VIDEO: AfriPOP! Picks for Sauti za Busara 2013 > AfriPOP! »

AfriPOP! Picks for

Sauti za Busara 2013


The 10th edition of the Sauti za Busara (Sounds of Wisdom) music festival starts today and over 400 musicians from East Africa and elsewhere will serenade music lovers over the weekend until the 17th February 2013. Held annually on the quaint, rustic island of Zanzibar, Sauti za Busara boasts one of the most diverse and expansive musical line-ups known to African music festivals. Hundreds of musicians, artists and art lovers have converged on the island in a dazzling spectacle of African music and culture. The main shows are supplemented by several smaller fringe performances in Zanzibar’s capital town. For people living outside of East Africa, especially in the southernmost tip of the continent, it may not get as much press as that other music festival in Cape Town. Here are our picks of must-sees for the 2013 festival:

Nathalie Natiembé
Réunionese musician Nathalie Natiembé’s voice could crumble a mountain. Her chilling, commanding voice over funky could-be jazz, could-be maloya, could-be reggae sounds, have attracted fans the world over. She sings mostly in Creole and her performances are as theatrical as Freddie Mercury’s, yet her music is as arresting as a well-made thriller. Watch her perform Galo at Sakifo 2010 for a taste.

Cheikh Lo

The Senegalese musician is perhaps one of the more popular and enduring acts on the Sauti za Busara list. He has been making music for as long as anyone can remember, playing his hand in several bands until he eventually pursued a solo career. Apart from singing and writing his own songs, Cheikh Lo is a talented drummer, percussionist and guitarist. Watch him perform Sankara live.

Khaira Arby

After the recent upheaval in northern Mali, Khaira Arby “the Voice of the North” was banned on Malian radio. She was not the only one. Militant Islamists in the country have banned everything they claim is against Sharia or Islamic law and that includes music. This forced several artists to flee the north and ‘desert blues’ singer Arby was forced to leave her home in Timbuktu. Here is her video Aigna

Burkina Electric

Also performing at the festival are six African and European performers, collectively known as Burkina Electric. The members are from Burkina Faso, Germany and Austria. Burkina Electric’s music has been described as a very eccentric combination of modern electronic sounds and traditional Burkinabe melodies and rhymes. They also have dancers in the group who will certainly thrill audiences during the festival.
Here is a video of their song Ligdi 

Also take a listen to this preview of the 2013 show by Pystol Pete

<div> <div style="clear:both; height:3px;"></div><p style="display:block; font-size:12px; font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin:0; padding: 3px 4px; color:#02a0c7; width:472px;">Sauti za Busara Festival preview 2013 - words and music published on Mambo Magazine<span> by </span>Pystol Pete<span> on </span> Mixcloud</p><div style="clear:both; height:3px;"></div></div>

Sauti za Busara Festival preview 2013 - words and music published on Mambo Magazine by Pystol Pete on Mixcloud

 

 

For those of you who are lucky enough to attend, you can download the festival programme from the Sauti za Busara website 

 

PUB: Passages North Thomas J. Hruska Memorial Nonfiction Prize > Poets & Writers

Passages North

Thomas J. Hruska Memorial Nonfiction Prize

Deadline:
March 22, 2013

Entry Fee: 
$15

E-mail address: 
passages@nmu.edu

A prize of $1,000 is given biennially for an essay. Elena Passarello will judge. Submit an essay of up to 7,500 words with a $15 entry fee by March 22. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Passages North, Northern Michigan University, 1401 Presque Isle Avenue, Marquette, MI 49855. Jennifer Howard, Editor. 

via pw.org

 

PUB: Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition > Poets & Writers

Atlanta Review

International Poetry Competition

Deadline:
March 1, 2013

Entry Fee: 
$5

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Atlanta Review is given annually for a poem. In addition, twenty entrants will be published in Atlanta Review. Dan Veach will judge. Submit a poem of any length with a $5 entry fee ($3 for each additional poem) by mail or via the online submission system by March 1. Send an SASE or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Atlanta Review, International Poetry Competition, P.O. Box 8248, Atlanta, GA 31106. Dan Veach, Editor.

via pw.org

 

PUB: BBC National Short Story Award > Booktrust

BBC National Short Story Award 2013

Latest update 'The BBC National Short Story Award 2013 launches with a call for entries and new judging panel'

 

After a year spanning the globe for the finest international talent, the BBC National Short Story Award returns for 2013 to celebrate the best in homegrown short fiction.

Submissions for the Award, now in its eighth year, are open from today. Mariella Frostrup will chair the judging panel for the Award, one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000. The runner-up receives £3,000 and three further shortlisted authors £500 each.

 

We are now accepting entries for the 2013 prize

The Award is now open for submissions from publishers, agents and published authors from the UK. The closing date for entries is 11 March 2013 at 10am.

 

Read the terms and conditions and entry guidelines carefully and submit your story in a Word document, along with a completed entry form. The maximum length for the short story is 8,000 words.

 

Download the BBC National Short Story Award 2013 entry form

 

Download the BBC National Short Story Award 2013 terms and conditions/entry guidelines

 

Judging panel

The judges are:

 

  • Mariella Frostrup, journalist, television presenter and arts critic
  • Novelist and short story writer, Mohsin Hamid
  • Arvon tutor, novelist and short story writer, Peter Hobbs
  • Deborah Moggach, screenwriter, novelist and short story writer
  • Editor of Readings, BBC Radio, Di Speirs

     

The shortlist will be announced on Friday 20 September with each of the five stories broadcast on BBC Radio 4 the following week. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 8 October. As in previous years, the five stories will also be published in a special anthology and be available for free audio download.

 

The BBC National Short Story Award, managed in partnership with Booktrust, continues to serve as a reminder of the power of the short story and to celebrate a literary form that is proving ever more versatile in the twenty first century. The genre is enjoyed not just on the page, on air and increasingly on every sort of screen, but also in flash fiction events, short story festivals and slams. The short story has moved beyond the revival of recent years and is now experiencing a golden age. BBC Radio 4 is the world's leading broadcaster of short stories and a staunch and long-time supporter of the form. Short stories are broadcast every week attracting over a million listeners.

 

 

VIDEO: A Week of Terence Nance Short Films [Day 2 of 7] - Melissa Laveaux + (Peace)


MELISSA LAVEAUX • Postman

Music Video for Mélissa Laveaux's album Dying is a Wild Night

Written and Directed by Terence Nance
Shot by Shawn Peters
Produced by Chanelle Pearson and Derrick Small
Choreography by Justina Gaddy


A collaborative short film made with Hank Willis Thomas for Films4Peace, an international commission of films for world peace day.

