Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  MORRISON: I mean, you know, the intimacy and the distance that is probably—had been historically much more complicated in the South than in the North, where there was a lot of illusion and delusion and evasion, I mean, you know, you could sort of hide behind very virulent racism for a lot in the North because of the way in which it was constructed. In the South, it was almost impossible to do that.

  MOYERS: I don’t mean this to be a trick question, it just occurs to me, though, is it conceivable that you could write a novel in which blacks are not center stage?

  MORRISON: Absolutely.

  MOYERS: You think the public would let you, because the expectations are you made such a—you’ve achieved such fame and made such a contribution by writing about black people in your novels that they now expect you to write about black people.

  MORRISON: I will, but I won’t identify them as such. That’s the difference. There are two moments in Beloved in which I tried to do it, in which I set up a situation in which two people are talking, two black people. And some other people enter the scene, and they’re never identified as black or white. But the reader knows instantly. Not because I use the traditional language of stereotype. There are two moments, one when Pauldie and Sapphire are walking down the street and he touches her shoulder to lead her off of the sidewalk onto the ground, because three women are walking this way. That’s all, but you know who that is. There’s another moment when he’s sort of in despair, talking to a friend, and a man rides up on a horse and says, “where is, I don’t know what her name is, Valerie?” and he calls a woman by her first name. “Doesn’t she live around here somewhere?” And you can tell by the reactions of the black men that he is a white man, but I don’t have to say it. So my thing that I really want to do and expect to do is to do what you say, but I am not writing about white people. I will be writing about black people. But I won’t have to do what they did in all these 19th-century novels. They always had to say it. I mean, you couldn’t say, “Jupiter walked in the room,” or “Mary.” You said “the Negro,” “the slave,” “the black,” the this. You know, it always required its own modifier. You take the modifiers out, you see. If you had—if Willa Cather had entitled her book Safira and Nancy, that changes the whole book. I mean, the strategies are different, the power relationships are different. But she said Safira and the Slave Girl. She has no first name, you know, in the title.

  MOYERS: In fact, as you talk, I remember now, back to my own reading in those periods, that you were always called, “the something.”

  MORRISON: That’s right.

  MOYERS: Yeah. There was not a name, there was an object, a noun.

  MORRISON: No name, that’s right.

  MOYERS: “The Negro,” “the slave,” “the Negress.”

  MORRISON: That’s right. Exactly. That’s right. Or “my.” I challenged my students last year if they could find a 19th-century novel in which a black male appeared and was called a man, without the possessive pronoun or when he was not in the company of a black female, in which case they were distinguishing gender. Just find one reference in which somebody says black man, and I’ll take you to dinner, I said.

  MOYERS: Did you have to pay out any—

  MORRISON: Uh-uh, not yet.

  MOYERS: —you haven’t.

  MORRISON: Uh-uh. But if I write a book and I can do that, whatever it will mean to people who read it, they won’t be confused. That will be part of my job. But can you think what it would mean for me and my relationship to language and to text to be able to do that without having to always explain to the reader the race of the characters. Even if, in my mind, they are all black, or African Americans, or whatever the word is at the time. If I don’t have to say that.

  MOYERS: [voice-over] From the New York Public Library, this has been a conversation with Toni Morrison. I’m Bill Moyers.

  THE SALON INTERVIEW: TONI MORRISON

  INTERVIEW BY ZIA JAFFREY

  SALON

  FEBRUARY 3, 1998

  I met Toni Morrison at her apartment in SoHo. She hung up my coat and offered me a drink, and we settled in for a conversation. I was immediately aware of the gentleness in that room—her listening presence. Morrison’s seventh novel, Paradise, had just been published by Knopf, and throughout our talk her phone rang continually with news—from her son, her sister, a friend—of the reviews the book was getting. An unhurried and thoughtful speaker, she took it all in stride. Paradise—which opens with the startling sentence “They shoot the white girl first”—involves the murder of several women in the 1970s by a group of black men, intent on preserving the honor of their small Oklahoma town; they see the women as bad, a wayward influence on their moral lives. It’s an intense, deeply felt book that easily ranks with her best work.

  Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. She attended Howard University, then received a master’s degree in English at Cornell University, where she wrote a thesis on William Faulkner. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1969, followed by Sula in 1973. Then came Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Tar Baby (1981), the play Dreaming Emmett (1985), and Beloved (1987), which received the Pulitzer in 1988. Her novel Jazz appeared in 1992, and in 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Last year she was the co-editor, along with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, of a volume called Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. An editor at Random House for many years, Morrison now teaches fiction writing at Princeton University.

