Toni Morrison Talking Books

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

News, Talking Books. Hello. I'm Razia Iqbal, and I'm at

Hay Festival for a special Talking Books programme with Toni Morrison.

She is the last American writer to have won the Nobel Prize for

Literature. That was in 1993. She remains, though, a towering figure

in literature. From her first book, The Bluest Eye, about an

African`American girl who wants blue eyes, to her crowning achievement,

Beloved, about the impact of 200 years of slavery. She has always

written out of the experience of being an African`American woman, yet

her writing has become emblematic of an essential aspect of American

reality. I would like to start by talking about definitions ` how you

have been defined, and how you define yourself. I know it probably

matters less now, but when you first started out writing, you quite

consciously wanted to define yourself as an African`American

woman writer. Why was that? Those days, the early days, when I began

to write, I got compliments from other writers about the value and

the beauty, perhaps, of the book, and in order to elevate my

reputation, I remember being at an author's event, and I think it was

Doctorow who said, "Toni Morrison is a wonderful writer. I don't think of

her as a woman writer, I don't think of her as an African`American

writer, I think of her as" ` and he paused ` "a white male writer".

LAUGHTER. So the categories we were being put in. So I claimed it. "Yes,

I am a black woman writer." Whatever that means. As I continued writing,

the problem became the gaze, the white gaze, that was always present

in so many books by African`Americans. Men on the whole,

like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison. Yes, they were not

writing to me, and I always used to use the title of Ralph Ellison's

book, which I love, by the way, because it is extraordinary, but the

title set me back a little, because it was The Invisible Man, and I

thought, "Invisible to whom?" To them, you know. So it was like even

the best of the slave narratives were addressed to the readers ` they

were always assumed to be white people, and not black people. So I

was determined not to do that. Where did that certainty come from, that

you felt so rooted in the perspective that you wanted to write

from before you even articulated the notion of the white gaze, and not

being interested in the white gaze? There were two things. One was the

kind of books being written at that time in the late '60s by black men.

Not the big novelists, but, you know, the revolutionaries. It was

always to the man, you know. Screw the man, or whatever. "Black is

beautiful." I was saying, "What? What is that about? Wait a minute.

Before we get on the black is beautiful thing, may I remind you of

what it was like before? When it was not beautiful, when it was lethal to

consider yourself ugly, not human, other?" And so The Bluest Eye was my

answer to that sudden leap into perfection and power and so on, as

though there was no history that preceded it. This was your first

novel, written when you were an editor at Random House in the 1970s.

The impulse was not just the historical context, but a particular

incident, an anecdote. A friend of yours who wanted blue eyes ` an

African`American girl who wanted blue eyes. Two things happened. I

was walking along with her. Her name was Eunice. We were very close.

Schoolgirls. Ten or 11, I think. We were discussing whether God existed,

and I said he did, of course. She said, "No, no, there is no God". I

asked her how she knew, and she said, "I have been praying for blue

eyes for two years, and I don't have them." LAUGHTER. When I looked at

her, I thought two things. If he had answered her praise, it would be

grotesque. She would look awful. And also, I recognised beauty for the

first time. That she was really beautiful, and that was not a ten or

12`year`old word in connection with your girlfriend or anything. So when

I began The Bluest Eye, I used that anecdote in what she must have been

thinking, how desperate she was to be other, to be white or to have

some characteristic that would set her apart. Was there also a sense

that you wanted to write a story that didn't exist, that there was a

silence of that perspective? Oh, yeah. I wanted to read that book,

and I couldn't find it. I thought maybe if I looked hard enough,

somebody had written a story about those things ` to put a young black

child centre stage without making fun of her. She's not any of these

cliched things. I thought somebody probably was writing that book or

would write it. No`one did. I was eager to read it, and I didn't think

I could read it unless I wrote it. All of my books have been like that.

