Some thoughts after learning of Toni Morrison's death

After learning of Toni Morrison's death last week, I have had some time to think about the impact that her writing has had on me personally.  I have not kept up with all of Morrison's latest works but she has been a mainstay throughout my reading and academic life.  Her death was something of a shock because I have taken her presence so much for granted.  She was ever-present in the academic work that I did and I have returned to her work frequently through the years.
Although I have been aware of her work by reputation for much of my adult life, the first of her books that I actually read was Tar Baby in an American Lit class I took in college.  Soon after this I read Beloved and The Bluest Eye in quick succession.  What struck me most about these is how unapologetic Morrison is in her writing.  She writes very frankly about devastating sexual violence and human cruelty, both showing the ways that these impact lives and also the ways that they may be overcome.  These instances of violence were never gratuitous and do not romanticize the worst aspects of humanity.  She presents them as facts in the lives of her characters that must be dealt with in one way or another.  Her characters often carry the weight of their past actions with them, to be haunted psychically or literally by what they have done.
I taught her novel Beloved in a special topics class on American Gothic fiction that I designed years ago.  My students struggled with many of the novels in that class, but particularly with this one, because they were forced to rethink how they talked about books.  They enjoyed the work but were often appalled by the events in them.  They had to rethink how to praise a work when they had been so accustomed to telling me that they "liked" a certain part.  It is hard to "like" some of the reveals in Beloved.  It was instructive for me to watch how they were confronted with their own pre-conceptions about what literary criticism should be in a classroom.  My students were engaged and interested in discovering a new language to express the satisfaction of reading a difficult novel and their admiration for Morrison's narrative.
I think this is something that Morrison wanted.  She made us rethink whose stories could and should be told.  She definitely made us rethink how the stories could be told and what it means to tell our own stories.