Created by Terence Nance and Hank Willis Thomas
Produced by Natasha Logan
Starring Kambui Olujimi
Heavy lifted by Chris Myers

Shot on an island in Maine

hankwillisthomas.com • films4peace.org • terencenance.com • kambuiolujimi.com

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Heineken Affinity Award Profile:

Terence Nance

This is part of our series of posts spotlighting the ten Heineken Affinity Award winners. Read all the profiles so far.

An initiative through our Tribeca All Access® program, the Affinity Award celebrates emerging and established African-American filmmakers by creating further awareness and dialogue around their work. Learn more here. Along with the Affinity Award winners receiving an initial grant, you can now vote for one filmmaker to win a $20,000 cash award, which will be announced during the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Vote here.

Dallas, Texas-born Terence Nance has been known for his work in the art world, in music and with his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, he's now becoming recognized as one of the latest filmmaking talents to emerge from Brooklyn.

With his mother having been an actress, his father a photographer and his uncle a jazz musician, the arts are in Nance's blood, which led him to study visual arts followed by making shorts and doing music under the name Terence Etc.

However, filmmaking may be this multihyphenate's calling as Oversimplification has brought Nance attention in the indie film world with a selection to Sundance's New Frontier section in 2012, Nance being selected to Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" last summer and the film winning the "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" award at the 2012 Gotham Awards.

Oversimplification will be in theaters and VOD in April; Nance is also in the works on his next feature.

Asked what he wants audiences to get out of his filmmaking, Nance says…

"I want my audiences to feel like they have seen the possibilities of the media expanded in my work. I know when I see a Terrence Malick film or a Kubrick film the most important thing I take away is a sense of inspiration rooted in the idea that the possibilities of what film is capable of as a medium have been expanded."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PHOTO ESSAY: In Uganda, gay people are forced into exile > Dynamic Africa

Brian is the leader of the gay community project, Icebreakers. The project runs a free clinic for LGBT people, and a small shelter for those faced with homelessness.

In Uganda, gay people are being forced into exile.

A year ago, Kampala had several gay-friendly bars and clubs. Today, there is only one gay bar left, and its visitors are certain that it will close when the bill is passed.

Cleo is a transsexual woman. She lives in less danger than some of her peers because she has received hormonal treatment to enhance her feminine appearance.

'Bad Black' is a transsexual man who has struggled to make a living as a sex worker since his family threw him out of their home because of his sexuality.

Ema and Simon are a couple living in a shelter for gay people in Kampala. Their families shunned them when they found out they were gay.

In Uganda, gay people are being forced into exile. If a new bill becomes law, homosexuality will be punishable by death – which means many people are choosing to leave and seek asylum elsewhere. With the vote on the country’s anti-homosexuality bill set to become public in the coming days, photographer Mathias Christensen met gay people in Uganda who fear the changing of the law.

Gay people in Uganda: love on the run 

by Rasmus Thirup Beck 

(via Guardian)

“Five police officers force three young men out of their one-room slum dwelling in Kampala, with no explanation. As they are dragged down the slum’s main shopping street, their neighbours’ hateful shouts make their “crime” all too clear: “Beat those gays up!” “Kill those monsters!” “Give them what they deserve!”

Threats were also issued – threats they had heard before:

“We’ll burn down your house!”

After two days in a small, dirty prison cell they are released. Now they’ve gone underground, and hope to gain asylum in another country.

“We don’t dare to live here any more. We have felt unsafe for a long time and it only gets worse. It’s all the talk about that law that agitates people. If it is passed I am sure they will burn down the house,” says one, a 23-year-old transsexual who prefers to be called “Bad Black” for safety reasons.

The law he refers to is the so-called “Kill the Gays” bill, which is set to become reality in Uganda within days. It is already illegal to commit a homosexual act in the country, but a unified parliament now supports a tightening of the law, which, among other things, will make it punishable by death to be a “serial offender”.

The parliamentarian behind the bill is David Bahati. He describes homosexuality as an evil that has to be fought. He also says that he and his peers “do not hate the homosexuals but the sin in them”.

Bahati’s reference to sin reveals the direct connection between Uganda’s politicians and a group of very influential pastors. One of these pastors is Moses Solomon Male, who travels the country presenting his talk, Understanding the Challenges of Homosexuality (Sodomy).

“Those homosexuals … They call it anal sex. It ruins the anus. And they say they enjoy it,” said Male in a recent speech to Sunday-school pupils in a Kampala suburb. He also described the cornerstone of both the pastors’ and the politicians’ argument against homosexuals: That they are “recruiting” innocents to their side – especially children.

LGBT rights advocates are doing their best to challenge these views – and the bill. One of these, transsexual activist Pepe Julian Onziema, has courageously come out with his message as well as his sexuality. Homosexuality is not something you become, it is something you are, he stresses.

“The only thing we can do is to try to inform as many people as possible about how we’re human beings just like them – just with different sexual preferences,” he explains.” 

All photographs taken by Mathias Christensen.

 

VIDEO: Happy Birthday Audre Lorde

AUDRE LORDE

CELEBRATING the 79th Anniversary of the birth of Black Feminist Lesbian Mother Warrior Poet Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992)

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

 

 

__________________________

 nys writers logo 

Audre Lorde

 

 

AUDRE LORDE

State Poet, 1991-1993

"Poets must teach what they know, if we are all to continue being."

Audre Lorde, poet, essayist, novelist and teacher was born in New York City on February 18, 1934. She grew up in Manhattan where she attended Catholic school. She loved to read poetry, often reciting whole poems or individual lines to communicate with people. When she could no longer find poems that expressed her feelings, she started writing her own poetry. Her first poem to be published appeared in Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school.

Lorde attended Hunter College, graduating in 1959 with a bachelor's degree. In 1961 she received a masters in library science from Columbia University and worked as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library until 1963. From 1966 to 1968 she worked as head librarian at Town School Library in New York City.

In 1968, Lorde received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and became poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Her first volume of poetry,The First Cities, was also published in 1968. Dudley Randall, a black critic and poet described The First Cities as a "quiet, introspective book," focusing on feelings and relationships.

