toni morrison speech analysis

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Listen to Toni Morrison’s Remarkable, Transcendent Nobel Prize Lecture

As we mourn the death of author and cultural titan Toni Morrison , one quote has been used repeatedly to summarize her legacy and her worldview. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

That line comes from Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture, a speech she gave in 1993 while accepting a Nobel Prize in Literature for her novels, which the committee praised at the time for their “visionary force and poetic import, giv[ing] life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Morrison’s lines about death and language are beautiful on their own, but they’re part of a much longer, more nuanced story Morrison sketches over the course of the speech. She begins with a folk story about an old blind woman known for her wisdom. In Morrison’s telling, the woman is approached by a group of children, who tell her that they’re holding a bird in their hands. “‘Is the bird I am holding living or dead?’” one child asks the woman.

From that sparse outline of a narrative, Morrison spins the story outward. “I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer,” Morrison begins, before diving into what she imagines as the old woman’s anxiety about language in the hands of those who could kill it or use it for violent ends. “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.” The woman, in the first section of Morrison’s speech, feels the threat of those who have the power to wield language unwisely, or to kill it or loot it or use it to oppress. “Oppressive language,” Morrison says, “does more than represent violence; it is violence, does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

But once Morrison has outlined the woman’s worldview and implicitly aligned her own anxieties with those of this nameless old woman, she uses the second portion of her speech to shift perspective. “Who are they, these children?” Morrison asks. What if the question about the bird isn’t meant to trick the old woman, but is instead “a straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one?” “If the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?”

The transcript of the speech is available here , and it’s worth reading in its entirety. It is a gorgeous, astonishing microcosm of Morrison’s worldview, but also her craft as a storyteller; her capacity for weaving simple stories together with radical, foundational, complicated ideas; and her ability to wield language in a way that somehow names and describes ineffable concepts. The excerpt that begins “We die” may be the line that we turn to the most while mourning Morrison’s death, but the full speech will help you appreciate how Morrison ended her story. It was not with language or with death. “Look,” she says in closing. “How lovely it is, this thing we have done — together.”

Listen to the audio of the full speech below:

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• nobel prize

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Toni Morrison’s transcendent Nobel Prize speech is key to understanding what made Morrison so great

Toni Morrison understood how powerful language was and the human privilege to wield it.

by Alex Abad-Santos

Toni Morrison died on Monday, August, 5, at the age of 88. Morrison’s books changed lives, capturing American life and its history in a peerless way — her works are so loved and resonant that they often (rightfully) eclipse the awards and recognition we bestow upon them.

But it was in 1993 that Morrison was awarded the most prestigious one on the planet. Morrison was the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, for “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

In accepting that award, Morrison, keenly and so eloquently, described the importance of language in our lives. The lecture — an audio recording of which is available on the Nobel Prize website — is a fable about the power of language to elucidate and cloud, to oppress and liberate, to honor and sully, and to both quantify and be incapable of capturing a human experience.

It’s the way humans wield this powerful tool of language that makes any form of expression so magical, Morrison explains:

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.

Morrison quotes Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as an example, specifically this simple sentence: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Morrison explains that trying to sum up the destruction and pain of the Civil War would be fruitless. Instead, Lincoln’s focus on the impossibility of capturing the human life lost moves us toward deeper mourning and lasting respect for those lives.

“We die,” Morrison says. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Perhaps there’s no better way to remember Morrison than how clearly and beautifully she understood the power of language, and how she was able to harness that knowledge to capture American life and reality like no one else.

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Stockholm, Sweden - December 7, 1993

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is a prolific and celebrated writer whose fictional accounts of African American life are part of the canon of great American literature. In 1993, Morrison became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee said, "Toni Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the luster of poetry." 1

Morrison's mission has been to tell the stories of "the people who in all literature were always peripheral – little black girls who were props, background." As Morrison says, "those people were never center stage and those people were me." 2 She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. The book's main character, Pecola Breedlove, longs for blue eyes, believing they would make her beautiful. The story is a haunting exploration of racism's deep wounds. Tragedy, neglect and abuse drive Pecola to become psychotic. Morrison says that as she began the book, "There was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society – a black female and a child. I wanted to write about what it was like to be the subject of racism. It had a specificity that was damaging." 3

By the time Morrison became a Nobel Laureate, she had already won other prestigious awards for her fiction, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for the novel Beloved. The story centers on an escaped slave who kills her baby daughter to spare the child from slavery. In Beloved, Morrison was again intent on depicting the visceral experience of racial oppression. In a 1994 interview, she explained, "I wanted to say 'Let's get rid of these words like "the slave woman" and "the slave child," and talk about people with names like you and like me, who were there.'" 4 In another interview, she said, "I wanted to show the reader what slavery felt like, rather than how it looked." 5

