Morrison, Toni
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (a series of about two hours with the interviewer's questions largely missing, so some of Morrison's answers lack their context; the transcription is generally clear but uncertain passages and unnamed references are omitted or hedged)
Core ideas
Family, migration and stories. Morrison describes her family's move from the South to the North as typical of many African Americans: her father spoke of Georgia as the worst place for black people yet visited it every year, while her mother remembered Alabama as idyllic and never went back. Growing up in a Depression-era household among immigrants, without television, she absorbed ghost stories and cautionary tales that taught children to "look at life with eyes wide open." Her parents and relatives modelled resistance: her mother wrote to Franklin Roosevelt about buggy cornmeal and tore down an eviction notice; her father threw a white man down the stairs; an uncle and her mother tested whether new shops and theatres served black people. She says she only valued this legacy when she began to write and looked for "silences and absences" in literature that she could fill with her own people's memories.
Education, publishing and early novels. She chose Howard University to be among black intellectuals, then studied American and dramatic literature at Cornell, writing on suicide in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner (Woolf's economy of language, Faulkner's treatment of race "without contempt"), and later taught in Texas, where she first met African-American history taught academically and saw the first stirrings of the civil rights movement. As an editor she deliberately published books by Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and by emerging black women writers (Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan), so that leaders and new voices would leave "their stories in a permanent place." She describes writing The Bluest Eye amid "male kill-whitey books" (Claude Brown, Baldwin, Wright) as an inquiry into what happens when a little girl absorbs racism, and says she wanted to describe rape "in the language of a woman" so as to deprive it of any glory.
Myth, history and the ghost. In Song of Solomon she explores the ambivalence of the flying man (the thrill of flight versus abandoned wife and children) and the double standard by which a man who leaves home is a hero (Ulysses) while a black man is called irresponsible. In Tar Baby she reworks a folktale with a female figure and the cultural conflict of two lovers who cannot speak each other's world. In Beloved she makes sure that the history of slavery, which she says has been "mangled, cleaned up, polished and made sanitary," cannot be forgotten: the ghost is "hungry to be reconciled with the mother," and stands for the millions who died unburied and unmourned. She describes the ghost as a way of "putting flesh on memory", compares belief in ghosts to religious belief in saints, and adds that remembering the past means selecting what is usable for the future, not being "stuck in a museum."
Jazz, names, language, paradise. For Jazz, she explains that she never uses the word jazz or famous musicians: it is a structural model, practice that allows improvisation, and a narrator who "knows it all" but whose characters escape her. She discusses naming (nicknames of blues singers and musicians as a refusal of slaveholders' names, her own maiden name Wofford) and the violence required to replenish a slave population, "part of the DNA of the country." On hip-hop and young people's music, she sees "unpoliced language, language without the cops," agency like laughter. In Paradise, she says a paradise "based on somebody else's not being there" excludes, and tries to imagine one where no one is excluded; the novel shows two communities each convinced they have the perfect community, and she recalls an all-black town that turned away poor newcomers ("if you don't have any money, don't come"). Elsewhere she says she wrote a novel before 9/11 while collecting literature on how societies create foreigners, strangers and "aliens", citing the Grendel story from Beowulf retold from the monster's side (the transcript does not name the book). She concludes by noting that major white American writers (Melville, Hawthorne, Poe) always bear the "invisible presence" of slavery in their work.
Excerpts
“You can only have a heaven if there's a hell for somebody.”
“It was time not to blink, to look at it the way it really was.”
“The unpoliced language, language without the cops.”