Toni Morrison and the Freedom of Words
Toni Morrison Author and Nobel Prize Winner
In 2017, a few of us who feel passionate about the future, formed a group and called ourselves the Progressive Women of Conejo Valley. At first there were 20 women, but gradually many peeled away, and then there were only six of us. We smiled and forged on, supporting The Florence Project, which provides toys and art supplies to children at the border; worked with Senior Concerns to provide food baskets at Thanksgiving, gift bags for the holidays; and helped teens register to vote with the nonpartisan League of Women Voters.
But then we came up with a bigger project.
A famous member of Congress, U.S. Representative Tip O’Neill, once said POLITICS IS LOCAL—that the way to move people to a grander design is to show how your proposal follows them into their backyards.
SCHOOL BOARD POLITICS, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The letters to the editor in our local newspaper were growing. The reason: some parents didn’t want their children to read Toni Morrison’s Sula; David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedarsand The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.
What did we do? We listened, met with some of the parents whose children attended the local high school and discovered that the fall election would determine whether these young adults would be reading and discussing Morrison and others. Some candidates for the school board would make that impossible. We did our homework, interviewed three other candidates and discovered they were running to support these works of literature. Again politics is local and so we did what was possible with our small numbers—we held a garage sale and made over five hundred dollars which we presented to the three candidates. We also canvassed for each of them and—they all won!
WHY OUR YOUNG ADULTS SHOULD READ MORRISON & THE OTHERS
In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was lauded for being a writer “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
As a woman of color, Morrison speaks and writes about language and how it can affect and deepen our American reality. If we do not have the freedom to express ourselves in language and to reveal the truths of our history, we are lost.
In her Nobel Acceptance speech, she told this story:
Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise. …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 honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away…
One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be 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…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. 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 color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
Finally the old woman 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.
What the blind woman has done is shift the power that these seeing people might have over her, and instead are reprimanding them for mocking her, but also for the life they might have sacrificed to do so.
TONI MORRISON’S MESSAGE
I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer.
She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes.
Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency — as an act with consequences.
So the question the children put to her: “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will.
She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse.
FINAL THOUGHTS on THE FREEDOM LANGUAGE PROVIDES
Morrison writes: Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn (paint) the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Thanks to Pocket and the amazing article: Toni Morrison on the Power of Language and to Leeann Petras for sending it to me.