Lorde's second volume, Cables to Rage (1970) was published outside the United States. The poems focused on several themes: the transience of human love, the existence of human betrayal, birth, and love.

In 1972 Lorde received a Creative Artists Public Service grant. A year later she published her third book of poetry, From A Land Where Other People Live. Nominated for a National Book Award, this volume portrayed a quiet anger of global injustice and oppression along with more personal themes of nurturing, tenderness and love for her children.

New York Head Shot and Museum, probably her most political and rhetorical work was published in 1974. Writing from the perspective of a city dweller, the poems in this volume express her visions of life in New York City, intertwined with themes of what it is like to be a woman, a mother and Black.

Coal, published in 1976 by W. W. Norton was the first of Lorde's books to be released by a major publisher. A compilation of her first two books, it brought her work to a broader readership.

Her seventh book of poetry, The Black Unicorn (1978) is considered to be her most revealing work and the apex of her poetic and personal vision. Poet and critic Adrienne Rich said of The Black Unicorn: "refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity."

A bout with cancer led Lorde to publish her first prose collection, The Cancer Journals. Chronicling her illness and eventual recovery, The Cancer Journals won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of the Year for 1981. Lorde continued her prose writing with Zami: A New Spelling of My Name(1982), a novel on the difficult relationship between a mother and her daughter, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), and A Burst of Light (19881).

Her most recent poetry collections include Chosen Poems Old and New (1982) and Our Dead Behind Us (1986).

Lorde has worked intensively with women of color in many different countries and is a founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a press which concentrates exclusively on publishing and distributing works of women of color from various communities. She is also a founding mother of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa.

Lorde was professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City from 1979-8 1. From 1981-87 she was poet and professor of English at Hunter College of The City University of New York where she was named Thomas Hunter Professor in 1987. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies here and abroad, and her work has been translated into seven foreign languages.


BOOKS BY AUDRE LORDE

COLLECTIONS OF POETRY
 

THE FIRST CITIES. New York: Poets Press, 1968.
 

CABLES TO RAGE. London: Paul Breman, 1970.
 

FROM A LAND WHERE OTHER PEOPLE LIVE. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973.
 

NEW YORK HEAD SHOP AND MUSEUM. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974.
 

COAL. New York: Norton, 1976.
 

BETWEEN OUR SELVES. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1976.
 

THE BLACK UNICORN. New York: Norton, 1978.
 

CHOSEN POEMS, OLD AND NEW. New York: Norton, 1982.
 

OUR DEAD BEHIND US. New York: Norton, 1986.
 

NEED: A CHORALE FOR BLACK WOMAN VOICES. Freedom Organizing Series, no. 6. Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1990.


PROSE
 

USES OF THE EROTIC: THE EROTIC AS POWER. Out & Out Pamphlet, no. 3. Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1978. THE CANCER JOURNALS. Argyle, NY- Spinsters Ink, 1980.
 

ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1982.
 

SISTER OUTSIDER: ESSAYS AND SPEECHES. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 1 AM YOUR SISTER:

BLACK WOMEN ORGANIZING ACROSS SEXUALITIES. Freedom Organizing Series, no. 3, New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1985.
 

APARTHEID U.S.A. With OUR COMMON ENEMY, OUR COMMON CAUSE: FREEDOM ORGANIZING IN THE EIGHTIES by Merle Woo. Freedom Organizing Series, no. 2. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1986.

A BURST OF LIGHT: ESSAYS. Ithaca, NY- Firebrand Books, 1988.


SELECTED RESOURCES

CRITICISM

BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AT WORK by Claudia Tate. New York: Continuum, 1984.

BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM: PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK WOMEN WRITERS by Barbara Christian. The Athene Series. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985.

THE POET WHO FOUND HER OWN WAY by Rosemary Daniell. In New York Times Book Review, December 19,1982, p. 12.

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. MAYA ANGELOU, GWENDOLYN BROOKS, NIKKI GIOVANNI, LILLIAN HELLMAN, AND AUDRE LORDE by Ekaterini Georgoudake. In Diavazo, April 1990, p. 62.


PROFILES/INTERVIEWS

AUDRE LORDE: INTERVIEW by Karla M. Harnmond. In Denver Quarterly, Spring 198 1, p. 10.

GRACEFUL PASSAGES. [11 of the finest black women reflect on the last 20 years and what they have learned for the future.] In Essence Magazine, May 1990, p. 130.

AN INTERVIEW WITH AUDRE LORDE by William Steif. In The Progressive, January 199 1, p. 32.

 

SELECTED READINGS ON TAPE AND VIDEOCASSETTE

AUDRE LORDE: THE BLACK UNICORN. Sound cassette. Kansas City, MO: University of Missouri, 1979.

POETRY READING. Videocassette. ARCO Forum of Public Affairs. Cambridge, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1982.

TO BE YOUNG, LESBIAN, AND BLACK IN THE 50s. Sound cassette. Los Angeles: Pacifica Tape Library, 1983.

A NEW SPELLING OF OUR NAME. Sound cassette (2). North Dartmouth, MA: Southeastern Massachusetts University Library, Audiovisual Department, 1985.

SHORELINES. Sound cassette. Signature Series. Washington: Watershed Tapes, 1985.

READING THEIR WORK: AUDRE LORDE AND ADRIENNE RICH. Sound cassettes (2). College Park, MD: National Women's Studies Association, 1988.

WOMEN, POWER, AND DIFFERENCE. Sound cassette. University Lecture Series. Iowa City, IA: Iowa State University, 1989.


from the works of Audre Lorde. . .

THE BLACK UNICORN
The black unicorn is greedy. 
The black unicorn is impatient. 
'The black unicorn was mistaken 
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country 
where mist painted mockeries 
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests 
but deep in her moonpit 
growing.
The black unicorn is restless 
the black unicorn is unrelenting 
the black unicorn is not 
free.

WHO SAID IT WAS SIMPLE
There are so many roots to the tree of anger 
that sometimes the branches shatter 
before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march 
discussing the problematic girls 
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject 
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed 
see causes in color 
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive 
all these liberations.

NEVER TO DREAM OF SPIDERS
Time collapses between the lips of strangers
my days collapse into a hollow tube 
soon implodes against now
like an iron wall
my eyes are blocked with rubble 
a smear of perspectives
blurring each horizon 
in the breathless precision of silence
One word is made.

Once the renegade flesh was gone
fall air lay against my face 
sharp and blue as a needle
but the rain fell through October
and death lay a condemnation
within my blood.

