The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  Chinua Achebe

  I TAKE great pleasure in having this opportunity to say some things in public that I have never said to the person who is the subject of these comments—Chinua Achebe. My debt to Mr. Achebe is the best kind. Large, minus repayment schedule, and interest-free. Let me describe it to you.

  In 1965 I began reading African literature, devouring it actually. It was a literature previously unavailable to me, but by then I had discovered a New York bookstore called Africa House, which offered among other things back issues of Transition, Black Orpheus, and works by a host of African writers from all over the continent. Amos Tutuola, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ezekiel Mphahlele, James Ngugi, Bessie Head, Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, Mongo Beti, Léopold Senghor, Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark: the jolt these writers gave me was explosive. The confirmation that African literature was not limited to Doris Lessing and Joseph Conrad was so stunning it led me to secure the aid of two academics who could help me anthologize this literature. At that time African literature was not a subject to be taught in American schools. Even in so-called world literature courses it had no reputation and no presence. But I was determined to funnel the delight, the significance, and the power of that literature into my work as an editor. The publication of Contemporary African Literature in 1972 was the beginning of my love affair.

  But the more profound and more personal consequence was the impact Chinua Achebe’s novels had on my own beginnings as a writer. I had read his essay in Transition, on the struggle with definitions of African literature, and knew its ramifications for African American writers. In that essay, Achebe quoted James Baldwin’s comments on the subject of language choice and manipulation in defining national and cultural literatures and its resonance with marginalized writers. “My quarrel,” said Baldwin, “with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience….Perhaps…I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.” But theorizing a definition is one thing. Executing a theory is another. Achebe’s “answer,” so to speak, was in his work. He (along with Camara Laye, Bessie Head, and others) constituted a complete education for me. Learning how to disassemble the gaze that I was wrestling with (the habitual but self-conscious writing toward a nonblack reader that threatened and coated much African American literature); discovering how to eliminate, to manipulate the Eurocentric eye in order to stretch and plumb my own imagination; I attribute these learned lessons to Chinua Achebe. In the pages of Things Fall Apart lay not the argument but the example; in the pages of No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah the assumption of the authenticity, the force, the valleys of beauty were abundant. Achebe’s work liberated my artistic intelligence as nothing else had ever done. I became fit to reenter and reinhabit my own milieu without the services of a native guide.

  So in fact that was not a debt in 1965. It was a gift.

  Introduction of Peter Sellars

  PETER SELLARS WARNED me against any ideas I might be forming about this introduction. He strongly suggested two and only two sentences: “Thank you for coming.” And “Here’s Peter Sellars.”

  I defy him at my peril, but I appeal to what Peter might be stunned to learn is “a higher authority.”

  I happen to know Peter Sellars’s mother. Have met her several times in several countries. She is, in a word, lovely. And suspecting the difficult joy of rearing sons—whether in Pennsylvania, where Peter was born, or Denver, Colorado, where he directed Beethoven from the podium his father built for him, or Phillips Andover, or Harvard directing Coriolanus, collecting a Phi Beta Kappa key and an invitation to direct at the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb; or studying in Japan, China, and India; or being director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, the American National Theater, the Kennedy Center; or receiving a MacArthur award. I say—suspecting a mother’s difficult joy, I am certain she would take the same pleasure I do in hearing an introduction of one’s son a bit more expansive. So, out of affection for Mrs. Sellars, an English professor, I am going to bow to her authority and I hope her desire and add a few sentences to the two her son seriously recommended to me.

  We go to art sometimes for safety, for a haven of order, serenity; for recognizable, even traditional beauty; for anticipation with certainty that the art form will take us past our mundane selves into a deepness where we also reside.

  We go, sometimes, to art for danger; to be riveted by experiencing the strange, by understanding suddenly how uncanny the familiar really is. We go to be urged, shaken into reassessing thoughts we have taken for granted; to learn other ways of seeing, hearing. To be excited. Stirred. Disturbed.

  Fortunately for us, among contemporary artists, Peter Sellars is rare: he never asks us to make those choices; he does not require us to select the red/green, food/no food buttons of mice in a laboratory, the one of two oppositional kinds of pleasure or power or genius we want. His work has always displayed both safety and danger; both the haven of the recognizable and the unchartered terrain of the disfamiliarized.

  His almost pious devotion to the original score, the complete script, the uncommercial length (which pays a public the compliment of assuming its attention span—its memory bank—is longer than that of a housefly). In his fidelity, his respect for the work itself, we find safety, reassurance.

