In 1993, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison, whose “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, [gave] life to an essential aspect of American reality” (The Nobel Prize in Literature). In her acceptance speech, Morrison frames language and writing through a fable of a blind woman being presented with a bird by a group of young strangers, who ask her if she believes the bird to be dead or alive. Morrison understands the fable through the woman as “practiced writer” and the bird as language itself. She thinks of dead language similarly to the prone body of a frail bird, “certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of will” (Morrison 2). Only when the young strangers express belief in language and narrative as alive and radical, “creating us at the very moment it is being created” (7), does the blind woman say:
“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. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together” (7).
“This thing we have done – together” encapsulates the communal effort to preserve the move toward a productive use of language in changing the trajectory of history, and of recognizing the systematic use of language that allows the transpiration of stagnant, oppressive perspectives. Morrison questions the Tower of Babel itself, stating that “the weight of many languages precipitated the tower’s failed architecture,” and one monolithic language would have saved the building and heaven could have been reached. Morrison reflects back to the blind woman, asking “Whose heaven? […] And what kind?” (4). The paradise that Babbel would have brought was one version of paradise for one group of people, and the dead languages left in its wake would still linger in the rubble of the fall. Their lingering presence still persists in the present moment, where statist systems of language that protect the interests of oppressors and polices the power of the oppressed must be “rejected, altered, and exposed” (3) in order for language to become generative and alive once again.
Beloved’s publication and themes of lingering trauma related to American systems were highly influential to Morrison’s reception of the Nobel Prize, and in the novel she herself contributes to the resurrection of a dead language in the resurrection of Beloved herself. Beloved is a ghost of a child killed in a desperate act of mercy, but she also encompasses the trauma of America’s history of slavery and racism that lingers just the same as systems continuing to effect because they have not been rejected, altered, and exposed. Only then can those systems of language and history be broken, and only then can Beloved and everything she represents be freed from the purgatory she has risen from.
At the end of the fable, the blind woman only trusts the young strangers with the bird, or language, when they assert they understand its ever changing nature and how they must question its meaning in order to take care of it. Whether it be language and the purpose of its uses or the ghost of a dead child, Morrison uses the power of narrative and confrontation to change the ways in which we operate within our surrounding systems.
Morrison, Toni. “Nobel Lecture.” Nobel Prize for Literature, 7 December 1993, Stockholm, Sweden, Speech. https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/?id=1502 (Transcript: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/)
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/summary/