Essay

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993

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 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. 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 it 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, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing

Co., Singapore, 1997