  ZIA JAFFREY: Do you read your reviews?

  TONI MORRISON: Oh, yes.

  JAFFREY: What did you think of Michiko Kakutani’s strongly negative review of Paradise in the New York Times?

  MORRISON: Well, I would imagine there would be some difference of opinion on what the book is like or what it meant. Some people are maybe more invested in reading it from a certain point of view. The daily review in the New York Times was extremely unflattering about this book. And I thought, more to the point, it was not well written. The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

  JAFFREY: You don’t feel you need to protect yourself from listening to critics?

  MORRISON: You can’t.

  JAFFREY: You need to know what’s being said?

  MORRISON: I know there are authors who find it healthier for them, in their creative process, to just not look at any reviews, or bad reviews, or they have them filtered, because sometimes they are toxic for them. I don’t agree with that kind of isolation. I’m very much interested in how African American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It’s been a long, hard struggle, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done. I’m especially interested in how women’s fiction is reviewed and understood. And the best way to do that is to read my own reviews, for reasons that are not about how I write. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the work. I’m not entangled at all in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it, how I succeeded at doing it. So it doesn’t have that kind of effect on me at all. But I’m very interested in the responses in general. And there have been some very curious and interesting things in the reviews so far.

  JAFFREY: Paradise has been called a “feminist novel.” Would you agree with that?

  MORRISON: Not at all. I would never write any “ist.” I don’t write “ist” novels.

  JAFFREY: Why distance oneself from feminism?

  MORRISON: In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe
[those categories]. I think it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.

  JAFFREY: Because the book has so many women characters, it’s easy to label.

  MORRISON: Yes. That doesn’t happen with white male writers. No one says Solzhenitsyn is writing only about those Russians, I mean, what is the matter with him? Why doesn’t he write about Vermont? If you have a book full of men, and minor female characters—

  JAFFREY: No one even notices. No one blinks that Hemingway has this massive problem with women.

  MORRISON: No one blinks at all.

  JAFFREY: Many of the male characters in Paradise have severe problems. I was wondering if you yourself identified with any of them as morally strong characters?

  MORRISON: I suppose the one that is closest to my own sensibility about moral problems would be the young minister, Reverend Maisner. He’s struggling mightily with the tenets of his religion, the pressures of the civil rights, the dissolution of the civil rights.

  JAFFREY: And he’s worried about the young.

  MORRISON: And the young. He’s very concerned that they’re being cut off, at a time when, in fact, he probably was right, there was some high expectations laid out for them, and suddenly there was a silence, and they were cut off.

  JAFFREY: He’s like Lev in Anna Karenina.

  MORRISON: Right.

  JAFFREY: Struggling with the moral —

  MORRISON: He’s not positive about all of it, but he wants to open up the discussion. He wants to do this terrible thing, which is listen to the children. Twice it’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

  JAFFREY: Paradise has also been called a “difficult” book.

  MORRISON: That always strikes me—it makes me breathless—to be told that this is “difficult” writing. That nobody in the schools is going to want to talk about all of these issues that are not going on now.

  JAFFREY: Do they say that about Don DeLillo’s Mao II, because it involves cults?

  MORRISON: No, there’s a different kind of slant, I think. Different expectations. Different yearnings, I think, for black literature.

  JAFFREY: You mean, they want you to step into what they’ve already heard?

  MORRISON: And say, once again, “It’s going to be all right, nobody was to blame.” And I’m not casting blame. I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

  JAFFREY: Did you have any relationship to the word “feminism” when you were growing up, or did you have a sense of yourself first as black and then as female?

  MORRISON: I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. You know, my mother would walk down to a theater in that little town that had just opened, to make sure that they were not segregating the population—black on this side, white on that. And as soon as it opened up, she would go in there first, and see where the usher put her, and look around and complain to someone. That was just daily activity for her, and the men as well. So it never occurred to me that she should withdraw from that kind of confrontation with the world at large. And the fact that she was a woman wouldn’t deter her. She was interested in what was going to happen to the children who went to the movies—the black children—and her daughters, as well as her sons. So I was surrounded by people who took both of those roles seriously. Later, it was called “feminist” behavior. I had a lot of trouble with those definitions, early on. And I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote Sula, really, based on this theoretically brand-new idea, which was: Women should be friends with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really “sisters,” in that sense.

