Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison – review
Spanning five decades, this collection of Morrison’s essays and speeches underscores her rage and linguistic brillianceARIFA AKBAR
SUNDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2019
Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture in literature, given on receiving the prize in 1993, opens as a kind of folk tale: “Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but 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.”
It goes on to describe how a bird is brought to the old woman that may be dead or alive. The woman, it turns out, is a “practised writer” and the bird is a metaphor for the mutability of language.
This seminal speech, about language as a “measure of our lives”, encapsulates the theme that underpins this collection of speeches, articles and essays, though there is much else about contemporary American life, politics, literature and critical theory too. The pieces span five decades (from 1976 to 2013) and bring together Morrison’s nonfiction works for the first time in the UK. Themes range from mourning the dead of 9/11 to healthcare and paeans to inspirational black figures including Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe.
The content on race burns with controlled anger and a deep knowledge of her subject. In A Race in Mind (from a speech to the Newspaper Association of America conference in 1994), she speaks witheringly about press bias, arguing that the lives of black people are reported on as if they were a “special interest” group.
She speaks of the white working classes with prescience too, accusing the media of obfuscating white poverty: “African Americans are still being employed in that way: to disappear the white poor and unify all classes and regions, erasing the real lines of conflict.”
America’s history of enslavement is a persistent theme. Moral Inhabitants is a short, sharp speech from 1976 that examines the language of a national reference book from colonial times to 1957 in which black bodies are logged as commodities. Quotes about the value of black people follow from powerful white men including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. While their open racism isn’t revelatory, it is repugnant and implicitly reminds us that such rank inhumanity must not be forgotten.
Morrison takes the question of remembrance further in The Slavebody and the Blackbody (2000), in which she recounts the pressure she was put under to move on from, or sublimate, America’s slave past in the 1980s: “In some quarters, [it was] understood not only to be progressive but healthy… The slavebody was dead, wasn’t it? The blackbody was alive, wasn’t it?”
Her writing on language in relation to race is erudite and nuanced. Black enslavement is branded into language, she argues, in which the “codes of racial hierarchy and disdain are deeply embedded”. She suggests that these can be circumnavigated with enough awareness and calls herself a “raced” writer who knew, from the beginning, that “I could not, would not reproduce the master’s voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father.”
The dilemmas she grapples with around identity and the pigeonholing of black writers are just as relevant for writers of colour today. In a 2001 essay, she remembers being invited on to a TV show to talk about her work. She asked the interviewer if it was possible to avoid questions around race but he felt that “neither he nor his audience was interested in any aspects of me other than my raced ones”.
This double bind – to be a consciously “raced” writer while feeling confined by the expectation to explain or defend race-related issues – comes up repeatedly: “I had a yearning for an environment in which I could speak and write without every sentence being understood as mere protest or understood as mere advocacy.”
Some pieces are less penetrating than others but all have a rigorous logic and intelligence. Interestingly, many of the spoken addresses retain their power on the page and are exhilarating to read for their rousing rhetoric and idealism. The Individual Artist, about the imperative of creating art at any cost, particularly for the black American community, is deeply moving when seen within the legacy of slavery.
Elsewhere, in a section that’s distinct in tone from the rest of the material, Morrison explores her own fiction, with close textual analyses of several books (The Bluest Eye, Paradise, Beloved, Tar Baby). She also advocates rereading canonical works, revealing how stories by Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain contain unconscious racial coding.
The risk of such wide-ranging subject matter is that it ends up skittering across the surface. Here, however, Morrison’s words possess a contemporary resonance, delivering unwavering truths with an intelligent rage that is almost equal to her hope.
• Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison is published by Chatto & Windus (£20).
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