The smell of your neck in August
a fine gold wire bejeweling war
all the rest lies
illusive as a farmhouse
on the other side of a valley
vanishing in the afternoon.

Day three day four day ten
the seventh step
a veiled door leading to my golden
anniversary
flameproofed free-paper shredded
in the teeth of a pillaging dog
never to dream of spiders
and when they turned the hoses upon me
a burst of light.

>via: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lorde.html

 

 

 

 

INTERVIEW + VIDEO: Happy Birthday Toni Morrison

TONI MORRISON

Synopsis

Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Morrison has won nearly every book prize possible. She has also been awarded honorary degrees.

Early Career

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music, and folklore.

Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from The New York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school, and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.

At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English, and chose the classics for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, and completed her master's degree in 1955. She then moved to Texas to teach English at Texas Southern University.

In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English. There she met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The couple got married in 1958 and welcomed their first child, son Harold, in 1961. After the birth of her son, Morrison joined a writers group that met on campus. She began working on her first novel with the group, which started out as a short story.

Morrison decided to leave Howard in 1963. After spending the summer traveling with her family in Europe, she returned to the United States with her son. Her husband, however, had decided to move back to Jamaica. At the time, Morrison was pregnant with their second child. She moved back home to live with her family in Ohio before the birth of son Slade in 1964. The following year, she moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor. Morrison later went to work for Random House, where she edited works for such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones.

African-American Literary Star

Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. It told the story of a young African-American girl who believes her incredibly difficult life would be better if only she had blue eyes. The book received warm reviews, but it didn't sell well.

Morrison continued to explore the African-American experience in its many forms and time periods in her work. Her next novel,

 Sula (1973),

Song of Solomon (1977) became the first work by an African-American author to be a featured selection in the book-of-the-month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. It follows the journey of Milkman Dead as he searches the South for his roots. Morrison received a number of accolades for this work.explores good and evil through the friendship of two women who grew up together. The work was nominated for the American Book Award.

A rising literary star, Morrison was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. The following year, Tar Baby was published. The novel drew some inspiration from folktales, and it received a decidedly mixed reaction from critics. Her next work, however, proved to be one of her greatest masterpieces. Beloved(1987) explores love and the supernatural. The main character, a former slave, is haunted by her decision to kill her children rather than see them become slaves. Three of her children survived, but her infant daughter died at her hand. For this spellbinding work, Morrison won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ten years later, in 1998, the book was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.

Branching Out

Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989, and continued to produce great works. In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African-American woman to be selected for the award. The following year, she published the novelJazz, which explores marital love and betrayal.

At Princeton, Morrison established a special workshop for writers and performers known as the Princeton Atelier in 1994. The program was designed to help students create original works in a variety of artistic fields. Outside of her academic work, Morrison continued to write new works of fiction. Her next novel, Paradise(1998), which focused on a fictional African-American town called Ruby, earned mixed reviews.

In 1999, Morrison branched out to children's literature. She worked with her son Slade on The Big BoxThe Book of Mean People(2002) and The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003). She has also explored other genres, writing the play Dreaming Emmett in the mid-1980s and the lyrics for "Four Songs" with composer Andre Previn in 1994 and "Sweet Talk" with composer Richard Danielpour in 1997.

Her next novel, Love (2003), divides its narrative between the past and present. Bill Cosey, a wealthy entrepreneur and owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, is the center figure in the work. The flashbacks explore his life, while his death casts a long shadow on the present part of the story. A critic for Publisher's Weekly praised the work, stating that "Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed."

Later Works

In 2006, Morrison announced she was retiring from her post at Princeton. That year, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years. She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto forMargaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.

Morrison traveled back to the early days of slavery in the United States for her next novel, A Mercy. Once again,

A champion for the arts, Morrison spoke out about censorship in October 2009 after one of her books was banned at a Michigan high school. She served as editor for Burn This Book, a collection of essays on censorship and the power of the written word, which was published that same year. She told a crowd gathered for the launch of the Free Speech Leadership Council about the importance of fighting censorship. "The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink," Morrison said.a woman who is both a slave and a mother must make a terrible choice regarding her child. As a critic from the Washington Postdescribed it, the novel is "a fusion of mystery, history and longing." In addition to her many novels, Morrison has written several works of non-fiction. She published collection of her non-fiction writings entitled What Moves at the Margin in 2008.

Recent Projects

Now in her eigthies, Morrison continues to be one of literature's great storytellers. She published her latest novel, Home, in 2012. She once again explores a period of American history—this time the post-Korean War era. In choosing this setting, "I was trying to take the scab off the '50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please. There was a horrible war you didn't call a war, where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy," Morrison explain to the Guardian newspaper. Her main character, Frank, is a veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

While writing the novel, Morrison experienced a great personal loss. Her son Slade, an artist, died in December 2010. The pair had collaborated together on a number of children's books, including Big Box (1999) and Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010).

In addition to Home, Morrison also debuted another work in 2012: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production inspired by William Shakespeare'sOthello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the summer of 2012.

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.

 

 

__________________________

Toni Morrison,

The Art of Fiction No. 134

Interviewed by Elissa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour

The Paris Review No. 128, Fall 1993

Toni Morrison detests being called a “poetic writer.” She seems to think that the attention that has been paid to the lyricism of her work marginalizes her talent and denies her stories their power and resonance. As one of the few novelists whose work is both popular and critically acclaimed, she can afford the luxury of choosing what praise to accept. But she does not reject all classifications, and, in fact, embraces the title “black woman writer.” Her ability to transform individuals into forces and idiosyncrasies into inevitabilities has led some critics to call her the “D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche.” She is also a master of the public novel, examining the relationships between the races and sexes and the struggle between civilization and nature, while at the same time combining myth and the fantastic with a deep political sensitivity.

We talked with Morrison one summer Sunday afternoon on the lush campus of Princeton University. The interview took place in her office, which is decorated with a large Helen Frankenthaler print, pen-and-ink drawings an architect did of all the houses that appear in her work, photographs, a few framed book-jacket covers, and an apology note to her from Hemingway—a forgery meant as a joke. On her desk is a blue glass teacup emblazoned with the likeness of Shirley Temple filled with the number two pencils that she uses to write her first drafts. Jade plants sit in a window and a few more potted plants hang above. A coffeemaker and cups are at the ready. Despite the high ceilings, the big desk, and the high-backed black rocking chairs, the room had the warm feeling of a kitchen, maybe because talking to Morrison about writing is the intimate kind of conversation that often seems to happen in kitchens; or perhaps it was the fact that as our energy started flagging she magically produced mugs of cranberry juice. We felt that she had allowed us to enter into a sanctuary, and that, however subtly, she was completely in control of the situation.

