With Toni Morrison’s words on the home page of the website, it was good to be reminded of our responsibility ‘to do language’; and to be reminded of so much that Toni Morrison wrote that faced up to self-pity and fear. Since her death last year, I have had cause to read and re-read her Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1993 in which she speaks, again, about our responsibilities towards language. The speech is rich and complex. Each time I read it, I take something slightly different from it. The speech is framed by a parable, a frequently told story that Morrison shapes to her own ends. It tells of an old woman, blind, wise, and in this version, the daughter of slaves. A group of children visit the woman and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman does not answer immediately. She cannot see them, or whether or not there is a bird in the child’s hand. Have they come to mock her? What is their intention? Eventually, she answers, “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.”
‘It is in your hands’.
It is their responsibility. Toni Morrison goes on to say that she reads the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She thinks of language as a living thing, over which we can have control, and ‘mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.’ Language, she says, is susceptible to death and in the hands of those who would control and suppress, it is already dead but not without effect. ‘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.’
Morrison imagines the woman thinking about language. She recognises that language can never live up to life once and for all. She sees its force in its reach for the ineffable.
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.
And then she gives the story another twist. She proposes that the children did not come to the woman in mockery but in genuine search for wisdom. They speak up:
“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.”
We are not Toni Morrison. We are teachers. We write. Children are asking us about the world and about their future. We do have stories to tell. And we can make it possible for children to tell their stories. Together we can keep language alive; do the word work.
It is in our hands.