Respond to the arguments that Anzaldua cites in favor of learning a country's dominant language. Are getting a good job and becoming successful worth the price of suppressing or even silencing one's identity? How might Anzaldua respond to the charge that her advice could keep people from succeeding in the United States?
Compare Anzaldua's arguments for the inclusion of a marginalized group with those of Martin Luther King Jr. (p. 425). What are the strengths and weaknesses of their rhetorical approaches?
One of Anzaldua's key points is that people employ different "languages" within their different cultures and subcultures. Discuss how a group that you belong to (racial, national, religious, occupational, etc.) uses a unique language.
toni morrison
Nobel Lecture [1993]
TONI MORRISON was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. She studied English at Howard University from 1949 to 1953, and in 1955 she received a master's degree in English from Cornell University with a thesis on the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf—authors who would later influence her own work substantially. Morrison taught English at Texas Southern University and Howard University before moving to New York City in 1964 to work as an editor at Random House.
Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Two huge critical successes followed: Sula (1975), which was nominated for a National Book Award, and Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her biggest commercial and critical success, however, came in 1987 with Beloved, the haunting story of an escaped slave that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. To date, over her forty-year career, Morrison has published ten novels, several books of nonfiction, and many essays and works of literary criticism.
Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In her acceptance speech, reprinted here, she explains her work as a writer within the context of a well-known African folktale about a wise woman who is confronted by two children wanting to know whether a bird that one of them holds is living or dead. Morrison weaves this story throughout her speech, constantly reinterpreting it in different frameworks to advance her argument. In all of her interpretations, the bird represents language, the old woman represents a writer, and the children represent the members of the culture that the writer addresses. The old woman's answer to the children, "It is in your hands," points out the great responsibility that we have to the language that has been entrusted to our care.
The folktale at the heart of Morrison's speech functions rhetorically much as the parables of Jesus do in the New Testament. The tale creates an analogy that serves as scaffolding for her observations. Morrison, though, repeatedly revises and reinterprets the meaning of her parable—and by doing so adds a new layer of meaning about the ambiguous nature of narrative itself.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. 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 beyond 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 bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her differences from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding 5 living or dead?"
Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding 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 you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, 10 told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power 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 now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language,1 censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing
1. Statist language: language produced by a government, with connotations of authoritarianism or propaganda.
duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed[106] to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice 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 only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.