“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”
“In the version I know, the woman is the daughter of slaves, Black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honour she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighbourhood to places far away; to the city, where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
“One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”
“She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”
“Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their colour, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
“The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally, she speaks, and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
“Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility. — For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded—told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.”
—Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993
A few years ago, I sat with a group of women in Laventille who gathered weekly in quiet solidarity on a low concrete bench. Their backs were straight, their hands rested in their laps. Behind them, a stunning view: the bay below, the hills standing still in the light, a lone eagle hovering in silence, and a few egrets rising slow across a flamboyant tree.
Each woman had lost a son. Some had lost two. One had lost three. Shot dead in a span of months or weeks. The details blurred, but the mourning never did.
There is a version of this country that treats such loss as unremarkable—a murder rate among the highest in the hemisphere. Gang violence accepted as part of the ordinary. A child’s scream mistaken for play. Anger that detonates without warning. People return to work the next day as if rage were rain. We live among ghosts.
The women I sat with were not seeking answers. They simply wanted the violence remembered. That’s what literature does when it matters. It gives grief structure. It gives pain language. Toni Morrison understood this better than anyone in living memory. Her fiction didn’t ask to be read; it asked to be lived through.
Home sits closest to the heart
Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, came from a working-class background. Her father, a welder, refused to beg for coal and brought home firewood. Her mother sang arias while scrubbing floors.
Their home was filled with stories—folk tales, family lore, ghost narratives—that taught her early what silence could contain. She read Latin, the Bible, Madame Bovary, and the Bhagavad Gita. And when none of the stories on the shelves resembled her own, she began to write.
Morrison’s education at Howard University and Cornell, along with her career as the first Black woman senior editor at Random House, were milestones that shaped the trajectory of American literature.
Morrison, who raised two sons alone, edited Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, and fought to publish Black women long before the market found them fashionable.
Her writing—first composed in scraps between jobs—became a body of work that rewired American fiction.
Her works included The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Home. These were books made from the bones of memory. From the vocabulary of trauma. From the lives of people rarely given the dignity of complexity. Morrison never simplified. She dignified.
This week, after yet another election, as the country exhales into uncertainty and a measure of calm, the novel Home sits closest to the heart. Published in 2012, spare in style, it follows Frank Money, a Korean War veteran returning to the American South to care for his sister and confront the brutalities he has carried inside his body. The novel doesn’t offer redemption; it offers something closer to repair—slow, incomplete, but real.
“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”—Home (2012)
That line is the novel’s thesis. Healing, for Morrison, is not transcendence. It is remembering properly. It is naming what happened without flinching. And staying there long enough to feel what the forgetting cost.
In Beloved, memory takes human form. In Jazz, a dead girl narrates her own murder. In Sula, friendship is both a battlefield and a sacrament. Morrison’s sentences cut with precision, and her syntax resists the rhythms of comfort. She shaped fiction around rupture—around the harm that lives in families, neighbourhoods, and nations.
Morrison once said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Her fiction understood freedom as a responsibility. Political, emotional, communal. Her characters carry the weight of generations not because they want to, but because there is no one else left who will.
In Trinidad and Tobago, we understand this weight. We know the cost of refusing to name it. Our schools are collapsing. Our children grow up in violence that’s accepted as normal. Our politics reset every five years without repair. This week, a new government inherits promises—including proposals to revise gun legislation—that may only intensify the unbearable. These are not minor changes; they are decisions with blood in their margins.
That afternoon in Laventille, the women sat for a long time. They did not speak in speeches. They did not grieve aloud. But when one woman reached for another’s hand, it was the most eloquent gesture I had seen in years. Overhead, the eagle turned once. Across the flamboyant tree, the egrets rose again.
We sat in the sun with a breathtaking view, wondering—though no one said it aloud—how we had learned to normalise both beauty and bullets.
Morrison never offered comfort. She gave us form. And now, after the vote, after the noise, it’s time again to listen.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist who has contributed for international outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian (UK), and Reporters Without Borders. She is a Guardian Media columnist and the winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Website: www.irasroom.org
Author enquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
