Donna Bailey Nurse to celebrate Toni Morrison's legacy with Black female writers at Luminato Festival

June 8, 2022

Canadian literary critic and journalist Donna Bailey Nurse has interviewed hundreds of authors over the years.

Her 1998 meeting with celebrated novelist Toni Morrison, however, stands out as the most memorable.

After the 90-minute interview done in a Lower Manhattan loft that Morrison resided at the time, they lunched together.

“Clearly, it was the most profound conversation I have had with anyone,” said Bailey Nurse who edited the groundbreaking ‘Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing’. “She absolutely stood out with her intelligence, candor, beauty and just her love of her people. This is one person you meet and it is unequivocal that Black is beautiful. It is not that she thought we are perfect. She thought we are magic. She had a strong and true sense of the excellence and power of Black people. To be in the presence of that is so wonderful and extremely rare. She was also so deeply well-read and knowledgeable about the African-American experience.”

The first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, Morrison died in 2019 at age 88.

As part of the city’s Luminato Festival that runs from June 9 to 19, Bailey Nurse is commemorating Morrison’s literary legacy by leading conversations with acclaimed female authors who revered her.

“Knowing that I wasn’t going to meet her again made me very sad,” she said. “As soon as I got over it, I wanted to do something to celebrate what she has done for everybody and me.”

The two-day event takes place on June 17 and 18 at the Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge St.

Nicky Lawrence (Photo by UBW-Wade Photography)

Toronto-based singer/songwriter Nicky Lawrence will host the shows that will include musical accompaniment by a four-piece band led by bandleader and Harry Jerome Award winner Orin Isaacs as Bailey Nurse celebrates Morrison’s legacy and the impact she has had on Black women writers and readers globally.

Orin Isaacs won a Harry Jerome Award in 2016 for Excellence in the Arts (Photo by Ron Fanfair)

“I want people to enjoy the stories that are meant for them,” she said. “The Black literary circle in Canada has become exceptionally scholarly and focused. There is an idea that stories are for study and very serious scholarly attention. Stories are for people. When Toni Morrison writes ‘Song of Solomon’, ‘The Bluest Eye’ or ‘Beloved’, she is writing for folks to read. I really want people to have ownership of those stories instead of allowing them to be usurped by academia. It is wonderful to study them which I have done, but that is not why people write stories and not what stories are for.”

Zalika Reid-Benta (Photo contributed)

Zalika Reid-Benta, Rebecca Fisseha, Francesca Ekwuyasi and special guest Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia will appear on the first night.

Rebecca Fisseha (Photo contributed)

Reid-Benta’s debut short story collection, ‘Frying Plantain’, won the 23rd annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award recognizing the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author, Ethiopian-born Fisseha’s writing often explores her own heritage and the African diaspora, Ekwuyasi’s work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness and belonging and Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s debut novel, ‘The Son of the House’, made the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.

Francesca Ekwuyasi (Photo contributed)

The second night will feature Myriam Chancy, Dawnie Walton, Aminatta Forna and Esi Edugyan who will make a video appearance.

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia (Photo contributed)

Chancy has authored four books and is the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California, Walton’s novel, ‘The Final Revival of Opal & Nev’, won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, Forna is an award-winning author and Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Edugyan is a two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner.

Esi Edugyan (Photo contributed)

Bailey Nurse, who has curated reading series in conjunction with the Toronto Public Library and the Art Gallery of Ontario, selected the authors.

Aminatta Forna (Photo contributed)

“As a critic, I am always reading people,” she said. “Very few Black women writers don’t bring up Toni Morrison when I am interviewing them. They always have some personal little story. She means so much to them and they are, to me, her literary legacy.”

Myriam Chancy (Photo contributed)

Morrison, who was once married to late Jamaican architect Harold ‘Moxy’ Morrison, authored 11 novels, including ‘Song of Solomon’ that received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977.

Dawnie Walton (Photo contributed)

Chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection which was the first novel by a Black author to receive that recognition since Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ in 1940, ‘Song of Solomon’ is Bailey Nurse’s favourite Morrison book.

“At that moment when I read it, I began to understand so many things about my experience and what was needed to survive it as a Black woman in this world,” she said. “By the time the central character gets back to his ancestral homeland in Virginia, he understands who he is because he comes to know his ancestors and their story. The essential part of the story is that his ancestors became fed up with slavery and flew back to Africa.

“As one of the slaves going back, that main character learnt that the closer you can get to Africa, the closer you are to those ancestors and their knowledge and wisdom. That is what makes you stronger and provides a foundation. It tells you who you are and permits you to love yourself and survive.”

In 2019, Bailey Nurse was a Scotiabank Giller Prize juror.

Founded in 1984, the award recognizes excellence in Canadian fiction.

“I loved the experience because it is not very often that I would find people who want to talk about books as much as I do,” said Bailey Nurse whose favourite book is ‘Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life’ authored by Mary Anne Evans who wrote as George Eliot. “It was time-consuming, intense and, of course, a lot of reading was involved. I got Ian (Williams) book in the first box and immediately knew that would be one of my top books. As soon as you read certain books, you get a feel for them.”

Trinidadian-born Williams’ novel, ‘Reproduction’ won the award three years ago.

A Pickering resident since 1965, Bailey Nurse started reading at a very young age.

“My mother sent for these Humpty Dumpty magazines that came in my name,” she said. “After that, I can’t remember anyone reading to me. My mom always had books coming to her, so books came to me as well. Both my parents read a lot, there were always books around and I had the most books because I read more than anyone else in the house. I remember being told to turn the light off when I would be reading late at night or ‘Donna, you are going to go blind’. I was always reading and I don’t know where that hunger for stories came from.”

Bailey Nurse’s love of books has never faded except for a brief moment in May 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when she felt like throwing all of them over the balcony.

“I have never felt that way in my life,” she said. “It passed in two weeks. That is the only time I have had any negative feelings towards books.”

Bailey Nurse’s first non-fiction book, ‘The Black Album’, will be released next year.

“This is really about stories scattered across Canada and throughout time of Black people here,” she said. “It’s just vignettes in the life of many Black Canadians.”

A second book to follow is a poignant and fiercely engaged memoir about Bailey Nurse’s Jamaican Canadian family.

Her parents migrated from Jamaica over 60 years ago.