The Power of Language
By: Hank Kalet
Tags: Racism, Language, Literature, Toni Morrison, Whiteness

Toni Morrison’s Work Was — and Is — the Antithesis to the Cynicism of the Majority.

Toni Morrison, from the Nobel Prize archive.

Toni Morrison has died. This is a major loss for the literary community and the world. Toni Morrison is one of the great prose stylist of American literature, a truly original voice who captured something essential in the American character, that nexus where the mythology of our greatness meets the failures of our reality.

The Guardian, in its obituary, described her as “chronicl(Inglewood) the African American experience in fiction,” but I think that is too narrow a description. Her focus may have been black Americans, but that was just the lens through which she viewed American history and the American present.

From The Guardian (writing about The Bluest Eye):

The book she was missing took Morrison back to Lorain and a conversation she had had at elementary school. Writing in 1993, she remembered how she “got mad” when her friend told her she wanted blue eyes. “Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing,” Morrison wrote. “And 20 years later I was still wondering how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.”

This “gaze” is an American gaze, born of the racialized hierarchies constructed in our supposedly classless society. The United States has always operated as a racial republic that privileges whiteness. Groups who fell outside of this privilege — initially, black slaves and the Irish, with a smattering of other “others,” but eventually Italians and Eastern Europeans, Asians, and Mexicans and South Americans — were placed on lower tiers and forced to compete for entry into acceptable society. Many of these groups have managed to claim a tenuous hold on whiteness — and citizenship.

Skin color, as Morrison makes clear in her novels, has always mattered. it is why African Americans have been forced to struggle for even the smallest bit of what they are owed as American citizens. It is not just about hatred, which is what people like Presidents Donald Trump want us to believe. It is about systems of power and the underlying default assumptions that create the privilege that protects me and leaves African Americans vulnerable in otherwise innocent interactions with law enforcement or adds an unnecessary layer of difficulty to the search for a job or a place to live.

Morrison understood how language reinforces these hierarchies, explaining in her Nobel Prize address in 1993 that language used by the powerful to maintain their power is a “dead language,” which “is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.”

Ruthless in its policing 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 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 continued by declaiming the “systematic looting of language,” which “can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.” She is describing our current moment, but she is doing it in 1993, 23 years before Donald Trump was to win the presidency by running on a platform of anti-intellectualism, nostalgia, mythology, and hate.

Trump has spent the last three weeks stoking the flames of that hatred — spent the last four years since he announced his candidacy, in fact, stirring up those embers, adding wood to the fire, spreading gasoline and lighting the match. His racism is overt, a shift in tone for Republicans but not a change in content. What Trump is saying is really no different than what Newt Gingrich and his ilk haves been saying for decades. He just says it overtly and, in doing so, he has given license to the racists to be overtly racist themselves, and unleashing a torrent of racist violence we pretended was only a part of our past.

Morrison saw this clearly. “Oppressive language” — which is used not only by Trump, but by Tucker Carlson and many of the hosts and reporters on Fox News, by the leaders of the Republican Party and the pseudo-intellectuals who underpin their arguments — “does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

I did not intend for this to be about Trump, but as I reread her Nobel lecture and consider the Morrison canon — from Bluest Eye to Song of Solomon — I realize there was no other place for this appreciation to go. Morrison’s efforts to free the language from its captivity, its enslavement to the political class, and its debasement by people’s like Trump are her legacy as much as anything. In her commitment to truth, to the dismantling of hierarchies, to lived experience, she stands as the antithesis of Trump and of the America he represents.

While her death leaves us poorer, her life reminds us of the richness of possibility.