Since 1970, Morrison has published nine novels, a series of children's stories with her son Slade, and numerous works of nonfiction that explore literature, politics, the arts and censorship. Morrison has also spent decades teaching, editing and lecturing. She held an endowed chair in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 to 2006.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931. She was raised in Lorain, Ohio, a small steel town near Cleveland. Her father, George, worked at various jobs, including as a ship welder. Her mother, Ramah, was a homemaker. Morrison grew up in a racially and ethnically mixed community that she describes as "tight and…unhostile." 6 But her father grew up in the Jim Crow South and hated white people. As a child, Morrison says, "I knew he was wrong." Morrison went to school with white children and, mostly, they were her friends. "There was no awe, no fear" of whites, she says. 7 Even so, Morrison still experienced racism in Ohio. As she told one interviewer, "I remember in the fifth grade, a smart little boy who had just arrived and didn't speak any English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that I was black – a nigger." Morrison says it took the boy six months to learn the town's racial caste system. Once he learned it he could feel a sense of belonging by looking down at the one group below his: black people. "Every immigrant knew he would not come as [a member of] the very bottom [stratum]. He had to come above at least one group – and that was us." 8

Within the Morrison family, as she remembers it, there was no sense of belonging to a lower caste. "My parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary deserving people within us," she says. "I felt like an aristocrat – or what I think an aristocrat is. I always knew we were very poor. But that was never degrading." 9 Morrison grew up in a family rich with music, books and storytelling. Her parents spun exhilarating ghost stories at night; her grandmother interpreted dreams. As Morrison says, "We were intimate with the supernatural." 10 The music, the ghosts and the folk tales are all powerful elements that run through Morrison's fiction.

Morrison graduated with honors from high school, and in 1953 earned her B.A in English from Howard University. She adopted the nickname "Toni" in college. Her professors included poet Sterling Brown and philosopher Alain Locke. Morrison received an M.A. in American Literature from Cornell University and launched her academic career at Texas Southern University in Houston. In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard to teach. She married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison and the couple had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. The Morrisons divorced in 1964.

Toni Morrison supported her young family by working as a textbook editor in Syracuse. In 1968, Random House hired Morrison as a senior editor at its headquarters in New York City. Over the next 16 years, she made her mark in publishing by nurturing the careers of an array of popular black writers. They included Angela Davis, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara. One of the authors whose work she edited, former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, said, "Toni has done more to encourage and publish other black writers than anyone I know." 11

While working full time and raising her two boys alone, Morrison began to squeeze in time to write when the children were asleep. After The Bluest Eye in 1970, she produced several more critically acclaimed books. Morrison had been writing for a solid decade before she began to really think of herself as a writer. She recalls that after her 1977 publication of Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, someone said to her, "This is probably what you do." Morrison said, "You mean, this is what I'm going to be when I grow up?" And the person replied, "Yeah." 12 Morrison resigned from Random House in 1984 to focus on writing.

Morrison delivered the Nobel Lecture in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The audience gave her a standing ovation as she entered the 18th century room. Her close friend, theologian and writer Cornel West, was there. "You talk about grace, dignity, class, elegance – when Toni walked down that aisle on the arm of King Gustav of Sweden!" he recalled. "But what I could really see was these millions and millions of black folk who had come and gone. I could see it in her walk, I could see it in her face. All kinds of humiliation and cruelty coming their way. And they just kept comin' on!" 13

Morrison's lecture takes the form of a parable that illuminates the power of language as both a force of life and a tool of destruction. As Morrison says, "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge." Morrison returns to this idea in her 2009 edited volume, Burn This Book, a collection of essays on writing and censorship by a variety of influential authors. Morrison writes, "Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination." Morrison continues, "A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity." 14

Listen to the speech Thank you. My sincere thanks to the Swedish Academy. And thank you all for this very warm welcome. Fiction has never been entertainment for me. It has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information is via narrative. So I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all remember – the phrase "Once upon a time...." "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've 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 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 doesn't answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?" She still doesn't answer. She's blind. She can't see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She doesn't know their color, their gender, or their 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's 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's your decision. Whatever the case, it's 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's 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, and absence of esteem, indifference, 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's 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 pâté-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 glamour, 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've 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. 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 wouldn't 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, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it's 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 thousand 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, the recognition that – 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 doesn't 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's 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? And 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 toward possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I'm 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 the wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can? But she doesn't. She keeps her secret, her good opinion of herself, her gnomic pronouncements, her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, reinforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space. Nothing, no word follows her declarations 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 couldn't 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 our consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you 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 soundbite, 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've 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's 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 you 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 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 suns; 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 is 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. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together." Thank you. [applause]