Outside, high canopies of oak leaves filtered the sunlight, dappling her white office with pools of yellowy light. Morrison sat behind her big desk, which despite her apologies for the “disorder” appeared well organized. Stacks of books and piles of paper resided on a painted bench set against the wall. She is smaller than one might imagine, and her hair, gray and silver, is woven into thin steel-colored braids that hang just at shoulder length. Occasionally during the interview Morrison let her sonorous, deep voice break into rumbling laughter and punctuated certain statements with a flat smack of her hand on the desktop. At a moment’s notice she can switch from raging about violence in the United States to gleefully skewering the hosts of the trash TV talk shows through which she confesses to channel surfing sometimes late in the afternoon if her work is done.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you begin to write before dawn. Did this habit begin for practical reasons, or was the early morning an especially fruitful time for you?

TONI MORRISON

Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama—and that was always around five in the morning. Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before. At first I didn’t know when I wanted to eat, because I had always eaten when it was lunchtime or dinnertime or breakfast time. Work and the children had driven all of my habits . . . I didn’t know the weekday sounds of my own house; it all made me feel a little giddy.

I was involved in writing Beloved at that time—this was in 1983—and eventually I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was—there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard—but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

INTERVIEWER

What about your writing routine?

MORRISON

I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space—a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out—life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in. I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.

INTERVIEWER

Could you write after work?

MORRISON

That was difficult. I’ve tried to overcome not having orderly spaces by substituting compulsion for discipline, so that when something is urgently there, urgently seen or understood, or the metaphor was powerful enough, then I would move everything aside and write for sustained periods of time. I’m talking to you about getting the first draft.

INTERVIEWER

You have to do it straight through?

MORRISON

I do. I don’t think it’s a law.

INTERVIEWER

Could you write on the bottom of a shoe while riding on a train like Robert Frost? Could you write on an airplane?

MORRISON

Sometimes something that I was having some trouble with falls into place, a word sequence, say, so I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles. If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.

INTERVIEWER

What is the physical act of writing like for you?

MORRISON

I write with a pencil.

INTERVIEWER

Would you ever work on a word processor?

MORRISON

Oh, I do that also, but that is much later when everything is put together. I type that into a computer and then I begin to revise. But everything I write for the first time is written with a pencil, maybe a ballpoint if I don’t have a pencil. I’m not picky, but my preference is for yellow legal pads and a nice number two pencil.

INTERVIEWER

Dixon Ticonderoga number two soft?

MORRISON

Exactly. I remember once trying to use a tape recorder, but it doesn’t work.

INTERVIEWER

Did you actually dictate a story into the machine?

MORRISON

Not the whole thing, but just a bit. For instance, when two or three sentences seemed to fall into place, I thought I would carry a tape recorder in the car, particularly when I was working at Random House going back and forth every day. It occurred to me that I could just record it. It was a disaster. I don’t trust my writing that is not written, although I work very hard in subsequent revisions to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language. To pull all these things together into something that I think is much more alive and representative. But I don’t trust something that occurs to me and then is spoken and transferred immediately to the page.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever read your work out loud while you are working on it?

MORRISON

Not until it’s published. I don’t trust a performance. I could get a response that might make me think it was successful when it wasn’t at all. The difficulty for me in writing—amongthe difficulties—is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn’t hear anything. Now for that, one has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

INTERVIEWER

How many times would you say you have to write a paragraph over to reach this standard?

MORRISON

Well, those that need reworking I do as long as I can. I mean I’ve revised six times, seven times, thirteen times. But there’s a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death. It is important to know when you are fretting it; when you are fretting it because it is not working, it needs to be scrapped.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever go back over what has been published and wish you had fretted more over something?

MORRISON

A lot. Everything.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever rework passages that have already been published before reading them to an audience?

MORRISON

I don’t change it for the audience, but I know what it ought to be and isn’t. After twenty-some years you can figure it out; I know more about it now than I did then. It is not so much that it would have been different or even better; it is just that, taken into context with what I was trying to effect, or what consequence I wanted it to have on the reader, years later the picture is clearer to me.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think being an editor for twenty years affected you as a writer?

MORRISON

I am not sure. It lessened my awe of the publishing industry. I understood the adversarial relationship that sometimes exists between writers and publishers, but I learned how important, how critical an editor was, which I don’t think I would have known before.

INTERVIEWER

Are there editors who are helpful critically?

MORRISON

Oh yes. The good ones make all the difference. It is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one, then you are better off alone. But there are editors so rare and so important that they are worth searching for, and you always know when you have one.

INTERVIEWER

Who was the most instrumental editor you’ve ever worked with?

MORRISON

I had a very good editor, superlative for me—Bob Gottlieb. What made him good for me was a number of things—knowing what not to touch; asking all the questions you probably would have asked yourself had there been the time. Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that is what is valuable—not compliments. Sometimes it’s uncanny; the editor puts his or her finger on exactly the place the writer knows is weak but just couldn’t do any better at the time. Or perhaps the writer thought it might fly, but wasn’t sure. Good editors identify that place and sometimes make suggestions. Some suggestions are not useful because you can’t explain everything to an editor about what you are trying to do. I couldn’t possibly explain all of those things to an editor, because what I do has to work on so many levels. But within the relationship if there is some trust, some willingness to listen, remarkable things can happen. I read books all the time that I know would have profited from not a copy editor but somebody just talking through it. And it is important to get a great editor at a certain time, because if you don’t have one in the beginning, you almost can’t have one later. If you work well without an editor, and your books are well received for five or ten years, and then you write another one—which is successful but not very good—why should you then listen to an editor?

INTERVIEWER

You have told students that they should think of the process of revision as one of the major satisfactions of writing. Do you get more pleasure out of writing the first draft, or in the actual revision of the work?

MORRISON

They are different. I am profoundly excited by thinking up or having the idea in the first place . . . before I begin to write.

INTERVIEWER

Does it come in a flash?