  JAFFREY: Do you keep the company of female writers? Do you find a need for that?

  MORRISON: I really have very few friends who are writers. I have some close friends who are writers, but that’s because they’re such extraordinary people. The writing is almost incidental to the friendship, I think. It was interesting to me that when books by black women first began to be popular, there was a non-articulated, undiscussed, umbrella rule that seemed to operate, which was: Never go into print damning one another. We were obviously free to loathe each other’s work. But no one played into the “who is best.” There was this marvelous absence of competition among us. And every now and then I’d see a review—a black woman reviewer take another black woman writer, a critic usually, on—but usually it’s in that field of cultural criticism. Because it was always understood that this was a plateau that had a lot of space on it.

  JAFFREY: Have you noticed a change in the intelligence of the criticism of your books over the years?

  MORRISON: I have. Over time, they’ve become much more intelligent, they’ve become much more sensitive, they’ve given up some of the laziness they had before. There was a time when my books, as well as everybody else’s books, were viewed as sociological revelations. Is this the best view of the black family, or not? I remember once, in the New Yorker, being reviewed, I think it was Beloved, and the reviewer began the review and spent a lot of time talking about Bill Cosby’s television show—the kind of black family to be compared with the family in Beloved. It was so revolting. And that notion—once I was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, with two other black writers. The three of us, who don’t write anything alike, were lumped together by color, and then the reviewer ended by deciding which of the three books was the best. And she chose one, which could have been [the best], but the reason it was the best was because it was more like “real” black people. That’s really discouraging. So if you have that kind of reduction to the absurd, you just have to keep on trying.

  JAFFREY: Do you see a place for gay literature, Indian literature, black literature, black women’s literature—in a positive way?

  MORRISON: Oh, absolutely. It’s changing everything. They may take longer; the marketing shapes how we understand these books. Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers. I had a student who was Native American and I told him, “You’re going to have trouble getting this book accepted, because there are no moccasins, there are no tomahawks.” And he did. He had enormous trouble. I mean, submissions, I don’t even want to repeat the number, but he finally did have this book published, and you know, it’s a first novel—it got excellent reviews—but the point was that the rejections, I know, were based on the inability to think of Native Americans, in this particular case, as Americans.

  JAFFREY: You teach writing at Princeton. Can writing can be taught?

  MORRISON: I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t expect to teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

  JAFFREY: Or confidence?

  MORRISON: Well, that I can’t do much about. I’m very brutal about that. I just tell them: You have to do this, I don’t want to hear whining about how it’s so difficult. Oh, I don’t tolerate any of that because most of the people who’ve ever written are under enormous duress, myself being one them. So whining about how they can’t get it is ridiculous. What I can do very well is what I used to do, which is edit. I can follow their train of thought, see where their language is going, suggest other avenues. I can do that, and I can do that very well. I lik
e to get in the manuscript.

  JAFFREY: How did you juggle being an editor, being a writer and being a mother?

  MORRISON: When I look back at those years, when I was going into an office every day, when my children were small, I don’t really understand how all that came about. Why was I doing all these things at once? Partly, it was because I felt I was the breadwinner, so I had to do everything that would put me in a position of independence to take care of my family. But the writing was mine, so that I stole. I stole away from the world.

  JAFFREY: So when did you write?

  MORRISON: Very, very early in the morning, before they got up. I’m not very good at night. I don’t generate much. But I’m a very early riser, so I did that, and I did it on weekends. In the summers, the kids would go to my parents in Ohio, where my sister lives—my whole family lives out there—so the whole summer was devoted to writing. And that’s how I got it done. It seems a little frenetic now, but when I think about the lives normal women live—of doing several things—it’s the same. They do anything that they can. They organize it. And you learn how to use time. You don’t have to learn how to wash the dishes every time you do that. You already know how to do that. So, while you’re doing that, you’re thinking. You know, it doesn’t take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, where you can’t do anything anyway. Well, you can read the paper, but you’re sort of in there. And then I would think about, well, would she do this? And then sometimes I’d really get something good. By the time I’d arrived at work, I would jot it down so I wouldn’t forget. It was a very strong interior life that I developed for the characters, and for myself, because something was always churning. There was no blank time. I don’t have to do that anymore. But still, I’m involved in a lot of things, I mean, I don’t go out very much.

  JAFFREY: Who is Lois? Your book is dedicated to Lois.

  MORRISON: My sister. The one who just called. [Laughter]