1 . Press release, "The Nobel Prize in Literature," Swedish Academy, October 7, 1993, www.nobelprize.org. 2 . Dick Russell, Black Genius and the American Experience, (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 235. 3 . Claudia Dreifus, "Chloe Wofford Talks about Toni Morrison," The New York Times, September 11, 1994. 4 . Ibid. 5 . Elissa Schappell, "Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction," in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 76. 6 . Russell, Black Genius, 233. 7 . Ibid., 230. 8 . Bonnie Angelo, "The Pain of Being Black: An Interview with Toni Morrison," in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 255. 9 . Dreifus, "Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison." 10 . Russell, Black Genius, 231. 11 . Russell, Black Genius, 237. 12 . Unitarian Universalist Association, "A Bench by the Road: Beloved by Toni Morrison," in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 46. 13 . Ibid., 227. 14 . Toni Morrison, Burn this book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 4.

Home > Journals > AGORA > Vol. 27 (2018)

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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture

Christine Hooper , Lynchburg College Follow

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Hooper, Christine (2018) "Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture," Agora : Vol. 27, Article 6. Available at: https://digitalshowcase.lynchburg.edu/agora/vol27/iss2018/6

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This is Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the power of language.

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The Nobel Lecture in Literature

By toni morrison, the nobel lecture in literature summary and analysis of part ii.

The children are annoyed by the old woman’s silence, and interrupt her reverie with improvised words. They have no bird in their hands, they tell her. They ask her why she didn’t even try to answer; why she couldn’t engage with them; why she avoided discussion with tricks and riddles in her language. They tell her they are young, and their inheritance is a catastrophe. They want to see the world differently, and they want answers.

The children implore the old woman to give them a narrative that will help them solve life’s mysteries. They do not expect solutions, they tell her, but they want her to try to show them what the world means to her. Only she can do it because she is “blessed with blindness” and therefore knows language best.

The children want the old woman to tell them about what she knows: what it is like to be a woman, to be at the margin, to live in isolation. They also want to know about her people’s history—slaves singing in a wagon. As they press on with their insistence that the old woman speak, they begin to tell a story themselves. The wagon of slaves stops on the snowy road at an inn in the dark. The driver and his mate go into the inn. Then, a boy and a girl step out from the inn and join the slaves in the wagon. They offer bread and meat and a jug of warm cider. Most importantly, the children imply, they look into the eyes of the slaves, one by one, as they pass the food around.

The children finally stop speaking and the silence resumes. Then, the old woman speaks again. She tells the children that at last she trusts them. She trusts them with the bird that is not in their hands—with language. Then she says, “How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.”

In this second half of her Nobel Lecture, Morrison reveals that there is no bird in the children’s hands. They are there only to ask the old woman for her stories. In reading the bird as language, and then removing the physical bird from the scene, Morrison shifts the focus of the fable from the quality of the language itself to the act of creation. It is through their narration that the children build a relationship with the old woman—not by bringing any bird to her house, whether alive or dead. In this way, Morrison seems to be arguing for the importance of the ongoing process of working on language, rather than the classification of it from a distance. This was Morrison’s role as a writer: not to offer language as a static object to her readers, but to build language as a bridge between people.

The children’s monologue exposes another important theme in Morrison’s speech: that of storytelling as intergenerational connection. For example, the children view their “inheritance as an affront,” and ask for guidance from the old woman, “the old one, the wise one.” Indeed, they indicate that they cannot fix the “catastrophe” their present world has become without looking to the past. By asking for the old woman’s stories, they place emphasis on the power of history and the stories who came before them.

In an unexpected shift towards the end of the fable, the children's monologue abruptly transitions into a slave narrative. As they share a narrative about a wagonful of slaves and the kindness of a young boy and girl who feed them one snowy night, they transform into storytellers in their own right. Their tone becomes solemn and instructive, telling the old woman, “The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed.” In this moment, the group of young people who arrive at the old woman’s cottage to trick her become wise sages. This ending collapses the divide between the old woman and the young people that was so stark at the beginning of the fable, and suggests that they both have the same potential for the powerful use of words.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Nobel Lecture in Literature is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Nobel Lecture in Literature

The Nobel Lecture In Literature study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Nobel Lecture in Literature
• The Nobel Lecture in Literature Summary
• Character List

Lesson Plan for The Nobel Lecture in Literature

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Nobel Lecture in Literature
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Nobel Lecture in Literature Bibliography

• Houston Community College
• Eagle Online

• Peggy Porter
• Reading Selections

Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993)

The link address is: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/

Toni Morrison on How to Be Your Own Story and Reap the Rewards of Adulthood in a Culture That Fetishizes Youth

By maria popova.

