Saturday, October 17, 2015

My hero / Toni Morrison by Marlon James


Toni Morrinson
Photo by David Levenson

My hero: Toni Morrinson by Marlon James


Her novels transformed the way I think,’ says this year’s Man Booker winner
Marlon James
Sat 17 Oct 2015

Iread Toni Morrison’s work for the first time in 2001. I had showed one of my early drafts to the author Elizabeth Nunez, and when she read it her response was, “you’re a good writer, but you don’t know anything about women”. I was shocked. I had a strong mother, I grew up in a house of women, what did she mean? She wasn’t talking about knowing women personally, she explained, but understanding female literary space. She asked me a question that I think would test a lot of men: how many women have you read? I had to admit that apart from some dead Victorians, I hadn’t really read any.

Song of Solomon and Sula both profoundly changed my life, but in very different ways. Like Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Song of Solomon was incredibly galvanising: it made me want to write. It’s Morrison’s loosest novel, an epic about an extraordinarily dysfunctional black family. It becomes almost magical realist, and has the most plausible supernatural ending I have ever read – I finished that novel thinking I could fly.
Sula was influential because it transformed the way I think about myself. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I haven’t passed many of the “normal” milestones. At the point when I read the novel, I was questioning that, still looking at life in terms of the milestones you’ve reached and the things you’ve accumulated. The main character, Sula, does a lot of risky and awful things, including sleeping with her best friend Nell’s husband. She doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. At the end of the book, a friend asks her what she has to show for her life. When I read this exchange, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to read her answer, but it seemed so relevant to me. But Sula just says: “Show? To who?”
It’s not often you get a fall-off-the chair moment in literature, but that was one for me. It made me realise that I didn’t have a thing to prove to anybody.
• Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings this week won the Man Booker prize.

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