Toni Morrison

:00:00. > :00:00.because of worsening fighting in Triploi and in Benghazi. Now on BBC

:00:00. > :00:28.News, Talking Books. Hello. I'm Razia Iqbal, and I'm at

:00:29. > :00:32.Hay Festival for a special Talking Books programme with Toni Morrison.

:00:33. > :00:36.She is the last American writer to have won the Nobel Prize for

:00:37. > :00:40.Literature. That was in 1993. She remains, though, a towering figure

:00:41. > :00:43.in literature. From her first book, The Bluest Eye, about an

:00:44. > :00:46.African`American girl who wants blue eyes, to her crowning achievement,

:00:47. > :00:52.Beloved, about the impact of 200 years of slavery. She has always

:00:53. > :00:55.written out of the experience of being an African`American woman, yet

:00:56. > :01:09.her writing has become emblematic of an essential aspect of American

:01:10. > :01:12.reality. I would like to start by talking about definitions ` how you

:01:13. > :01:18.have been defined, and how you define yourself. I know it probably

:01:19. > :01:21.matters less now, but when you first started out writing, you quite

:01:22. > :01:32.consciously wanted to define yourself as an African`American

:01:33. > :01:35.woman writer. Why was that? Those days, the early days, when I began

:01:36. > :01:38.to write, I got compliments from other writers about the value and

:01:39. > :01:41.the beauty, perhaps, of the book, and in order to elevate my

:01:42. > :01:45.reputation, I remember being at an author's event, and I think it was

:01:46. > :02:04.Doctorow who said, "Toni Morrison is a wonderful writer. I don't think of

:02:05. > :02:08.her as a woman writer, I don't think of her as an African`American

:02:09. > :02:22.writer, I think of her as" ` and he paused ` "a white male writer".

:02:23. > :02:26.LAUGHTER. So the categories we were being put in. So I claimed it. "Yes,

:02:27. > :02:32.I am a black woman writer." Whatever that means. As I continued writing,

:02:33. > :02:35.the problem became the gaze, the white gaze, that was always present

:02:36. > :02:46.in so many books by African`Americans. Men on the whole,

:02:47. > :02:52.like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison. Yes, they were not

:02:53. > :02:55.writing to me, and I always used to use the title of Ralph Ellison's

:02:56. > :02:58.book, which I love, by the way, because it is extraordinary, but the

:02:59. > :03:07.title set me back a little, because it was The Invisible Man, and I

:03:08. > :03:11.thought, "Invisible to whom?" To them, you know. So it was like even

:03:12. > :03:14.the best of the slave narratives were addressed to the readers ` they

:03:15. > :03:28.were always assumed to be white people, and not black people. So I

:03:29. > :03:31.was determined not to do that. Where did that certainty come from, that

:03:32. > :03:34.you felt so rooted in the perspective that you wanted to write

:03:35. > :03:43.from before you even articulated the notion of the white gaze, and not

:03:44. > :03:47.being interested in the white gaze? There were two things. One was the

:03:48. > :03:55.kind of books being written at that time in the late '60s by black men.

:03:56. > :04:03.Not the big novelists, but, you know, the revolutionaries. It was

:04:04. > :04:18.always to the man, you know. Screw the man, or whatever. "Black is

:04:19. > :04:24.beautiful." I was saying, "What? What is that about? Wait a minute.

:04:25. > :04:28.Before we get on the black is beautiful thing, may I remind you of

:04:29. > :04:31.what it was like before? When it was not beautiful, when it was lethal to

:04:32. > :04:41.consider yourself ugly, not human, other?" And so The Bluest Eye was my

:04:42. > :04:44.answer to that sudden leap into perfection and power and so on, as

:04:45. > :04:54.though there was no history that preceded it. This was your first

:04:55. > :04:59.novel, written when you were an editor at Random House in the 1970s.

:05:00. > :05:06.The impulse was not just the historical context, but a particular

:05:07. > :05:08.incident, an anecdote. A friend of yours who wanted blue eyes ` an

:05:09. > :05:15.African`American girl who wanted blue eyes. Two things happened. I

:05:16. > :05:22.was walking along with her. Her name was Eunice. We were very close.