They are reading experiences for me, as well as writing. How did you

manage to write it, being an editor and having a full`time job as an

editor of books, including books by black writers? You know, we

multitask. LAUGHTER. I had two children. I'm in New York City. I

had left graduate school many years ago, taught in universities, went

other places, and finally landed this job at Random House. But still

there was this other thing that I wanted to do, so I sort of published

it... This sounds silly, but it was sort of secret. I didn't tell

anybody at the publishing house that I had written this book. Did you

tell anyone at all? Did you tell friends that you were writing? No. I

had a friend who was an editor at Holt, and he had published a book by

someone whom I knew who had actually been a student of mine, and he wrote

Manchild In The Promised Land, and he said, "Why don't you give your

manuscript too?" I did. I had sent it around a little bit and got 12

rejections. Some were letters, some were little postcards, but no. So

when I gave it to this man, I don't know if he liked it, but there were

African`American writers coming along, so he took it. I didn't tell

anybody at Random House. On the first edition, I wrote three flaps,

which are like three sentences. My bio is not there. I put on the

jacket ` this is really bad news ` the first page of the book, which I

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

store, you start reading it on the cover". I thought that was very

clever. But it doesn't display, you can't see it from afar. So I've not

done it since. But that was a little bit of a secret. Then at Random,

they didn't hire me to be a writer, they hired me to be an editor, so I

was doing two things. They suggested I talk to some people to see whether

I wanted to work there, and I remember the man who is my editor

now saying, "Look, if you are going to work as an editor, I will have to

be able to fire you". I said, "Uh`huh". He said, "If you work as a

writer, I will take you on". So it all worked out. I did quite a lot of

research for this interview. One of the things I found out was that the

New York Times book review didn't give The Bluest Eye a particularly

good review. I think it was kind of OK. I don't think they thought it

was great. Now, they described you as the closest thing America has to

a national writer. I had one good review from John Leonard, and it

wasn't in the New York Times. The New York Times, I think one of them

said, "I think she writes this way just to avoid cliche". Yes.

LAUGHTER. But more demoralising than that was the reception I got from

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

you know, incest and children. They were horrified by it, and let me

know it. How did that make you feel, given that you were quite

consciously defining yourself as writing out of that experience? I

didn't anticipate the venom. I thought they probably would be upset

because I was talking about us in very real, visceral way, and it

wasn't a happy story. It wasn't, "Oh, I was a slave, and I got free

and here I am". It was feminine too. It wasn't a man writing these

things. I anticipated hostility, but I didn't know how deep and how

profoundly they hated the idea of it. They didn't even think about

whether it was well`written. It was about something that was, you know,

embarrassing, shameful etc. Your first three books ` The Bluest Eye,

Sula, Song of Solomon ` none of them have any white characters in them at

all. The white world is there. It is a presence. It is an oppression, if

you like. I wonder if I can take you back to your childhood to try to

understand where that perspective comes from. You grew up in Lorain,

Ohio, and experienced institutionalised segregation as a

child. Where did your sense of your identity as an African`American girl

come from? Did it come more from your mother, your father, your

grandparents? Because all of them had different perspectives on the

white world, didn't they? I didn't experience a black neighbourhood or

segregation at all when I was a child. I lived in Lorain, Ohio,

which was a steel town. It was full of immigrants, people from Poland

and Mexico. There were people who came down from Canada who had

escaped. It was one high school. There was no segregation because

there was only one high school, and everybody was pretty poor. A family

lived next door and gave my mother recipes for cabbage rolls, and she

gave them... It was really very different in the '30s in that

northern part of Ohio. It wasn't like that in the South. But as one

notices, on Sunday, you see the divisions. There were four black

churches, nine Catholic Churches, the Polish one, the Czech one, the

Italians. Then there were the Protestants. There were two or

three. On Sundays, we went to our specific ethnic things, but

otherwise, it was fully exchanged. But to answer the question about the

feeling, it was very much family`oriented, because it was such

a family of storytelling and singing that it was inescapable. It was

participatory ` that is to say, as a child, I had to re`tell those

stories to other adults. The same story over and over again,

but I was allowed to edit it, me and my sister. You could change it a

little bit. You could recite it a little bit. But you were very much

involved in that process of telling these stories that were pretty much

horror stories about life as an African`American. I mean, they were

powerful and highly metaphorical, but that is really what was at the

bottom of it. Just tell me a little bit about your father's relationship

with the white world as compared with your mother's. Because it was

quite distinctly different. Vary. You have written about this very

movingly in a series of essays that it seems to me a lot of how you grew

to see the white world is influenced by understandably a combination of

both. My father really, really hated all white people. And would not let

them in the house. They would come to get the insurance payments or

something, and they had to stand on the porch. He was born in Georgia,

and he went back every year to visit family there. My mother was born in

Alabama. She remembers the South like it was heaven or something. She

thought picking okra was a delightful little chore. She would

say, "Yes, we used to pick okra, and we saw ghosts in the woods". And

they said "oooh." So for her, it was like Disney World or something.

