Summary
Toni Morrison’s lecture begins with a fable that she says is iterated in many different cultures: a story about an old, wise, and blind woman. In Morrison’s version, the woman is the daughter of slaves, and although she lives at the edge of town, her wisdom is well renowned. Yet one day a group of young people arrive to prove her ignorance. They ask her a single question: whether the bird they hold in their hands is alive or dead. She is blind, and doesn’t know. Finally, she responds that all she knows is the bird is in their hands; in other words, it is their responsibility.
Morrison goes on to give her reading of that fable. She sees the bird in the young people’s hands as a symbol of literature, and the woman as a writer. Language, like the bird, can be dead or alive, and if it is dead, its custodians made it that way. Morrison cites official state discourse as an example of dead language: rigid and unyielding, designed to inspire people into obedience but devoid of meaning. This oppressive language is violent, the old woman thinks, because it is powerful in its policing and limiting qualities.
The old woman knows there will be more of this diplomatic, rousing, glamorous, memorializing, official language, no matter what she says. She wonders, however, about the Tower of Babel story, which traditionally tells the story of too many languages as an impediment to construction. Perhaps it would have been more complicated, but more worthwhile, to try to understand each other here on Earth.
When language is alive, the woman thinks, it produces meaning, and shines light on experience in new ways. The woman thinks about President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, when he said: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here.” These words are living and also give life, the old woman thinks, because they refuse to sum up the meaning of the fallen soldiers’ lives in neat words. She is moved by these words’ deference to the impossibility of describing life’s experiences. It only reaches towards that which is not possible. Indeed, working with words is generative, but it also cements and celebrates our human differences.
Language is the measure of our lives. The old woman wonders who these children are, and what they want. Perhaps they heard her response as an abnegation of responsibility to the future of language. Maybe nothing was in their hands at all, and their visit is a simple trick, designed for them to be taken seriously by an adult. Or perhaps they came to her for answers to a serious question about life and death. The old woman doesn’t know, and she keeps her distance. The silence grows.
Analysis
Toni Morrison is one of the few African American women writers whose literary brilliance has been widely recognized. As she shattered multiple glass ceilings, Morrison was not afraid of being political, specific, and even militant in her writing and representation of the richness of black life in America. She wrote specifically about and for black women. Although she faced pressure to define herself as a great writer, not just a great black woman writer, she embraced that supposed criticism, telling essayist Hilton Acs in 2003, "I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from.”
Yet in this first half of her Nobel Lecture, Morrison develops a tension between particularism and universalism that seems to orient her towards a more universal human experience. To do so, she shares a fable about an exchange between an old woman and a group of children intent on disproving her wisdom. This fable, she comments, has an iteration in many cultures; not just her own. Thus the reflections and wisdom she lays out over the course of the fable is not only applicable to black America, but to cultures all over the world.
As the fable begins, Morrison also emphasizes the importance of language for embracing and accessing difference. For example, the old woman reminisces about the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Although the more practical approach may have been to stifle nuance, the old woman wonders what greatness could have been achieved if that particular moment of diversity had been preserved. Similarly, Morrison’s critique of statist language is that it censors and limits the diversity of human expression. She contrasts official, statist, racist, and sexist language—“dead” language—with language that is alive and that offers something new and useful to human experience.
By summarizing these ideas in a fable in her Nobel Lecture, Morrison seems to be offering a call to arms to produce stories that celebrate many different cultures. In other words, Morrison advocates for a broadness of voices in literature, cementing her legacy not only as a great black American woman writer but also an advocate for the voices of minorities across the world.