:05:23. > :05:28.Schoolgirls. Ten or 11, I think. We were discussing whether God existed,

:05:29. > :05:34.and I said he did, of course. She said, "No, no, there is no God". I

:05:35. > :05:37.asked her how she knew, and she said, "I have been praying for blue

:05:38. > :05:47.eyes for two years, and I don't have them." LAUGHTER. When I looked at

:05:48. > :05:53.her, I thought two things. If he had answered her praise, it would be

:05:54. > :05:59.grotesque. She would look awful. And also, I recognised beauty for the

:06:00. > :06:03.first time. That she was really beautiful, and that was not a ten or

:06:04. > :06:09.12`year`old word in connection with your girlfriend or anything. So when

:06:10. > :06:13.I began The Bluest Eye, I used that anecdote in what she must have been

:06:14. > :06:16.thinking, how desperate she was to be other, to be white or to have

:06:17. > :06:26.some characteristic that would set her apart. Was there also a sense

:06:27. > :06:30.that you wanted to write a story that didn't exist, that there was a

:06:31. > :06:34.silence of that perspective? Oh, yeah. I wanted to read that book,

:06:35. > :06:37.and I couldn't find it. I thought maybe if I looked hard enough,

:06:38. > :06:40.somebody had written a story about those things ` to put a young black

:06:41. > :06:53.child centre stage without making fun of her. She's not any of these

:06:54. > :06:58.cliched things. I thought somebody probably was writing that book or

:06:59. > :07:05.would write it. No`one did. I was eager to read it, and I didn't think

:07:06. > :07:09.I could read it unless I wrote it. All of my books have been like that.

:07:10. > :07:16.They are reading experiences for me, as well as writing. How did you

:07:17. > :07:19.manage to write it, being an editor and having a full`time job as an

:07:20. > :07:28.editor of books, including books by black writers? You know, we

:07:29. > :07:34.multitask. LAUGHTER. I had two children. I'm in New York City. I

:07:35. > :07:37.had left graduate school many years ago, taught in universities, went

:07:38. > :07:47.other places, and finally landed this job at Random House. But still

:07:48. > :07:53.there was this other thing that I wanted to do, so I sort of published

:07:54. > :07:58.it... This sounds silly, but it was sort of secret. I didn't tell

:07:59. > :08:03.anybody at the publishing house that I had written this book. Did you

:08:04. > :08:08.tell anyone at all? Did you tell friends that you were writing? No. I

:08:09. > :08:12.had a friend who was an editor at Holt, and he had published a book by

:08:13. > :08:15.someone whom I knew who had actually been a student of mine, and he wrote

:08:16. > :08:24.Manchild In The Promised Land, and he said, "Why don't you give your

:08:25. > :08:29.manuscript too?" I did. I had sent it around a little bit and got 12

:08:30. > :08:36.rejections. Some were letters, some were little postcards, but no. So

:08:37. > :08:38.when I gave it to this man, I don't know if he liked it, but there were

:08:39. > :08:48.African`American writers coming along, so he took it. I didn't tell

:08:49. > :08:53.anybody at Random House. On the first edition, I wrote three flaps,

:08:54. > :09:01.which are like three sentences. My bio is not there. I put on the

:09:02. > :09:04.jacket ` this is really bad news ` the first page of the book, which I

:09:05. > :09:09.thought, "Well, I've written this book. If you look at it in the book

:09:10. > :09:21.store, you start reading it on the cover". I thought that was very

:09:22. > :09:28.clever. But it doesn't display, you can't see it from afar. So I've not

:09:29. > :09:34.done it since. But that was a little bit of a secret. Then at Random,

:09:35. > :09:39.they didn't hire me to be a writer, they hired me to be an editor, so I

:09:40. > :09:43.was doing two things. They suggested I talk to some people to see whether

:09:44. > :09:47.I wanted to work there, and I remember the man who is my editor

:09:48. > :09:59.now saying, "Look, if you are going to work as an editor, I will have to

:10:00. > :10:06.be able to fire you". I said, "Uh`huh". He said, "If you work as a

:10:07. > :10:13.writer, I will take you on". So it all worked out. I did quite a lot of

:10:14. > :10:16.research for this interview. One of the things I found out was that the

:10:17. > :10:25.New York Times book review didn't give The Bluest Eye a particularly

:10:26. > :10:28.good review. I think it was kind of OK. I don't think they thought it

:10:29. > :10:36.was great. Now, they described you as the closest thing America has to

:10:37. > :10:41.a national writer. I had one good review from John Leonard, and it

:10:42. > :10:45.wasn't in the New York Times. The New York Times, I think one of them

:10:46. > :10:56.said, "I think she writes this way just to avoid cliche". Yes.

