Toni Morrison and the Living Language

It's tough to keep track of the news, for lots of reasons; however, the passing of Toni Morrison bears noting here, among all the others' passing that we pass over in silence.

Her Nobel Prize Lecture, her banquet speech, her books and essays, all bear reading and re-reading--words the quality of which most of us could only dream of leaving behind.

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.

And her language goes on, wave after wave of this incredible wisdom, until the dialogue of the listening children picks back up:

“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."

It's astonishing to think that I was growing up in a world where there was still a writer of this imaginative stature, this noble mien. Her novel Beloved is one of the first of the books I was assigned to read in school that really made me take notice of how far beyond the school these books might reach, how much more school could be. I've been writing about that in one way or another, inspired by that and similar moments, for a decade now, and still haven't quite recovered from the shock of those initial impressions.

Her essay Playing in the Dark, like much of the language in her Nobel speech, bears powerfully upon the discourse of video games and fantasy literature which I've been studying, and if I can get my act together I'll try to bring out some of these connections soon, and over the next few years.