Beloved

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”

Chloe Anthony Wofford “Toni” Morrison. It’s been a few weeks since she passed away, and it’s taken just as long for me to put what I felt into some semblance of understanding. That quote, one of many that blossomed from her fingertips, from her lips, from her beautiful mind, convinced me and I know thousands of others to put pen to paper and write what they wanted to read.

Toni Morrison epitomised the black American female experience. She wrote for black women and won Pulitzer Prizes (1988) and Nobel Prizes (1993). To a young black girl in England writing about girls getting lost in a shopping centre to get into secondary school, she was aspirational. Her calm and grace and the beauty in her work, the evocation that whispered like a memory, the pain felt chronic, the world tangible to the point where I lived the lives of the women she wrote about.

In a world where we are being suffocated with the “fake news” narrative, to lost Ms Morrison now, when we are so much in desperate need of her wisdom, of her truth, of her ability to cut straight through nonsense (sexist and racist) it cuts like a knife to know she’s no longer of this world. The words that remain are just as important, if not even more so now.

It reminds me to keep going, to keep writing, to speak the truth, to make my voice, Black and British as it is, be heard. There are still books that I want to read. There are still books that haven’t been written. Ms Toni told me to write it. I’m gonna write.