  His deeply held conviction that profound art—whatever its date of origin—is always contemporary permits us fresh access to that nostrum when he chips away the encrustations of time and use to expose its truth. Whether it is Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutti; Handel’s Julius Caesar in Egypt; Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins; Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; Wagner’s Ring; Gogol’s Inspector General—whatever. By collapsing these otherwise mutually exclusive approaches to art’s work—fidelity and resuscitation; safety and danger; thorough scholarship with outrageously innovative stagecraft; astonishingly incisive personal interpretation with an almost impertinent trust in actors’ instincts. Because of his ability to embrace both approaches, we are made aware of how irresistible art is. We are made aware of his reverence for its possibilities—to keep us sane or make us so. His absolute love of it. His total faith in it. And in us.

  Thank you for coming. Here’s Peter Sellars.

  Tribute to Romare Bearden

  IN ORDER to get to the crux of my views on the art of Romare Bearden, on the discourse of African American art in general, I have to go back a bit, for my own sake, if not yours, to put my remarks in context.

  Extraordinary things were happening in the sixties among African Americans. The realm of political change during that period has received, as it should, minute, even exhaustive attention. Yet in spite of some singular critiques of African American art at the moment of origin and some more expansive ones later on, the exploration of visual art as it relates to other genres in African American culture seems tentative. (I was not able to attend Saturday’s panel on Bearden and other arts and disciplines, so the comments that follow may very well be inoperative.) Where analysis of this cross-genre aspect does exist, it relies on terms like “inspiration,” “similarities,” “spirit,” “vibrancy,” “intensity,” “drama,” “liveliness,” shared cultural values. There are a number of reasons for this rather vague emotional vocabulary: artists are notoriously evasive about their creative process; it takes a certain amount of nerve, if not faith, for a scholar to assert connections, echoes across disciplines if she or he does not feel expert within them; aesthetic ramifications are very difficult to iterate.

  More importantly, the early attention of scholars on African American literary and other art was engaged in canon formation—taking its cue from the mainstream’s established format for the ranking of art production. The alternative canon that the new black critics urged had several goals (nationalism
, revolutionary success, cultural hegemony), among which was an aesthetic put to the service of a strong political agenda and/or a cohesive cultural flowering. Aesthetics were understood to be a “corrective” to “polluted American mainstream”; a “sister” to the black power movement. Artists were encouraged and judged by the nation-building “uses” to which their work could be put. The groundswell of those who understood this to be the work of their work is legend—as any review of sixties poetry will reveal. And there is no question that matters of “authenticity”—of representing the lived life and concerns of black people—are still the sine qua non of virtually all African American art from rap music to film to novels to visual arts. How successfully, distorted or even triumphantly, this authenticity expresses itself is still much of the drive of criticism.

  Although the explosion of creative energy was overwhelming in the sixties, its criticism did not, perhaps could not, refuse to wrestle with the eternal and eternally irrelevant argument about how and whether the art of a black artist could be, should be considered “universal,” meaning “mainstream,” “race transcendent,” “agenda-free,” and so on. The heart of the argument implied that if what was produced was merely political it was not art; if it was merely beautiful it was not relevant. Thus the critiques focused on the accuracy of the sociology and/or the inspirational, “self-help” value of the work. Some work was championed as representative, authentic; other was deemed unacceptable if it was less than uplifting; other work was dismissed as crude protest or propaganda. Virtually every African American writer in the near and distant past—James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley—has been called upon or felt called upon to explain what it meant to be a Negro or black artist. The sheer idiocy of that call has been enough to force artists (angrily, or with annoyance, I suspect) to respond to it. Romare Bearden was working long before the sixties and had traveled widely, studied carefully the ancient and the new. His homes included the South, the North, Europe, the Caribbean, country landscapes, porches, urban streets, clubs, churches. So it was with some delight that I read a comment by him on the subject of race or social factors in his work.

  “I am afraid,” he said, “despite my intentions, that in some instances commentators have tended to overemphasize what they believed to be the social elements in my work. But while my response to certain human elements is as obvious as it is inevitable, I am also pleased to note that upon reflection many persons have found that they were as much concerned with the aesthetic implications of my paintings as with, what may possibly be, my human compassion.”

  The operative words, for me, are “my response to certain human elements is as obvious as it is inevitable.” How, he is asking, can a human artist not be responsive to human things, which are by their nature social things? He takes for granted the humanity of his subject matter, and as has been said, this in itself is a radical act in a country with a history of purposefully and consistently dehumanizing the black population. Bearden is also pleased to refer to “aesthetic implications.” That is to say, there is information, truth, power, and beauty in his choice of color, form, in the structural and structured placement of images, in fragments built up from flat surfaces, rhythm implicit in repetition and in the medium itself—each move determining subsequent ones, enabling the look and fact of spontaneity, improvisation. This is the appropriate language employed to delineate his work, and to suggest its relationship to another genre—music. Which is very interesting since whatever the view of aesthetics in criticism, it has traditionally confined itself to explorations with an art form, not among them. It is odd, considering how affected artists are by other disciplines, that this approach, which so closely resembles traditional critique, maintains in spite of the insistence of the art itself on its wider sources and its far more interdisciplinary dialogue. The cross-fertilization among artists within a genre is a subject well examined. Less so are instances where the lines between genres are implicit.