MORRISON

No, it’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to. Specifically, since I began theBeloved trilogy, the last part of which I’m working on now, I have been wondering why women who are twenty, thirty years younger than I am are no happier than women who are my age and older. What on earth is that about, when there are so many more things that they can do, so many more choices? All right, so this is an embarrassment of riches, but so what. Why is everybody so miserable?

INTERVIEWER

Do you write to figure out exactly how you feel about a subject?

MORRISON

No, I know how I feel. My feelings are the result of prejudices and convictions like everybody else’s. But I am interested in the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea. It is not “this is what I believe,” because that would not be a book, just a tract. A book is “this may be what I believe, but suppose I am wrong . . . what could it be?” Or, “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.”

INTERVIEWER

Did you know as a child you wanted to be a writer?

MORRISON

No. I wanted to be a reader. I thought everything that needed to be written had already been written or would be. I only wrote the first book because I thought it wasn’t there, and I wanted to read it when I got through. I am a pretty good reader. I love it. It is what I do, really. So, if I can read it, that is the highest compliment I can think of. People say, I write for myself, and it sounds so awful and so narcissistic, but in a sense if you know how to read your own work— that is, with the necessary critical distance—it makes you a better writer and editor. When I teach creative writing, I always speak about how you have to learn how to read your work; I don’t mean enjoy it because you wrote it. I mean, go away from it, and read it as though it is the first time you’ve ever seen it. Critique it that way. Don’t get all involved in your thrilling sentences and all that . . .

INTERVIEWER

Do you have your audience in mind when you sit down to write?

MORRISON

Only me. If I come to a place where I am unsure, I have the characters to go to for reassurance. By that time they are friendly enough to tell me if the rendition of their lives is authentic or not. But there are so many things only I can tell. After all, this is my work. I have to take full responsibility for doing it right as well as doing it wrong. Doing it wrong isn’t bad, but doing it wrong and thinking you’ve done it right is. I remember spending a whole summer writing something I was very impressed with, but couldn’t get back to until winter. I went back confident that those fifty pages were really first-rate, but when I read them each page of the fifty was terrible. It was really ill-conceived. I knew that I could do it over, but I just couldn’t get over the fact that I thought it was so good at the time. And that is scary because then you think it means you don’t know.

INTERVIEWER

What about it was so bad?

MORRISON

It was pompous. Pompous and unappetizing.

INTERVIEWER

I read that you started writing after your divorce as a way of beating back the loneliness. Was that true, and do you write for different reasons now?

MORRISON

Sort of. Sounds simpler than it was. I don’t know if I was writing for that reason or some other reason—or one that I don’t even suspect. I do know that I don’t like it here if I don’t have something to write.

INTERVIEWER

Here, meaning where?

MORRISON

Meaning out in the world. It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.

INTERVIEWER

If you didn’t do this. Then the chaos would—

MORRISON

Then I would be part of the chaos.

INTERVIEWER

Wouldn’t the answer to that be either to lecture about the chaos or to be in politics?

MORRISON

If I had a gift for it. All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books. I don’t think that I could show up on a regular basis as a politician. I would lose interest. I don’t have the resources for it, the gift. There are people who can organize other people and I cannot. I’d just get bored.

INTERVIEWER

When did it become clear to you that your gift was to be a writer?

MORRISON

It was very late. I always thought I was probably adept, because people used to say so, but their criteria might not have been mine. So, I wasn’t interested in what they said. It meant nothing. It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life. Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, I am a writer, is difficult.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

MORRISON

Well, it isn’t so difficult anymore, but it certainly was for me and for women of my generation or my class or my race. I don’t know that all those things are folded into it, but the point is you’re moving yourself out of the gender role. You are not saying, I am a mother, I am a wife. Or if you’re in the labor market, I am a teacher, I am an editor. But when you move to writer, what is that supposed to mean? Is that a job? Is this the way you make your living? It’s an intervention into terrain that you are not familiar with—where you have no provenance. At the time I certainly didn’t personally know any other women writers who were successful; it looked very much like a male preserve. So you sort of hope you’re going to be a little minor person around the edges. It’s almost as if you needed permission to write. When I read women’s biographies and autobiographies, even accounts of how they got started writing, almost every one of them had a little anecdote that told about the moment someone gave them permission to do it. A mother, a husband, a teacher—somebody—said, OK, go ahead—you can do it. Which is not to say that men have never needed that; frequently when they are very young, a mentor says, You’re good, and they take off. The entitlement was something they could take for granted. I couldn’t. It was all very strange. So, even though I knew that writing was central to my life, that it was where my mind was, where I was most delighted and most challenged, I couldn’t say it. If someone asked me, What do you do? I wouldn’t say, Oh I’m a writer. I’d say, I’m an editor, or, A teacher. Because when you meet people and go to lunch, if they say, What do you do? and you say, I’m a writer, they have to think about that, and then they ask, What have you written? Then they have to either like it or not like it. People feel obliged to like or not like and say so. It is perfectly all right to hate my work. It really is. I have close friends whose work I loathe.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel you had to write in private?

MORRISON

Oh yes, I wanted to make it a private thing. I wanted to own it myself. Because once you say it, then other people become involved. As a matter of fact, while I was at Random House I never said I was a writer.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

MORRISON

Oh, it would have been awful. First of all they didn’t hire me to do that. They didn’t hire me to be one of them. Secondly, I think they would have fired me.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

MORRISON

Sure. There were no in-house editors who wrote fiction. Ed Doctorow quit. There was nobody else—no real buying, negotiating editor in trade who was also publishing her own novels.

INTERVIEWER

Did the fact that you were a woman have anything to do with it?

MORRISON

That I didn’t think about too much. I was so busy. I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do. That was the wonderful liberation of being divorced and having children. I did not mind failure, ever, but I minded thinking that someone male knew better. Before that, all the men I knew did know better, they really did. My father and teachers were smart people who knew better. Then I came across a smart person who was very important to me who didn’t know better.

INTERVIEWER

Was this your husband?

MORRISON

Yes. He knew better about his life, but not about mine. I had to stop and say, Let me start again and see what it is like to be a grown-up. I decided to leave home, to take my children with me, to go into publishing and see what I could do. I was prepared for that not to work either, but I wanted to see what it was like to be a grown-up.

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk about that moment at Random House when they suddenly realized that they had a writer in their midst?

