She dared to be difficult': How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think

"There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison."

"Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art. In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach. Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about. More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer and her work is highly complex."

"In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books it was so removed from his experience. She had responded: Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf! The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented: Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman."

Black womanhood often intersects with multiple forms of perceived difficulty, including being demanding, stubborn, baffling, and illegible. A prominent Black female novelist and Nobel laureate helped reveal how personal difficulty can be both a lived condition and a critical stance. Her work reshaped understandings across literature, politics, criticism, ethics, and artistic responsibility, while remaining hard to read, teach, and write about. A Vogue anecdote illustrates how readers misconstrue cultural distance as ignorance and how impatience can be moralized. Professional multiplicity—editor, professor, critic, public intellectual—created strain and the temptation to extend branches away from a central core.

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