"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?
"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no 30 context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly—once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
"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 indistinguishable 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 sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's 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 step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."
It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.
"Finally," she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your 35 hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together."
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
What is the moral of the story that Toni Morrison begins with? Why does she choose this particular story? Why does she stress that different regions of Africa have different versions of the story?
Morrison says that "children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead." In what ways might violence replace language as a way of dealing with others?
How, according to Morrison, can language be used to oppress and subjugate people? What other, more noble purposes of language does she suggest?
For Morrison, what is the difference between "living language" and "dead language"? How does this difference parallel the living or dead bird in the story that frames her speech?
Why does Morrison devote so much time at the end of her speech to the possibility that the children in her tale do not have a bird in their hand at all? How would this change the traditional moral of the story? What point about the possibilities of language does she make with this change?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Contrast Morrison's views on the abuse of language with those of Plato (p. 166) and Gloria Anzaldua (p. 205). How might each of these authors' backgrounds have shaped their perceptions of language? Explain.
Would Frederick Douglass (p. 24) have agreed with Morrison's view that language can be used for violence and oppression? What are the characteristics of language used in these ways?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
1. Write an essay in which you analyze the connection between language and violence. Refer to Morrison's text and to one other text in this chapter in your essay. You might also include anecdotes from your own life, facts, statistics, expert testimony, and other forms of evidence you can uncover during research.
Write an essay in which you analyze Morrison's use of an African folktale in this speech. Explain how this story functions as an introduction, a conclusion, and evidence for a claim, and evaluate its effectiveness in each role.
Listen to Morrison's speech online—it's available on the Nobel Prize website, nobelprize.org—and read it again carefully. Then, write an essay in which you explain how the experience of hearing the speech is different from the experience of reading it. In your essay, consider how these differences might be related to the differences between oral and written narrative that Morrison and others discuss.
zeynep tufekci
Networked Politics from Tahrir to Taksim: Is There a Social Media-Fueled Protest Style?
[2013]
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI is an assistant professor of information and library science, with an affiliate appointment in sociology, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on the interactions between technology and social, cultural, and political dynamics. Tufekci is a leading scholar of both social media and social movements, and her work on recent uprisings in the United States, Egypt, and Turkey has helped to clarify the problems and possibilities of using sites like Facebook and Twitter to organize popular revolts.
The present article originally appeared as a post on dmlcentral, a blog sponsored by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, whose mission is to "advance research in the service of a more equitable, participatory, and effective ecosystem of learning keyed to the digital and networked era." In this blog post, Professor Tufekci examines the common features of four mass protest movements across the world in which social media sites like Facebook and Twitter played an important role:
The #Jan 25 protests in Egypt, which began on January 25, 2011, and led to the ousting of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak five months later.
The #M15 movement in Spain, which began on May 15, 2011, with demonstrations simultaneously arising in 58 Spanish cities. Protesters demanded social and economic changes such as addressing high unemployment rates and reversing cuts to social spending.
The #Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, which began in September 2011 when protesters camped out in New York City's Zuccotti Park and spoke out against corporate power, financial corruption, and the unequal distribution of wealth.
The #Occupygezi movement in Turkey, which began in May 2013 as a demonstration against proposed plans to replace Taksim Gezi Park with a shopping mall, but which grew to encompass protests against police violence, corporate control of the government, and the curtailing of civil rights.