Toni Morrison, the critically acclaimed African-American writer whose novels were immensely popular and who won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize for Literature, was the first (and still the only) female African-American writer to capture that prestigious prize. During Barack Obama’s presidency, in 2012, Morrison also received the Congressional Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour.

She most often wrote in a very personal version of a luminous magical-realist style, even if she eschewed that particular label. The New York Times, in describing her literary style, had said:

“Ms. Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act.

“Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday verities, a technique that caused Ms. Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

“In Sula, a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. In Song of Solomon, a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who ‘had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome’. In Beloved, the specter of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer.”

Her novels gained overwhelming critical acclaim – and also global popularity among a multitude of readers. Along her long literary career, she gave birth to a young black girl who longed for blue eyes, a slave mother who must kill her own child to save her from bondage, and a litany of other memorable characters who helped refashion the contemporary American novel as a vibrant, popular art form.

She grew up poor in Lorain, Ohio, a gritty steel-making town, attended Howard University and later Cornell University for a master’s degree. Along the way, she became a highly respected editor for Random House and “stole” time from her day job and the care of two children from her failed marriage to West Indian architect Harold Morrison to begin her own serious writing. Eventually, she became a literary fixture as a professor at Princeton University, as well as a guest lecturer elsewhere, both in live lectures and in appearances on television, sometimes in conjunction with the immensely popular Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

As an editor, Morrison helped give voice to what she saw as the still-missing black stories in American literature, from the late 1960s onwards. At the time, there was a “terrible price to pay”, she said, about the choice of leaving the familiarity of Lorain, Ohio and beginning her career in the overwhelmingly white society. But her personal goal was to be a leader in the creation of what she called a “canon of black work”. Along the way, among other works, she guided into print the autobiographies of Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, evolved from a short story she had written while she guided other writers, and it became a popular as well as critical success. That novel centred on Pecola Breedlove, a young poor girl who is disconsolate at what she perceives to be her ugliness. Morrison later said she wrote the novel because she had encountered no other book or character like it — a story that delved into the life of a child so infected by racism that she had come to loathe herself.

Or, as Morrison herself had portrayed her protagonist:

“She had seen this little girl all of her life. Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.”

The Washington Post’s obituary for Toni Morrison tried to sum up her impact as an author and social force by saying:

“Ms. Morrison placed African-Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.”

Harvard Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr noted that Morrison’s literary voice was one “combining Ellington, Faulkner and Maria Callas”.

Perhaps her best-known novel was Beloved. It centred on Sethe, a (now-former) slave mother haunted by thoughts of the child she had murdered in the escape from slavery in the South, after having had to make the horrific calculation that a future life in slavery would be worse than death itself.

Or as the novelist wrote:

“Sethe had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of unslaved life. From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.”

That is, until a slave catcher tracks Sethe down. Cornered by him, she cuts her daughter’s throat rather than see her returned to a life of degradation. Morrison also wrote the libretto for an opera based on the true story of the woman who had inspired her to write Beloved.

This writer awoke on Wednesday at 6am to hear the radio’s breakfast show announcer, his voice nearly breaking with emotion, paraphrasing the opening paragraphs of Beloved and explaining how much this novel had meant to him when he had read it. Sethe, he said, had obviously been a high functioning victim of post-traumatic stress – but that crucially, that trauma extended back in time through the generations which had survived enslavement, but that there would be the generations that would come afterwards who would be scarred by that emotional legacy as well. Morrison’s writing clearly had touched South African readers as well as American ones.

And Zakes Mda, the renowned South African novelist, playwright, painter, and university professor (now teaching at Ohio University, not so very far from Lorain, Ohio) wrote to this writer after learning of Morrison’s passing to say:

“I think Ms Morrison was very important to me as a writer – imbued me with the courage to stretch the limits of myth – and to my students who were then able to appreciate their own Ohio environment as a source of magic. Whenever I taught a Pan African Literature class, I would have among the prescribed texts a Morrison.

“My affinity to her was on her use of what scholars call magical realism. She hated that label. But it was not for her to choose what to be called. It is never up to us writers but it is the role of scholars to categorise our work and place it in its pigeonhole according to the characteristics they observe in it. So she complained to no avail. She hated other labels too that were quite complementary to her; for instance, that she was a ‘poetic writer’. She felt that when people spoke of her lyricism it took focus away from the power of her stories.

“But one label that she embraced was that of ‘Black woman writer’. Morrison was important to South Africa too. South African women have had book clubs since the 1890s, but these were for the elite and were few and far between. The phenomenon of book clubs that blossomed throughout South Africa, even in the rural areas, really took off in 1996 after Oprah Winfrey started her book club on TV. One of the early books that was selected was Morrison’s Beloved. Quite often I would visit a book club in rural Qwaqwa or Butterworth or urban Pretoria and find women reading Beloved.”

In my own experience, when we worked in Sapporo, Japan back in the mid-1980s, a community of younger female academics had encouraged us at our American library and cultural centre to organise a reading group where each member would present a workshop, sequentially, on an individual American writer, after everyone had had a chance to read the books for the next session.

By acclamation, the group wanted to focus on contemporary black (and brown) female writers – Audrey Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker – but most especially on Toni Morrison. So distinctive was her voice that these Japanese scholars practically fought over who would have the opportunity to lead the discussion on Morrison and her novel, Song of Solomon. And this was still several years before the phenomenon of Beloved. She was already a literary force internationally with readers and scholars.

When she received her Nobel Prize in 1993, she was the first native-born American since John Steinbeck – back in 1962 – to gain that honour. The citation applauded for her “novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import” and that breathed life into “an essential aspect of American reality”.

In her Nobel Prize lecture, Morrison had told her audience (and the larger world):

“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here,’ his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600,000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war.

“Refusing to monumentalise, disdaining the ‘final word’, the precise ‘summing up’, acknowledging their ‘poor power to add or detract’, his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”

In her life and works, Toni Morrison, more than most, surely had made a long reach towards that “ineffable”. DM