My Beef Isnt With You Old Woman Movie

Nobel Lecture December seven, 1993

Listen to an audio recording of Toni Morrison'due south Nobel Lecture

"Once upon a fourth dimension there was an old adult female. Blind but wise." Or was information technology an one-time homo? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I take heard this story, or i exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

"Once upon a time in that location was an old adult female. Bullheaded. Wise."

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, blackness, American, and lives lonely in a pocket-size business firm exterior of boondocks. 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 across 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 aptitude on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their programme is elementary: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard every bit a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and ane of them says, "One-time woman, I concur in my hand a bird. Tell me whether information technology is living or dead."

She does non answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"

Notwithstanding she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot meet her visitors, permit alone what is in their easily. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman's silence is so long, the immature people take problem belongings 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 y'all are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."

Her reply can be taken to mean: if it is dead, yous have either constitute it that way or you accept killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill information technology. Whether information technology is to stay alive, information technology is your decision. Whatsoever the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their ability and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the human activity of mockery but also for the small packet of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention abroad from assertions of ability 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 at present thinking, as I have been, about the piece of work I do that has brought me to this company. And so I choose to read the bird as language and the adult female as a adept writer. She is worried about how the linguistic communication she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Existence a writer she thinks of language partly as a arrangement, partly as a living affair over which i has command, only mostly as agency – as an human activity with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal considering she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable but by an try of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is expressionless the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is non only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist linguistic communication, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, information technology has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the gratuitous range of its ain narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and potency. However moribund, it is not without effect for information technology actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell some other story, fill baffling silences. Official linguistic communication smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a conform of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long agone. Yet there it is: impaired, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when linguistic communication dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed past fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her state children accept bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the vocalization of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether equally a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing honey. Just she knows tongue-suicide is not only the pick 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 simply to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic annexation of language can exist recognized past the trend 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 linguistic communication or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the article driven language of science; whether information technology is the malign linguistic communication of law-without-ideals, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – information technology must exist rejected, altered and exposed. Information technology is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots nether 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 common exchange of ideas.

The one-time adult female is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for political leader or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would exist persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to proceed citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, mail offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing linguistic communication to mask the pity and waste of needless expiry. There will be more than diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more than seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there volition be more of the language of surveillance disguised as inquiry; 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, yet stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or mayhap not beating at all – if the bird is already expressionless.

She has thought most what could accept been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had non insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of fourth dimension and life that rationalizations for and representations of potency required – lethal discourses of exclusion blocking admission to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the plummet was a misfortune. That information technology was the lark, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower'southward failed architecture. That one monolithic linguistic communication would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little jerky if no one could take the time to sympathize other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the sky they imagined might have been plant at their feet. Complicated, enervating, yeah, but a view of heaven every bit life; not heaven every bit mail service-life.

She would non want to get out her immature visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to exist. The vitality of language lies in its power 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 significant may lie. When a President of the U.s.a. idea about the graveyard his country had get, and said, "The world will little note nor long call up what we say here. But it will never forget what they did hither," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining backdrop considering they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final discussion", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life information technology mourns. Information technology is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life one time and for all. Nor should it. Linguistic communication can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do and so. Its forcefulness, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be information technology grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a weep without an alphabet, the choice give-and-take, the chosen silence, unmolested linguistic communication surges toward knowledge, non its destruction. Simply who does non know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because information technology is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, considering it is generative; information technology makes significant that secures our deviation, our man difference – the way in which we are like no other life.

We dice. That may be the meaning of life. But we practice linguistic communication. That may be the measure of our lives.

"In one case upon a time, …" visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that meet? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your easily"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Peradventure what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am onetime, female, black, blind. What wisdom I accept 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 go to exist spoken to, taken seriously as they have non been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse virtually them, for them, merely never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the 1 they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or expressionless?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is decease?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise ane. An erstwhile i. And if the erstwhile and wise who have lived life and faced expiry cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without delivery. She keeps her altitude, enforces information technology and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Aught, no word follows her annunciation 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 oral communication," they enquire her, "no words you tin give u.s.a. that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education yous take just given us that is no pedagogy at all considering we are paying shut attention to what you have done equally well as to what you have said? To the barrier yous accept erected between generosity and wisdom?

"Nosotros have no bird in our hands, living or dead. Nosotros have only you and our of import question. Is the nothing in our easily something yous could non deport to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember existence young when linguistic communication was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to encounter? When questions and demands for answers burned and so brightly yous trembled with fury at not knowing?

"Do nosotros have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you accept already fought and lost leaving us with goose egg in our hands except what yous accept imagined is there? Your answer is aesthetic, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass y'all. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television set script that makes no sense if there is aught in our hands.

"Why didn't you attain out, bear upon us with your soft fingers, filibuster the audio seize with teeth, the lesson, until yous knew who we were? Did you lot then despise our trick, our modus operandi yous could not see that we were baffled nigh how to get your attention? We are immature. Unripe. We have heard all our curt lives that nosotros accept to exist responsible. What could that perchance mean in the ending this world has become; where, as a poet said, "goose egg needs to exist exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You lot want usa to have your onetime, blank optics and see just cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves over again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when nosotros stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

"You trivialize the states 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 feel that you lot tin can pass forth to assistance u.s. start strong? You are an developed. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face up. Recollect of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment information technology is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they get down in flames and nix is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon'due south hands, your words suture but the places where blood might flow. Nosotros know you can never exercise information technology properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your proper noun in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the calorie-free. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us conventionalities south wide skirt and the run up that unravels fear'south caul. You, erstwhile woman, blessed with incomprehension, can speak the language that tells us what only linguistic communication can: how to encounter without pictures. Language alone protects u.s. from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell united states what information technology is to be a adult female and then that we may know what information technology is to exist a homo. What moves at the margin. What it is to accept no home in this place. To be set afloat from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your visitor.

"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 duplicate 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 sexual practice, they thought of rut, then sun. Lifting their faces as though information technology was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They terminate at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse'southward 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 pace abroad from its light. They climb into the railroad vehicle bed. The male child will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from rima oris to rima oris. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the optics of the i she serves. One helping for each man, two for each adult female. And a await. They look back. The next stop will be their last. Merely not this one. This one is warmed."

It's quiet over again when the children stop speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you lot with the bird that is not in your hands considering yous have truly defenseless it. Wait. How lovely information technology is, this thing we have done – together."

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