GUYANA
UNDER SIEGE
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Toni Morrison –
Nobel Lecture
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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?" 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. 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 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. 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. |
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©
2001 Guyanaundersiege.com
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