third and perhaps most significant [Page 803]theme, “motherhood as political,” positions motherwork as fundamentally and profoundly political. Morrison defines and positions maternal identity as a site of power for black women.

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