0084 | August 12, 2019
Toni Morrison: Her Life in Words
The hosts take a break from their long form discussion about climate change to discuss Toni Morrison, who died on August 5th. “We die,” Morrison said in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language,” she added. “That may be the measure of our lives.”
| C.T. WEBB: 00:18 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, and welcome to The American Age Podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:26 | Hi, I’m Steven G. Fullwood, and I am the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project. And I’m here in Harlem, and it’s about 83 degrees, I think. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:36 | Hey, I’m Seph Rodney. Wow, I just almost forgot my own name [laughter]. I am an editor at the Hyperallergic blog and the recent author of The Personalization of the Museum Visit, which came out from Routledge on May 31st of this year. Yep, that’s it [laughter]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 00:58 | Yeah. I threw everyone off. I forgot to say that I’m speaking to you from Southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 01:03 | Yeah. You were clipped. You caught– yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:05 | And yeah, that was my mistake, and Seph was trying to help me catch my error. |
| S. RODNEY: 01:10 | No, actually I was telling you to turn your volume up but, yeah okay. That’s fine too. I’m in the Bronx y’all. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:16 | And this is to remind everyone that we like to practice a form of what we call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. We are taking a slight detour, an interruption, as death often is, from our typical discussion on climate change. This time we’re on the topic of climate change. And we’re going to talk about Toni Morrison today, who just passed away. And anything that you hear in the media, whether it be this podcast, television, and whether it be the news, the “news,” obviously movies, and the rest, novels, our crafted fictions. Right? I mean this is a pretty sparsely crafted fiction. And we try to be as natural as possible, but of course, the conversation you’re hearing is it not exactly the same as the conversation Seph, and Steve, and I might have if we were meeting at a diner in New York, for example, or meeting for drinks the first night. That human immediacy and intimacy cannot ever be fully captured. But it can be more truthfully rendered in one of those oddities of human invention with genius and art. And that’s something that Toni Morrison, obviously, accomplished with her life. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:53 | And I am going to take a back seat in this podcast because I don’t think– so I am a fan– fan is probably too strong. I respect and have been touched by things that Toni Morrison has written. But I know for a fact she was not as meaningful to me as she was to Seph. And I don’t know Steven as well, but I’ve gotten the impression that Toni Morrison was a pretty meaningful figure for him. So I’m going to do a lot of listening. I mean I have my own things to contribute. But, Steven and Seph, I just kind of like you guys to talk about Toni Morrison. And we had talked about maybe bringing up some of the passages that she wrote. I don’t want to constrain the conversation basically. I want basically to just allow us to talk about someone that obviously meant a great deal to a great many people. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:48 | Seph, do you want to begin or should I, or–? |
| S. RODNEY: 03:50 | I can or you can. I think I would defer to you, Steven, honestly, because I think you know more about Toni Morrison. In fact, in the lead-up to our conversation, you had mentioned that you’d met her. And I have not come close– had not come close to doing that. My only relationship with her was through her writing. So I would love to hear that story. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:15 | Wow, that story, that story. Can I just push that over to the side? Cause I’d like– |
| S. RODNEY: 04:20 | Sure, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure, sure. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:20 | –to sort of, yeah– I felt like if I were called upon, I wanted to sort of just start with a few passages, very short passages, from her Nobel lecture in 1993. Which for me encapsulates a great deal of why I find her amazing, her powers of perception and creativity, really profoundly moving. And so I’d just like to read a couple things for you guys right quick and then kind of move onto something else. So this is, again, from the Nobel lecture in literature in 1993. My signed copy from Toni Morrison in 1993. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 05:00 | Members of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen. Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. I hope you will understand, then, why I begin these remarks with the opening phrase of what must be the oldest sentence in the world, and the earliest one we remember from childhood: once upon a time. Once upon a time, there was an old woman. Blind but wise. Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I’ve heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures. Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise. In the version I know, the woman is the daughter of enslaved black people, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people, she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away. To the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is a source of much amusement. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 06:13 | One day the woman is visited by young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple. They enter her house and ask the one question to which rides solely on her difference from them. A difference they regard as a profound disability, her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “OId woman, in my hand I hold a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” She does not answer. And the question’s repeated, “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?” Still, she does not answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender, or homeland. She only knows their name. Oh, excuse me, she only knows their motive. The old woman’s silence is so long the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally, she speaks, and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.” |
