In April 2015, I saw Toni Morrison speak at Harvard before her passing in 2019. My love for Morrison started after I read “Song of Solomon” when I was 17 and got an ankle tattoo of wings in her honor, celebrating the quote that “you wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.” 

Eight years later, I believe, with deep fervency, that Yale needs to teach more Toni Morrison classes. Currently, there is only one class entirely dedicated to the Pulitzer prize winning author “Toni Morrison & the Matter of Black Life,” which is a seminar offered by Professor Daphne Brooks. Perhaps — and I could stand corrected — just one or two other classes cover Morrison, including, but not limited to, “Literature of the Black South.” But one seminar is not enough. Yale is sorely lacking a lecture class that covers all of the author’s work and doesn’t skip out on the major milestones of her literary career. 

Toni Morrison was, by hundreds of leaps and bounds, one of the most influential authors of all time — far more influential than Shakespeare, Camus and Hemingway combined. 

According to the Yale course catalog, it is my understanding that 12 English classes are teaching Shakespeare this semester, of which five classes are exclusively dedicated to the British playwright’s work. But crusty, dead, white male authors like Shakespeare no longer address the contemporary issues we face in society. These issues include, but are not limited to: racism, transphobia, homophobia, the indiscriminate shelling of Gaza, American imperialism through reckless war mongering, declining life expectancies and global warming. 

Sure, some might argue that Shakespeare addresses the universal issues people have faced since the dawn of time: love, jealousy, hatred, family and friendship. But these topics are now cliche, and have been hackneyed time and time again by other authors — most of them also dead, crusty, white men. 

Good literature is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted. When reading Shakespeare’s plays, I don’t feel either comforted or disturbed. Instead, I feel like I’m reading a fool’s language and that opening one of his verses is an utter waste of time. It is also an act in comedy, no pun intended. His books need to be put in a far away cupboard or thrown into the nearest trash bin around Timothy Dwight and lit on fire after being soaked in leftover beer from DKE. 

But when reading Morrison, I feel disturbed when a Black mother kills her two-year-old daughter so her child doesn’t have to live in slavery. This feeling of discomfort is good for the reader and prods them to feel all sorts of difficult emotions, which is, indeed, literature’s job at the end of the day. 

As someone who has studied Morrison extensively in my free time, I still dedicate many hours to watching her interviews online, despite having held jobs in the defense sector and other fields not related to English. Watching and rewatching her interviews is just as paramount to reading her novels, since we can glean some cues from her speech with television personalities like Charlie Rose. I study the intonation of Morrison’s voice when Charlie asks her a tough question on race. I study her mannerisms when she gets defensive of her characters. I still buy obscure books both by and about Morrison, ones in which she is critiquing novels and not writing them. I also try to pair watching her interviews with reading about her personal background: her father, her mother, her hometown, her schooling as a kid. 

When Morrison’s father was 15 years old, he witnessed the lynching of two African American businessmen on his street. When she was two years old, her family’s landlord set fire to their house because her parents could not afford to pay rent. 

I believe that Morrison was driven by a deserved vengeance towards the cruelty white people have inflicted on black folk for centuries and still inflict today. I believe that Morrison channeled this vengeance into her writing and used it as a force for good when all of her characters were black and not white. This flips the script on the oppressor and makes white people feel like they are the minority. I believe that part of Morrison was perpetually angry —  very angry, at that. I believe she channeled a silent rage in her writing that bent the reader so they absorbed the depth and breadth of the Black experience. 

Writing an imitation Toni Morrison novel that mimics her style while pitting a minority against an oppressor — a trans community against a society of cis people who taunt and kill — is an alluring idea for a writer like me. But the day any human being would be able to precisely echo Morrison’s style is a day Jesus would walk on water again: it would take a miracle for such a feat to happen, due to the unparalleled strength of her wise cadence and magical realism that abounds in her Nobel-winning lines. 

Because of her books, I now believe that vengeance can be a tool for good, spurring the masses into worlds where people who have been trashed for centuries can still have rich inner lives. It can take people on a quest for identity and belonging, like Milkman repeatedly does in “Song of Solomon,” to the tune of a bag of gold and a flight across Virginia mountains. Trans people feel vengeance on a daily basis — we just need a healthy way to channel it. 

So, to the Yale English department: it’s time to teach more of Morrison. Add two to three more classes on the famed author, ones that are solely dedicated to her work. 

Shakespeare is of the past. Morrison’s voice is of the present. 

ISAAC AMEND graduated in 2017 from Timothy Dwight College. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. Isaac has two poetry books out, “Lost in the Desert” and “When the Sky Was a Canvas to Make Fun Of.” In his free time he is a columnist for the Washington Blade. You can follow him on Instagram at: @literatipapi and contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com.