Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture
December 7, 1993
"Once
upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old
man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard
this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
"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 honor she is paid and the awe in which she is
held reach beyond her neighborhood 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 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, 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 color, 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.
Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand
might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now
thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this
company. So 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 thingks 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 unrea1 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. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or
written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.
Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties,
it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its
own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However
moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect,
stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to
interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts,
tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to
sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to
shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there
it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren,
providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability,
harmony among the public.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse,
indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she
herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her
country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to
iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of
language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with
meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows
tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the
infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language
leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for
they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its
users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and
subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is
violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits
knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of
mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the
academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign
language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement
of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be
rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps
vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability
and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the
bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language -
all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not
permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor
insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit
journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing
language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in
the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards;
stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless
death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture,
assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language
designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese
with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the
language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history
calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to
thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors;
arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into
cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however
stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or
perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.
She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any
discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of
time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance
required - lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for
both the excluder and the excluded.
The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse
was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many
languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one
monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have
been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the
achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take
the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives
period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their
feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven
as post-life.
She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that
language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of
language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives
of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in
displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the
place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought
about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will
little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget
what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their
life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality
of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize,
disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up",
acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words
signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference
that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life
once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down"
slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to
do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify;
whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice
word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not
its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is
interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because
alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged
tongue?
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes
meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in
which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be
the measure of our lives.
"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who
are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did
they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A
sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps
what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female,
black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The
future of language is yours."
They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was
only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have
not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its
miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent
questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the
bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could
someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no
silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise
one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced
death cannot describe either, who can?
But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her
gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance,
enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in
sophisticated, privileged space.
Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep,
deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers,
this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on
the spot.
"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give
us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the
education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are
paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have
said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?
"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and
our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not
bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when
language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not
mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions
and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not
knowing?
"Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes
like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands
except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its
artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is
indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that
makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.
"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the
sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our
trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how
to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short
lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the
catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing
needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is
an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty
and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves
again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of
duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?
"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands.
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of
vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to
help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop
thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your
particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at
the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach
exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames
and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a
surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow.
We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never
enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name
in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places
and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us
belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old
woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what
only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us
from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be
a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place.
To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of
towns that cannot bear your company.
"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta
in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly
their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew
from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their
last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then
sun. Lifting their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as
though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate
go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void
steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy
of the freezing slaves.
"The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They
climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now
he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to
mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance
into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each
woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But
not this one. This one is warmed."
It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks
into the silence.
"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the
bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How
lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."
From Nobel
Lectures, Literature 1991-1995.
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