Her extraordinary speech, included in the graduation compendium Take This Advice ( public library ), takes the art of the commencement address to the level of masterpiece — an art of taking what is and has always been true, rotating it 360 degrees with tremendous love and intellectual elegance, and coming back full-circle to the old truth that feels, suddenly, new and fresh and invigorating.

Morrison begins with a necessary nod to educators — a profession with a tryingly high risk of burnout :

I would remind the faculty and the administration of what each knows: that the work they do takes second place to nothing, nothing at all, and that theirs is a first order profession.

She then turns to one of the tritest, if truest, assertions of the commencement address genre — the idea that the future is the graduates’ for the taking:

The fact is it is not yours for the taking. And it is not whatever you make of it. The future is also what other people make of it, how other people will participate in it and impinge on your experience of it. But I’m not going to talk anymore about the future because I’m hesitant to describe or predict because I’m not even certain that it exists. That is to say, I’m not certain that somehow, perhaps, a burgeoning ménage à trois of political interests, corporate interests and military interests will not prevail and literally annihilate an inhabitable, humane future. Because I don’t think we can any longer rely on separation of powers, free speech, religious tolerance or unchallengeable civil liberties as a matter of course. That is, not while finite humans in the flux of time make decisions of infinite damage. Not while finite humans make infinite claims of virtue and unassailable power that are beyond their competence, if not their reach.

Although she argues that the past is rife with values “worthy of reverence and transmission” — this, after all, is a foundational premise here on Brain Pickings — Morrison considers the insufficiency of blindly turning to the past in remedying the present:

The past is already in debt to the mismanaged present. And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself. The past is already changing as it is being reexamined, as it is being listened to for deeper resonances. Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined future if you are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are willing to unleash its secrets.

Chief among these lies and distortions are the ideas our culture purveys about happiness. In a sentiment that calls to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s devastatingly beautiful meditation on aging , Morrison issues an admonition to graduates, tucked into which is urgent wisdom for any breathing, dreaming human being in our world today:

I’m sure you have been told that this is the best time of your life. It may be. But if it’s true that this is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be the best, then you have my condolences. Because you’ll want to remain here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing you to remain. One more flawless article of clothing, one more elaborate toy, the truly perfect diet, the harmless but necessary drug, the almost final elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic-all designed to maintain hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults, adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia. I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here, your choices of companions, of the profession that you will enter. You deserve it and I want you to gain it, everybody should. But if that’s all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these are indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.

With a wistful eye to the damage her own generation has done in instilling these illusory ideals of commodified happiness, Morrison urges the next generation:

You don’t have to accept those media labels. You need not settle for any defining category. You don’t have to be merely a taxpayer or a red state or a blue state or a consumer or a minority or a majority.

To couple this rejection of old paradigms with a constructive reimagining of new and better ones, Morrison argues, requires learning to own your story — a notion nowhere more beautifully articulated than in her lucid and luminous closing words:

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don’t have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it. Although you will never fully know or successfully manipulate the characters who surface or disrupt your plot, you can respect the ones who do by paying them close attention and doing them justice. The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who you are and what you mean. But then, I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind’s disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So, from my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

Take This Advice includes thirty-five more excellent addresses, including ones by Meryl Streep, Seamus Heaney, and Nora Ephron.

Not in the book but well worth devouring are Joseph Brodsky’s six rules for winning at the game of life (University of Michigan, 1988), George Saunders on the power of kindness (Syracuse University, 2013), Teresita Fernandez on what it really means to be an artist (Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013), Debbie Millman on courage and the creative life (San Jose State University, 2013), Kurt Vonnegut on boredom, belonging, and our human responsibility (Fredonia College, 1978), Bill Watterson on creative integrity (Kenyon College, 1990), Patti Smith on learning to count on yourself (Pratt University, 2010), John Waters on creative rebellion (RISD, 2015), and David Foster Wallace’s legendary This Is Water (Kenyon College, 2005).

— Published July 21, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/21/toni-morrison-wellesley-commencement/ —

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