LAUGHTER. But she never, ever discriminated or looked at people

racially. One at a time, she judged them, and would not tolerate racism

or anti`white behaviour or even comments from us. Those were two

really polar opposites in terms of responding to race. And I just

absorbed, I think, what was most helpful and creative and healthy for

me ` what I felt was that vacancy about our story, my story. I was a

very avid reader, and the book wasn't there. But if I it been, I

think I probably wouldn't have been a writer at all, I would have

remained a reader. I want to ask you about a short story you wrote called

Recitatif, in which two girls meet in an orphanage and encounter each

other again throughout their lives. In the story, one is white and one

is black, but the way you write the story, the reader never knows which

one is white, and which one is black, and it occurs to me that that

is something that has informed all of your writing, that you want

people to see the characters that you have written about as people

first and not as the colour of their skin. Yes, or their ethnicity at

all. That was very important to me that Recitatif...because I had all

of the cultural clues, who worked where, but nothing about which one

was black, because it is a language problem in writing, seriously. I

used to tell my students ` there is an interesting line in one of the

Hemingway books, I can't remember... Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm old.

But I remember the line. LAUGHTER. And he says...he's in Cuba. He says

two men came toward him. One was Cuban, one was black. Maybe they

were both Cuban. But you know, he was making... The black man has no

home. He doesn't belong in Cuba. He is outside of it. So I find in so

much classical white literature, this use to which black people are

put as different, you know, as separate. And so I began carefully

to try to figure out... You know, even Faulkner was the best example

of not doing that. You know, which is why he impressed me so much when

I was a student and of course later. But the idea was to de`race the

language. Let's talk about Beloved, which many view as your crowning

achievement. It is the story of a woman who must live with the

consequences of a particular event, and it is set in the aftermath of

the emancipation of slavery. And she is a runaway slave, and she makes a

choice to do something devastating to her child. It was rooted in a

true story, the story of Margaret Garner, and what I found really

fascinating was that you make no judgement about what she did. And I

want to ask you why you think that, as the writer, it was so important

that you did not make a judgement that this woman would have preferred

to have murdered her own children than to have them go back into

slavery. Yeah, I remember in the newspaper article where I first saw

the story of Margaret Garner that the mother`in`law said that she

couldn't judge her. And I thought... Everybody decided she was insane,

since she killed her children. But the newspaper said she was very

calm, very resolute. And I thought, "Well, suppose my children, if I put

myself in that place, I could not judge." Until I realised that only

person had the right to judge her, and that would be the dead child.

She would be the one to say, "Well, I don't think that was a good idea,"

or, "I understand, Ma". But whatever it was, therefore Beloved, she

judges or withholds or does all those things in addition to judge,

but she just wants very much to be loved by her mother. You said that

on the day you were told that you had won the Nobel Prize for

Literature in 1992 ` I think it was given to you in 1994 ` you felt

proud to be an American. The suggestion being that you were not

before that. I wonder what it was then, that, apart from the honour of

being given the Nobel Prize, what was it in your heart, in your soul,

that made you think, "I'm part of this country when I wasn't before"?

I felt proud in a number of ways. I was a proud Ohioan. I was a proud

female. There weren't a lot of females that had won that prize, you

know. And the other thing was that they give a great party. LAUGHTER.

Oh, that party was unbelievable. For days and days. So everything about

it was fantastic. I don't think I have to encourage any of you to put

your hands together and thank Toni Morrison. My pleasure, thank you.

APPLAUSE. Hello. Some pretty heavy rain

working its way steadily northwards at the moment. It is going to be a

fairly soggy Saturday for many of us. The breeze will be noticeable as

well, and winds actually picking up as we go through the course of