7th August, 2019
Former US President Barack Obama’s tribute to late Nobel Literature winner Toni Morrison, is still attracting accolades on Instagram, with over 750,000 likes less than 24 hours after he posted it on Instagram.
While in office, Obama paid the literary icon her, bestowing her America’s greatest honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
Morrison, who died late on Monday aged 88, wrote 11 novels, many of them touching on life as a black American, in a glittering literary and award-laden career that lasted over six decades.
Now read Obama’s moving tribute:
Time is no match for Toni Morrison. In her writing, she sometimes toyed with it, warping and creasing it, bending it to her masterful will. In her life’s story, too, she treated time nontraditionally.
A child of the Great Migration who’d lifted up new, more diverse voices in American literature as an editor, Toni didn’t publish her first novel until she was 39 years old.
From there followed an ascendant career—a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and so much more—and with it, a fusion of the African American story within the American story.
Toni Morrison was a national treasure. Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful—a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy.
She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. And so even as Michelle and I mourn her loss and send our warmest sympathies to her family and friends, we know that her stories—that our stories—will always be with us, and with those who come after, and on and on, for all time.