:10:57. > :11:00.LAUGHTER. But more demoralising than that was the reception I got from

:11:01. > :11:11.African`American critics. They did not like the book at all. It was,

:11:12. > :11:15.you know, incest and children. They were horrified by it, and let me

:11:16. > :11:17.know it. How did that make you feel, given that you were quite

:11:18. > :11:26.consciously defining yourself as writing out of that experience? I

:11:27. > :11:29.didn't anticipate the venom. I thought they probably would be upset

:11:30. > :11:41.because I was talking about us in very real, visceral way, and it

:11:42. > :11:54.wasn't a happy story. It wasn't, "Oh, I was a slave, and I got free

:11:55. > :11:57.and here I am". It was feminine too. It wasn't a man writing these

:11:58. > :12:00.things. I anticipated hostility, but I didn't know how deep and how

:12:01. > :12:12.profoundly they hated the idea of it. They didn't even think about

:12:13. > :12:20.whether it was well`written. It was about something that was, you know,

:12:21. > :12:24.embarrassing, shameful etc. Your first three books ` The Bluest Eye,

:12:25. > :12:32.Sula, Song of Solomon ` none of them have any white characters in them at

:12:33. > :12:38.all. The white world is there. It is a presence. It is an oppression, if

:12:39. > :12:40.you like. I wonder if I can take you back to your childhood to try to

:12:41. > :12:45.understand where that perspective comes from. You grew up in Lorain,

:12:46. > :12:53.Ohio, and experienced institutionalised segregation as a

:12:54. > :12:58.child. Where did your sense of your identity as an African`American girl

:12:59. > :13:03.come from? Did it come more from your mother, your father, your

:13:04. > :13:09.grandparents? Because all of them had different perspectives on the

:13:10. > :13:12.white world, didn't they? I didn't experience a black neighbourhood or

:13:13. > :13:19.segregation at all when I was a child. I lived in Lorain, Ohio,

:13:20. > :13:25.which was a steel town. It was full of immigrants, people from Poland

:13:26. > :13:31.and Mexico. There were people who came down from Canada who had

:13:32. > :13:35.escaped. It was one high school. There was no segregation because

:13:36. > :13:38.there was only one high school, and everybody was pretty poor. A family

:13:39. > :13:47.lived next door and gave my mother recipes for cabbage rolls, and she

:13:48. > :13:54.gave them... It was really very different in the '30s in that

:13:55. > :13:57.northern part of Ohio. It wasn't like that in the South. But as one

:13:58. > :14:04.notices, on Sunday, you see the divisions. There were four black

:14:05. > :14:11.churches, nine Catholic Churches, the Polish one, the Czech one, the

:14:12. > :14:30.Italians. Then there were the Protestants. There were two or

:14:31. > :14:32.three. On Sundays, we went to our specific ethnic things, but

:14:33. > :14:35.otherwise, it was fully exchanged. But to answer the question about the

:14:36. > :14:38.feeling, it was very much family`oriented, because it was such

:14:39. > :14:41.a family of storytelling and singing that it was inescapable. It was

:14:42. > :14:43.participatory ` that is to say, as a child, I had to re`tell those

:14:44. > :14:57.stories to other adults. The same story over and over again,

:14:58. > :15:01.but I was allowed to edit it, me and my sister. You could change it a

:15:02. > :15:04.little bit. You could recite it a little bit. But you were very much

:15:05. > :15:07.involved in that process of telling these stories that were pretty much

:15:08. > :15:10.horror stories about life as an African`American. I mean, they were

:15:11. > :15:18.powerful and highly metaphorical, but that is really what was at the

:15:19. > :15:21.bottom of it. Just tell me a little bit about your father's relationship

:15:22. > :15:34.with the white world as compared with your mother's. Because it was

:15:35. > :15:38.quite distinctly different. Vary. You have written about this very

:15:39. > :15:42.movingly in a series of essays that it seems to me a lot of how you grew

:15:43. > :15:48.to see the white world is influenced by understandably a combination of

:15:49. > :15:54.both. My father really, really hated all white people. And would not let

:15:55. > :15:57.them in the house. They would come to get the insurance payments or

:15:58. > :16:01.something, and they had to stand on the porch. He was born in Georgia,

:16:02. > :16:04.and he went back every year to visit family there. My mother was born in

:16:05. > :16:08.Alabama. She remembers the South like it was heaven or something. She

:16:09. > :16:14.thought picking okra was a delightful little chore. She would

:16:15. > :16:28.say, "Yes, we used to pick okra, and we saw ghosts in the woods". And

:16:29. > :16:32.they said "oooh." So for her, it was like Disney World or something.

:16:33. > :16:35.LAUGHTER. But she never, ever discriminated or looked at people

:16:36. > :16:38.racially. One at a time, she judged them, and would not tolerate racism

:16:39. > :16:41.or anti`white behaviour or even comments from us. Those were two

:16:42. > :16:49.really polar opposites in terms of responding to race. And I just

:16:50. > :16:53.absorbed, I think, what was most helpful and creative and healthy for

:16:54. > :17:08.me ` what I felt was that vacancy about our story, my story. I was a

:17:09. > :17:12.very avid reader, and the book wasn't there. But if I it been, I

:17:13. > :17:19.think I probably wouldn't have been a writer at all, I would have

:17:20. > :17:22.remained a reader. I want to ask you about a short story you wrote called