| S. FULLWOOD: 07:32 | Her answer can be taken to mean, if it is dead you have either found it that way, or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility. For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded. Told that they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from the assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised. Speculation on what, other than its own frail body, that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me. But especially so now, thinking as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:35 | It’s pretty awesome. It’s not even finished, but it’s completely awesome because Morrison allows you to enter this particular once-upon-a-time story from both the blind woman and from the children’s perspectives, separately and together. And so I recommend it. It’s available online as text but also as oral. And one of Morrison’s gifts as a storyteller is also her voice. And how she reads. And so I just wanted to begin there because I think what Morrison has done for me is to enter a particular kind of story. We talk a lot about– initially on this podcast, we’ve talked a lot about race and gender and other things. And what Morrison does for me and continues to do for me is to go into a story with your biases, and then you’re caught there. You’re in the brambles, and you have to kind of dislodge yourself because then people show up. And you have to manage vulnerability. You have to manage being wrong, and I like that about her work a lot. |
| S. RODNEY: 09:44 | There’s a line in that that you read, Steven, which was she is both, I think, the law and the transgression. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:55 | And its transgression, yes. |
| S. RODNEY: 09:57 | And its transgression. Right. So I suppose in the back of my mind, I was trying to find a way to weave in the profound memory that I have of reading her work. Again, I’ve never met her. So my go-to response to this moment of collective recollection, of what she means and meant and has meant to us, her readers, her listeners, is to go to that moment when I read Beloved for the first time. And I remember struggling with it. I think I was probably in my early 20s. I may not have been an undergrad yet but may have been making my way back to it. But I remember talking with people about Beloved and saying to them, “I’m struggling with this book.” And I remember some people saying to me, “Yeah, I gave up on it. And I [laughter] can’t do it. I tried, I tried. Didn’t work for me.” And I remember another friend said, “I tried, and it wasn’t until the second or third try that I was able to do it.” That’s the preface. |
| S. RODNEY: 11:14 | The meat of the story for me is getting past the moment of trying. And getting into the story and then realizing, years after the fact of reading it, some of the things that I had read that I hadn’t fully understood. And I don’t know whether these things came to me in conversation or maybe it was just late at night looking up at the ceiling and thinking and then realizing, “Oh, I hadn’t gotten that.” The line about the woman being the law and the transgression, that storyteller, makes me think of this because there’s a moment in Beloved where Sixo has run to meet, in the night– well, walked run to meet the thirty-mile woman. And at some point, he gets caught coming back, right, from the thirty-mile woman. He’s a recalcitrant slave because he has not obeyed. He has disobeyed the master’s orders enough so that they think that he’s essentially a bad bargain. That there is no way that this slave is ever going to learn to keep his place. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:22 | Yeah, he’s going to be independent. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 12:23 | Right. Exactly. In a sense, what they do kind of makes sense in that they realize he will never be a slave because he will never submit. Right? So he’s no good to them as a slave. He’s no good to them as anything else. So they– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:41 | And he’s– |
| S. RODNEY: 12:42 | Go ahead. No, go ahead. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:43 | No, just thinking that he’s an embodied person. He’s not a slave he’s an– |
| S. RODNEY: 12:48 | Precisely. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:48 | He’s an enslaved person who rejects actually just himself. Right? So. Go ahead. I’m sorry just– |
| S. RODNEY: 12:54 | That’s right. He rejects that role so they can do nothing with him, so they decide to kill him. To burn him alive. So they tie him to a stake, and as the flames are licking up, he cries out, “Seven-O, Seven-O.” It was not until years after reading Beloved that I realized, “Oh, he fathered a child. The child is named Seven-O.” So there’s a moment of crying out. In the moment of death he’s hopeful. He’s talking about a legacy that he’s left behind. And there’s something really beautiful and poignant about that moment. Now, that is kind of– there’s something kind of lawful about that to me. There’s something kind of– this is what we do as human beings. We keep our eyes on the prize of legacy and imagine handing something down to generations that will come after us. |
| S. RODNEY: 13:52 | And then there’s another moment in Beloved which again occurred to me years later, or I finally understood years later, which is truly disturbing. And I think part of the reason I didn’t– and this is this transgressions part of it for me. But I think part of the reason I didn’t know it is I was resisting knowing it on some subliminal level. There’s a scene where the men on a chain gang are working some farm somewhere, something. It’s horror the way she describes the conditions these men are kept in while they are working the land. Right? And she says something like, “The white man on horseback come through, and they wake everyone up, or they pull on their chains.” And one man says to one of the slaves, who’s on his knees, he says, “You want breakfast, nigger?” |