MORRISON

I published a book called The Bluest Eye. I didn’t tell them about it. They didn’t know until they read the review in The New York Times. It was published by Holt. Somebody had told this young guy there that I was writing something and he had said in a very offhand way, If you ever complete something send it to me. So I did. A lot of black men were writing in 1968, 1969, and he bought it, thinking that there was a growing interest in what black people were writing and that this book of mine would also sell. He was wrong. What was selling was: Let me tell you how powerful I am and how horrible you are, or some version of that. For whatever reasons, he took a small risk. He didn’t pay me much, so it didn’t matter if the book sold or not. It got a really horrible review in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday and then got a very good daily review.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned getting permission to write. Who gave it to you?

MORRISON

No one. What I needed permission to do was to succeed at it. I never signed a contract until the book was finished because I didn’t want it to be homework. A contract meant somebody was waiting for it, that I had to do it, and they could ask me about it. They could get up in my face and I don’t like that. By not signing a contract, I do it, and if I want you to see it, I’ll let you see it. It has to do with self-esteem. I am sure for years you have heard writers constructing illusions of freedom, anything in order to have the illusion that it is all mine and only I can do it. I remember introducing Eudora Welty and saying that nobody could have written those stories but her, meaning that I have a feeling about most books that at some point somebody would have written them anyway. But then there are some writers without whom certain stories would never have been written. I don’t mean the subject matter or the narrative but just the way in which they did it—their slant on it is truly unique.

INTERVIEWER

Who are some of them?

MORRISON

Hemingway is in that category, Flannery O’Connor. Faulkner, Fitzgerald . . .

INTERVIEWER

Haven’t you been critical of the way these authors depicted blacks?

MORRISON

No! Me, critical? I have been revealing how white writers imagine black people, and some of them are brilliant at it. Faulkner was brilliant at it. Hemingway did it poorly in places and brilliantly elsewhere.

INTERVIEWER

How so?

MORRISON

In not using black characters, but using the aesthetic of blacks as anarchy, as sexual license, as deviance. In his last book, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s heroine is getting blacker and blacker. The woman who is going mad tells her husband, I want to be your little African queen. The novel gets its charge that way: Her white white hair and her black, black skin . . . almost like a Man Ray photograph. Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read. Edgar Allan Poe did not. He loved white supremacy and the planter class, and he wanted to be a gentleman, and he endorsed all of that. He didn’t contest it or critique it. What is exciting about American literature is that business of how writers say things under, beneath, and around their stories. Think of Pudd’nhead Wilson and all these inversions of what race is, how sometimes nobody can tell, or the thrill of discovery? Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can’t see it. I did this lecture for my students that took me forever, which was tracking all the moments of withheld, partial, or disinformation, when a racial fact or clue sort of comes out but doesn’t quite arrive. I just wanted to chart it. I listed its appearance, disguise, and disappearance on every page—I mean every phrase! Everything, and I delivered this thing to my class. They all fell asleep! But I was so fascinated, technically. Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? And then to reveal it in order to say that it is not the point anyway? It is technically just astonishing. As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism. So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says or that one says . . . it is the structure of the book, and you are there hunting this black thing that is nowhere to be found and yet makes all the difference. No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don’t care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don’t personally care but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this.

INTERVIEWER

What about black writers . . . how do they write in a world dominated by and informed by their relationship to a white culture?

MORRISON

By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress it or confine it, but to open it up. Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket. I wrote a story entitled “Recitatif,” in which there are two little girls in an orphanage, one white and one black. But the reader doesn’t know which is white and which is black. I use class codes, but no racial codes.

INTERVIEWER

Is this meant to confuse the reader?

MORRISON

Well, yes. But to provoke and enlighten. I did that as a lark. What was exciting was to be forced as a writer not to be lazy and rely on obvious codes. Soon as I say, Black woman . . . I can rest on or provoke predictable responses, but if I leave it out then I have to talk about her in a complicated way—as a person.

INTERVIEWER

Why wouldn’t you want to say, The black woman came out of the store?

MORRISON

Well, you can, but it has to be important that she is black.

INTERVIEWER

What about The Confessions of Nat Turner?

MORRISON

Well, here we have a very self-conscious character who says things like, I looked at my black hand. Or, I woke up and I felt black. It is very much on Bill Styron’s mind. He feels charged in Nat Turner’s skin . . . in this place that feels exotic to him. So it reads exotically to us, that’s all.

INTERVIEWER

There was a tremendous outcry at that time from people who felt that Styron didn’t have a right to write about Nat Turner.

MORRISON

He has a right to write about whatever he wants. To suggest otherwise is outrageous. What they should have criticized, and some of them did, was Styron’s suggestion that Nat Turner hated black people. In the book Turner expresses his revulsion over and over again . . . he’s so distant from blacks, so superior. So the fundamental question is why would anybody follow him? What kind of leader is this who has a fundamentally racist contempt that seems unreal to any black person reading it? Any white leader would have some interest and identification with the people he was asking to die. That was what these critics meant when they said Nat Turner speaks like a white man. That racial distance is strong and clear in that book.

INTERVIEWER

You must have read a lot of slave narratives for Beloved.

MORRISON

I wouldn’t read them for information because I knew that they had to be authenticated by white patrons, that they couldn’t say everything they wanted to say because they couldn’t alienate their audience; they had to be quiet about certain things. They were going to be as good as they could be under the circumstances and as revelatory, but they never say how terrible it was. They would just say, Well, you know, it was really awful, but let’s abolish slavery so life can go on. Their narratives had to be very understated. So while I looked at the documents and felt familiar with slavery and overwhelmed by it, I wanted it to be truly felt. I wanted to translate the historical into the personal. I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate, and yet so public.

In reading some of the documents I noticed frequent references to something that was never properly described—the bit. This thing was put into the mouth of slaves to punish them and shut them up without preventing them from working. I spent a long time trying to find out what it looked like. I kept reading statements like, I put the bit on Jenny, or, as Equiano says, “I went into a kitchen” and I saw a woman standing at the stove, and she had a brake (b-r-a-k-e, he spells it) “in her mouth,” and I said, What is that? and somebody told me what it was, and then I said, I never saw anything so awful in all my life. But I really couldn’t image the thing—did it look like a horse’s bit or what?