  The influence and representation of African American music is a mainstay in commentary on Romare Bearden’s work as is the relationship between the plays and sensibility of August Wilson. The influence of and alignment with music is also a common observation in criticism of my own work—as well as my own acknowledgments on the subject. What I want to describe this evening are other ways in which artists of disparate disciplines fold into, energize, and transfer the aesthetics of one another.

  Let me linger for a moment on some aspects of my own process that are, indeed, responsive to the work of Romare Bearden. I must say I have been generous to myself in getting ideas from painters other than Bearden, although they are usually scenes or figurative arrangements on canvas. With Bearden I am struck by the tactile sensuality of his work, the purity of gesture, and especially the subtext of the aggressive, large-as-life humanity of his subject matter. This latter is no small thing when the urgency of destereotyping is so strong it can push one easily into sentimentality. The edge of the razor embedded in Bearden’s work prevents or ought to prevent easy, self-satisfying evaluations of his subject matter. Among the aspects of his work that appeal to me, that one is primary: lack of condescension.

  Another aspect of my own process involves the composition of the text. A layered exercise that I consistently undergo that has more elements in common with painting than literature.

  I need three kinds of information to complete, sometimes even start, a narrative. Once I’ve settled on an idea and the story through which to examine it, I need the structure, the sound, the palette. Not necessarily in that order. The sound of a text clearly involves the musical quality of the dialogue and the language chosen to contextualize it. Elsewhere I have written about my choices for the opening of Beloved, and I repeat those comments here: in reference to that opening—“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”—I was careful to illustrate the rhythm I thought necessary, and the quality of a spoken text: “There is something about numerals that makes them spoken, heard, in this context, because one expects words to read in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the novel, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an inner-ear sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can.” I go on to explain why the second sentence is not one—is instead a dependent clause given the status of a sentence just to mandate a stress on the world “full.” In an effort to understate the strangeness of an infant ghost so the reader will understand its presence as normal as the household does. The remarkable thing being its power (“full”) rather than its existence. In describing at such length the crucial nature of sound to my work, I hoped to focus attention not on a kind of forced poetry or lyricism, but rather on what meaning can be gleaned and communicated from sound, from the aural quality of the text. I only want to suggest that this is more than being influenced by blues or jazz. It is plumbing the music for the meaning that it contains. In other words, the “aesthetic implications” of which Romare Bearden spoke ought to include what is usually absent from aesthetic analysis. Most often the analysis is about how successful the technique is in summoning pleasure, a shocking or moving or satisfying emotional response.

  Seldom does it center on the information, the meaning the artist is communicating by his style, via his aesthetics. It can be said, has been said, that the collage techniques, employed by several modernist artists (Matisse, for example) were taken to new levels by Bearden and reflect the “fractured” life he depicts—an intervention into the flat surface that repudiates as it builds on the cubism of earlier periods. And that collage was representative of the modernist thrust of African American life as well as its insurgency. Both structure and improvisation inform this choice—the essence of African American music. The attraction to me in this technique is how abrupt stops and unexpected liquidity enhance the narrative in ways that a linear “beginning, middle, and en
d” cannot. Thus I recognize that my own abandonment of traditional time sequence (and then, and then) is an effort to capitalize on these modernist trends. And to say something about the layered life—not the fractured or fragmented life of black society, but the layered life of the mind, the imagination, and the way reality is actually perceived and experienced.

  The third, palette, or color, is one of the last and most crucial of my decisions in developing a text. I don’t use color to “prettify” or please, or provide atmospherics, but to imply and delineate the themes within the narrative. Color says something directly or metaphorically. The red, white, and blue strokes at the beginning of Song of Solomon should lie quietly in the mind of the reader as the American flag background the action is commenting on. The withholding of color in Beloved, its repudiation of any color at all until it has profound meaning to the character: Baby Suggs hankering for some; Sethe’s startle when she is able to let it come into view; the drama of one patch of orange in a quilt of bleak greys. These studied distributions of color or its absence, the careful placement of white for its various connotations (the white, rather bridal dress of the figure praying next to Sethe; the dresses of the church ladies at the pie table in Tar Baby), the repetition of a collection of colors chosen to direct the reader to specific and related scenes in Paradise, do not mimic the choices of a Romare Bearden, but are clearly aligned with the process.