:17:23. > :17:27.Recitatif, in which two girls meet in an orphanage and encounter each

:17:28. > :17:31.other again throughout their lives. In the story, one is white and one

:17:32. > :17:34.is black, but the way you write the story, the reader never knows which

:17:35. > :17:38.one is white, and which one is black, and it occurs to me that that

:17:39. > :17:41.is something that has informed all of your writing, that you want

:17:42. > :17:44.people to see the characters that you have written about as people

:17:45. > :18:05.first and not as the colour of their skin. Yes, or their ethnicity at

:18:06. > :18:08.all. That was very important to me that Recitatif...because I had all

:18:09. > :18:11.of the cultural clues, who worked where, but nothing about which one

:18:12. > :18:15.was black, because it is a language problem in writing, seriously. I

:18:16. > :18:22.used to tell my students ` there is an interesting line in one of the

:18:23. > :18:36.Hemingway books, I can't remember... Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm old.

:18:37. > :18:40.But I remember the line. LAUGHTER. And he says...he's in Cuba. He says

:18:41. > :18:53.two men came toward him. One was Cuban, one was black. Maybe they

:18:54. > :18:57.were both Cuban. But you know, he was making... The black man has no

:18:58. > :19:00.home. He doesn't belong in Cuba. He is outside of it. So I find in so

:19:01. > :19:03.much classical white literature, this use to which black people are

:19:04. > :19:18.put as different, you know, as separate. And so I began carefully

:19:19. > :19:25.to try to figure out... You know, even Faulkner was the best example

:19:26. > :19:29.of not doing that. You know, which is why he impressed me so much when

:19:30. > :19:34.I was a student and of course later. But the idea was to de`race the

:19:35. > :19:39.language. Let's talk about Beloved, which many view as your crowning

:19:40. > :19:42.achievement. It is the story of a woman who must live with the

:19:43. > :19:51.consequences of a particular event, and it is set in the aftermath of

:19:52. > :19:54.the emancipation of slavery. And she is a runaway slave, and she makes a

:19:55. > :20:00.choice to do something devastating to her child. It was rooted in a

:20:01. > :20:03.true story, the story of Margaret Garner, and what I found really

:20:04. > :20:14.fascinating was that you make no judgement about what she did. And I

:20:15. > :20:17.want to ask you why you think that, as the writer, it was so important

:20:18. > :20:20.that you did not make a judgement that this woman would have preferred

:20:21. > :20:29.to have murdered her own children than to have them go back into

:20:30. > :20:32.slavery. Yeah, I remember in the newspaper article where I first saw

:20:33. > :20:41.the story of Margaret Garner that the mother`in`law said that she

:20:42. > :20:49.couldn't judge her. And I thought... Everybody decided she was insane,

:20:50. > :20:56.since she killed her children. But the newspaper said she was very

:20:57. > :20:59.calm, very resolute. And I thought, "Well, suppose my children, if I put

:21:00. > :21:04.myself in that place, I could not judge." Until I realised that only

:21:05. > :21:08.person had the right to judge her, and that would be the dead child.

:21:09. > :21:11.She would be the one to say, "Well, I don't think that was a good idea,"

:21:12. > :21:14.or, "I understand, Ma". But whatever it was, therefore Beloved, she

:21:15. > :21:18.judges or withholds or does all those things in addition to judge,

:21:19. > :21:34.but she just wants very much to be loved by her mother. You said that

:21:35. > :21:37.on the day you were told that you had won the Nobel Prize for

:21:38. > :21:45.Literature in 1992 ` I think it was given to you in 1994 ` you felt

:21:46. > :21:49.proud to be an American. The suggestion being that you were not

:21:50. > :21:53.before that. I wonder what it was then, that, apart from the honour of

:21:54. > :21:56.being given the Nobel Prize, what was it in your heart, in your soul,

:21:57. > :22:14.that made you think, "I'm part of this country when I wasn't before"?

:22:15. > :22:24.I felt proud in a number of ways. I was a proud Ohioan. I was a proud

:22:25. > :22:33.female. There weren't a lot of females that had won that prize, you

:22:34. > :22:38.know. And the other thing was that they give a great party. LAUGHTER.

:22:39. > :22:45.Oh, that party was unbelievable. For days and days. So everything about

:22:46. > :22:48.it was fantastic. I don't think I have to encourage any of you to put

:22:49. > :22:54.your hands together and thank Toni Morrison. My pleasure, thank you.

:22:55. > :23:16.APPLAUSE. Hello. Some pretty heavy rain

:23:17. > :23:20.working its way steadily northwards at the moment. It is going to be a

:23:21. > :23:25.fairly soggy Saturday for many of us. The breeze will be noticeable as

:23:26. > :23:26.well, and winds actually picking up as we go through the course of