| S. RODNEY: 14:52 | And she doesn’t describe this explicitly. But what essentially happens – and again it took me years to figure this out – is that one of the white men– or she describes the situation that happens consistently, and says that in that moment the black man, who’s basically fellating this white man, might have the chance to just bite that phallus right off, and be whipped to death or stoned to death or killed in some way. But he would take that man’s manhood with him or something like that. I remember not fully grokking this, and then when it came to me, I was like, “Oh my God.” That is such a– I’m kind of speechless. It’s such a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around that. But it makes sense in some ways that a man would do that to another man, not for pleasure. Right. He’s not– |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:03 | That’s power. |
| S. RODNEY: 16:03 | –asking him to suck him off for pleasure. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 16:05 | No, that’s right. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 16:06 | It’s pure power. I can demean this other embodied human being in this way to make them not an embodied human being. Right? To just make them this hole that I can fuck. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 16:20 | And not have any indication, maybe later, maybe some other kind of way, that they are denigrating themselves. To really feel like what is it that you need this thing for, right? So– |
| S. RODNEY: 16:34 | So that was a really difficult moment when I came to that realization. I thought, “Oh, that’s right, human beings do do this to each other.” |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:46 | And one of the great talking– I opened the podcast with the talk of fictions. And stories have to always leave things out. Right? They have to leave details out. And sometimes that’s just as important. Not sometimes, it’s often more important than what’s included. And what was left out of the American story were black lives. I mean these were, depending on your legislative perspective and where you fall in history, they weren’t fully human. They were a problem. They were an economic resource. But for the mainstream culture, they were not a story. Right? They were not these fully embodied characters, the thirty-mile woman. And one of the great– and this fiction was used intentionally to craft the narrative of American exceptionalism in the 18th and 19th century. Namely, that what made America unique was its willingness to die for freedom. So it was willing to risk life and limb to cast off British imperialism and that they, therefore, deserved their freedom. America, and we should always understand that early story as being (white men), right, America, the white men deserved their freedom because they were willing to die. And the story that was told of slaves– well, they were slaves because they wanted to be slaves. If they really didn’t want to be slaves they wouldn’t– |
| S. RODNEY: 18:30 | They wouldn’t have been. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:30 | That’s right. They’d be willing to die. Of course, we now know that that is– there’s an element of truth in that, right? If you want to resist your circumstance, you will not be broken, except the truth is they weren’t. There were hundreds if not thousands of slave rebellions. There were hundreds if not thousands of moments of resistance that are being described here. There were hundreds, probably millions over the course of the several hundred years that Africans– |
| S. RODNEY: 19:02 | From the shores Africa, on the boat, to the shores, every single moment– |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:07 | That’s right. They never– |
| S. RODNEY: 19:08 | –there was some level of rebellion or resistance. Absolutely, yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:09 | That’s right. They never laid down. They never laid down. And that is the lie that was right at the center of American exceptionalism and has morphed into the lie of sort of deserved privilege. Right? This sort of idea of Social Darwinism or whatever. And I don’t want to get too far off track. Writers like Morrison reveal that lie in their storytelling. They reveal that gap, that aporia, in the story that America tried to tell of itself. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:48 | I want to go very briefly back to what you said, Seph about– I mean, Seph and Travis, about the idea of leaving things out because that’s where you can get in. That’s where the reader needs to come in. That’s where he, she, or they bring in their own sensibilities and their own this. Like you, Seph, I had a problem with the book when I first read it. But I was in college, so we had opportunities to sit in class and talk about the book, which gave me more space for the book. But I remember being haunted by that book, the first time I read it I was laying up in bed going, “What the fuck?” It was so disturbing and her so language so crisp. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:24 | And she said in an interview, years ago, “If they could live it, I could definitely write about it.” Because the people were asking how could she do it. The book started I think– she started the trilogy which became Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise years later. There was a story about a woman named Margaret Garner who the story Beloved was based on. A woman, I want to say Kentucky, who had escaped with her husband and three of her children to Ohio. And “the slave catchers” came and tried to retrieve her. And she killed one of her children and was on her way to killing another. And then tried, on the way back to Kentucky, tried to drown herself and her child. And so it was what they called a cause célèbre because they were interested in– she couldn’t be tried for murder because it was stolen property. And so they were really kind of pushing that– abolitionists were really pushing at this thing to have her tried as a murderer. And it never worked. And Morrison said that– and it’s included in the book that Morrison published in 1972 called The Black Book, which was basically 300 years of scrapbook of African American experience, essentially. And so she included that story. And she said that it haunted her for a while. But she didn’t want to get too close to it because she needed to be able to invent and to really pull out what that story was like. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 21:50 | And so the American experiment largely, at the root of it is freedom for me. This idea of freedom, from whom and why? Right? But that whole space that– she even talked about other parts where she’s like, “I don’t write my sexy into books, I leave space for your sexy to get in. Because your sexy is much more sexier than mine.” And I remember being pulled by that. When I would read other writers, who were trying to constantly tell me what to think and how to feel and all that. And I was like, “Just lay it out. Don’t tell me who the bad guys are or the good women are. I’ll figure that out.” I’m always going to figure that out. As a reader, you have to– as a writer, you have to trust your reader. And I think that she trusts her readers in the way that you kind of described that aha-moment, staring at the ceiling going, “Oh, this here, this means this to me. I think I know what she meant now.” And I think her books require, along with Baldwin books and a lot of other writers that I love, whose books I read over and over again, you get something different out of it when you change and how you develop, so. It’s a gift. It’s a gift. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:54 | And I also want to add on to that because I think we’ve done, in some ways, the typical thing of reading Toni Morrison as a particular kind of insightful interlocutor about the American story. I also want to talk about Toni Morrison as a particular kind of sensual writer because she’s done things with language that, at the time that I read her, I didn’t really know were possible. And specifically I’m thinking about the moment that, is it George or, it’s the man who comes to her house who she’s known in her previous life. And they kind of have an affair. And there’s a moment when he’s standing at the stove with her– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:47 | Oh, and he’s shirt– |
| S. RODNEY: 23:48 | –and I think she’s cooking. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:49 | He’s shirtless and the back– Oh. Yeah, I know which scene you’re talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:51 | And he talks, and he slowly unzips her dress in the back, and he sees the chokeberry tree. And he starts to trace the lines of those scars with his hands. And he talks about her like– Morrison talks about her making, and I’m just forgetting these characters names right now, I’m sorry, but. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:13 | That’s all good. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:14 | Making this dish, and I think she’s using flour. And Morrison describes the salt tears coming down her face and falling into whatever it is she’s making. And it’s such a– the scene is so wrenching because it is so beautiful, and it is so human just this moment of someone touching someone else’s scars. But it’s also really difficult for me or was really difficult for me because the scars mean that this woman has been whipped so extravagantly that scar tissue’s literally created a tree on her back. There’s so much happening in that scene that is just diametrically opposed. It’s this beauty and this tenderness and this ugliness and degradation, and it’s incredibly hard to read. And as soon as you’re done, you want to fucking read it again. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 25:17 | It was Paul D that came to her house. |
| S. RODNEY: 25:20 | Paul D, yes. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 25:20 | Yeah, that’s when she knew it was Sweet Home. That sensuality and that– she says she writes on various levels, so it didn’t occur to me, I actually looked up Paul D, that his last name was Garner, which is Margaret Garner’s name, right? And I was like, “Oh, look at you, look at that,” I just finally get this after 30 years. And so what I love is at her best, to me, she’s doing that kind of thing that you’re talking about, Seph, at her best. I was thinking about what she did for me, like I said she offered me a different way of thinking about different things. So she says, “I don’t write out of my biases. I write out of what I don’t know.” And so a friend of mine recently, after she passed, he goes– well, he hadn’t read much of her work, and he goes, “Well, I was told that she hated men.” And I think– |
| S. RODNEY: 26:20 | What? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:21 | Well, but here it is, right? So because I’ve been through this argument, I don’t know, a gillion times with people. |
| S. RODNEY: 26:26 | Oh God. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:27 | And it’s mainly with people who don’t read her, so they have no point of reference. It’s just that they’re telling me that someone else said, that someone else said, game of telephone, I don’t know. So what I said was– and so in Paradise, the first few lines are, “They shoot the white girl first, but the rest of them they can take their time.” There’s 17 miles between Ruby and this town, and so whatever. And I said, “Well, what Paradise is–” because Morrison was trying to figure out why people do violence to each other. And so what she did was in Paradise, in short, there’s this town called Ruby that was founded by these formerly enslaved people who had been turned away from towns called Fair. This is after reconstruction, I mean after the Civil War, after Emancipation, they’re walking along, and then they establish Ruby. And Ruby has no hotels. It has nothing. You are supposed to go by Ruby. You’re not supposed to stop at Ruby. And so there is– Ruby is so self-contained. And so bent on starting this notion of paradise, that when they’re outside of Ruby, there’s this convent that Morrison describes. She goes, “Well, there’s just one letter away from–” what’s it? “We’re a convent, and it’s the witch’s coven.” Yeah. Something like that it’s just one or two letters away from such and such. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 27:50 | So what it is is these women, who have been pariahs in various parts of that area, came to live at this convent. Where she goes, “Arapaho girls had been taught to forget who they were.” Right? Because Morrison likes to slip these little lines in, where in terms of the geo space or whatever that you’re at. So in short, when they go to shoot the white girl– they shoot the white girl first. Morrison said, “I deliberately didn’t want race to be this thing.” Right? Because she was thinking about how people do violence, for whatever reason, and what was it like? What was it like for an upstanding man in his community in Ruby to join in on a mob of men going to shoot what they think is the reason why their town is failing? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 28:37 | And I remember reading the first hundred pages of that book when I first moved to New York City. And I think because I was going through culture shock, right, I was constantly, “Uptown, uptown where?” on a train, that I didn’t get it. And I reread the book later, and it’s like, “Oh God, this is amazing.” And I was a big fan of Jazz, the prior novel. But Beloved pushes– I mean, excuse me, Paradise pushes the pedestal of the idea of Paradise on its head as well. Paradise, who’s included? Who’s not included? Why do you even need a paradise? She said she was going to call the book War but that she really kind of wanted to get at this idea. But the criticism of Morrison and other black women writers, and I’m sure white women writers and anybody who writes against what people think they should be writing about, the first thing is, you hate men. And for me, you can take case by case or whatever, but I never got that Morrison wrote out of that. She says, “I don’t write out of a particular ideology. I’m writing because I’m interested in finding out something. Either I have a line at the beginning of the book or the end of the book or some idea, and then I hope that something comes to inform it.” And so yeah, I mean I just– Paradise is so worth your time. It’s so worth your time. |
| C.T. WEBB: 29:51 | I had never heard Morrison encapsulated that way, that she hates men. That is definitely not my experience of reading her. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 30:06 | That’s a lazy critique. It’s a very lazy not a really interested in her work kind of critique to me too. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 30:12 | You had said, “Why do we need a paradise?” And it tripped the one quotation from Morrison that I wanted to share, that’s also from her Nobel Prize lecture. And we invent paradise because of death. We want a place where that doesn’t happen, and that’s not the reality of our lives. And towards the end of her Nobel Prize speech for literature, she says, “Word work is sublime because it is generative. It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference, the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Kafka is I think who said that, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” And so Morrison is very, I think, sort of self-consciously placing herself in a kind of literary canon which she clearly belongs in. As does any writer that sort of tackles those themes and is in conversation with other writers. |
| C.T. WEBB: 31:24 | And at the heart of it, this is a topic that is very generative for me. Which is that when you dig down and you look at, for me, any of the writers that have really grabbed me whether they be poets, novelists, intellectual historians, they understand that that germ at the root of all these things that we do and make is our anxiety about death and it’s interruption and what it takes away from us. And why I wanted to do the podcast to interrupt, because death interrupts all of it. Right? I mean as crazy as the country is right now, as unmoored, imagine if Donald Trump just– and I don’t mean it in a fantastic way, and hopefully no one picks up on this podcast and, “Oh, he’s advocating–” but if Donald Trump were to just drop dead today, our entire narrative, what we are organizing ourselves around politically and contesting would shift and change. And that is the nature of death. It’s the great arbiter and leveler. And in this instance, it caused us to recall a worthwhile life. And it’s talking about– and a beautiful life. And yeah, anyway, so. I’d like to give you both the last word and sort of whatever you’d like to say about Toni Morrison. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:04 | I defer. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:04 | There’s so much to say. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:05 | I defer to you, Steve. I defer to you, Steven. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:08 | Yeah, I’ve been talking this entire podcast because I love her way so much. And so thank you for that opportunity and the platform. I just want to say that I think that for anyone listening to this podcast if they’re interested in Toni Morrison, you would do well by reading her fiction but read it slowly. And if you’re the kind of reader who can read multiple things at once, I’d also recommend reading her interviews. Where I get a lot of joy out of reading her fiction and having an uninterrupted space where I’m just imagining what she’s talking about, having that conversation with her in the book, I do like hearing her voice. And I do like hearing her think about the craft of writing and the responsibilities writers have, or artists have, in general, to go to work. To do the work during hard times and tell difficult stories. And the book I’d recommend first would not be The Bluest Eye, which is her first novel. I would recommend Sula, a story of friendship. And it’s a very succinct and beautiful work of fiction. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:17 | [music] Nice. |
| S. RODNEY: 34:18 | Nice, I like that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:19 | Thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for the conversation, Steven and Seph. And I’ll speak to you guys soon. |
| S. RODNEY: 34:26 | Thank you. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 34:27 | Thank you. |
References
First referenced at 04:20
Toni Morrison
“Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.” Amazon