Eventually I did find some sketches in one book in this country, which was the record of a man’s torture of his wife. In South America, Brazil, places like that, they kept such mementos. But while I was searching, something else occurred to me—namely, that this bit, this item, this personalized type of torture, was a direct descendant of the inquisition. And I realized that of course you can’t buy this stuff. You can’t send away for a mail-order bit for your slave. Sears doesn’t carry them. So you have to make it. You have to go out in the backyard and put some stuff together and construct it and then affix it to a person. So the whole process had a very personal quality for the person who made it, as well as for the person who wore it. Then I realized that describing it would never be helpful; that the reader didn’t need to see it so much as feel what it was like. I realized that it was important to imagine the bit as an active instrument, rather than simply as a curio or an historical fact. And in the same way I wanted to show the reader what slavery felt like, rather than how it looked.

There’s a passage in which Paul D. says to Sethe, “I’ve never told anybody about it, I’ve sung about it sometimes.” He tries to tell her what wearing the bit was like, but he ends up talking about a rooster that he swears smiled at him when he wore it—he felt cheapened and lessened and that he would never be worth as much as a rooster sitting on a tub in the sunlight. I make other references to the desire to spit, to sucking iron, and so on; but it seemed to me that describing what it looked like would distract the reader from what I wanted him or her to experience, which was what it felt like. The kind of information you can find between the lines of history. It sort of falls off the page, or it’s a glance and a reference. It’s right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with names.

INTERVIEWER

When you create a character is it completely created out of your own imagination?

MORRISON

I never use anyone I know. In The Bluest Eye I think I used some gestures and dialogue of my mother in certain places, and a little geography. I’ve never done that since. I really am very conscientious about that. It’s never based on anyone. I don’t do what many writers do.

INTERVIEWER

Why is that?

MORRISON

There is this feeling that artists have—photographers, more than other people, and writers—that they are acting like a succubus . . . this process of taking from something that’s alive and using it for one’s own purposes. You can do it with trees, butterflies, or human beings. Making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people’s lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.

In fiction, I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. That’s part of the excitement. If they’re based on somebody else, in a funny way it’s an infringement of a copyright. That person owns his life, has a patent on it. It shouldn’t be available for fiction.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever feel like your characters are getting away from you, out of your control?

MORRISON

I take control of them. They are very carefully imagined. I feel as though I know all there is to know about them, even things I don’t write—like how they part their hair. They are like ghosts. They have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves. So you can’t let them write your book for you. I have read books in which I know that has happened—when a novelist has been totally taken over by a character. I want to say, You can’t do that. If those people could write books they would, but they can’t. Youcan. So, you have to say, Shut up. Leave me alone. I am doing this.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever had to tell any of your characters to shut up?

MORRISON

Pilate, I did. Therefore she doesn’t speak very much. She has this long conversation with the two boys and every now and then she’ll say something, but she doesn’t have the dialogue the other people have. I had to do that, otherwise she was going to overwhelm everybody. She got terribly interesting; characters can do that for a little bit. I had to take it back. It’s mybook; it’s not called “Pilate.”

INTERVIEWER

Pilate is such a strong character. It seems to me that the women in your books are almost always stronger and braver than the men. Why is that?

MORRISON

That isn’t true, but I hear that a lot. I think that our expectations of women are very low. If women just stand up straight for thirty days, everybody goes, Oh! How brave! As a matter of fact, somebody wrote about Sethe, and said she was this powerful, statuesque woman who wasn’t even human. But at the end of the book, she can barely turn her head. She has been zonked; she can’t even feed herself. Is that tough?

INTERVIEWER

Maybe people read it that way because they thought Sethe made such a hard choice slashing Beloved’s throat. Maybe they think that’s being strong. Some would say that’s just bad manners.

MORRISON

Well, Beloved surely didn’t think it was all that tough. She thought it was lunacy. Or, more importantly, How do you know death is better for me? You’ve never died. How could you know? But I think Paul D., Son, Stamp Paid, even Guitar, make equally difficult choices; they are principled. I do think we are too accustomed to women who don’t talk back or who use the weapons of the weak.

INTERVIEWER

What are the weapons of the weak?

MORRISON

Nagging. Poison. Gossip. Sneaking around instead of confrontation.

INTERVIEWER

There have been so few novels about women who have intense friendships with other women. Why do you think that is?

MORRISON

It has been a discredited relationship. When I was writing Sula, I was under the impression that for a large part of the female population a woman friend was considered a secondary relationship. A man and a woman’s relationship was primary. Women, your own friends, were always secondary relationships when the man was not there. Because of this, there’s that whole cadre of women who don’t like women and prefer men. We had to be taught to like one another. Ms. magazine was founded on the premise that we really have to stop complaining about one another, hating, fighting one another and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves—a typical example of what dominated people do. That is a big education. When much of the literature was like that—when you read about women together (not lesbians or those who have formed long relationships that are covertly lesbian, like in Virginia Woolf’s work), it is an overtly male view of females together. They are usually male-dominated—like some of Henry James’s characters—or the women are talking about men, like Jane Austen’s girlfriends . . . talking about who got married, and how to get married, and are you going to lose him, and I think she wants him and so on. To have heterosexual women who are friends, who are talking only about themselves to each other, seemed to me a very radical thing when Sula was published in 1971 . . . but it is hardly radical now.

INTERVIEWER

It is becoming acceptable.

MORRISON

Yes, and it’s going to get boring. It will be overdone and as usual it will all run amok.

INTERVIEWER

Why do writers have such a hard time writing about sex?

MORRISON

Sex is difficult to write about because it’s just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying “the curve of . . .” you soon sound like a gynecologist. Only Joyce could get away with that. He said all those forbidden words. He said cunt, and that was shocking. The forbidden word can be provocative. But after a while it becomes monotonous rather than arousing. Less is always better. Some writers think that if they use dirty words they’ve done it. It can work for a short period and for a very young imagination, but after a while it doesn’t deliver. When Sethe and Paul D. first see each other, in about half a page they get the sex out of the way, which isn’t any good anyway—it’s fast and they’re embarrassed about it—and then they’re lying there trying to pretend they’re not in that bed, that they haven’t met, and then they begin to think different thoughts, which begin to merge so you can’t tell who’s thinking what. That merging to me is more tactically sensual than if I had tried to describe body parts.

INTERVIEWER

What about plot? Do you always know where you’re going? Would you write the end before you got there?

MORRISON

When I really know what it is about, then I can write that end scene. I wrote the end ofBeloved about a quarter of the way in. I wrote the end of Jazz very early and the end of Song of Solomon very early on. What I really want is for the plot to be how it happened. It is like a detective story in a sense. You know who is dead and you want to find out who did it. So, you put the salient elements up front and the reader is hooked into wanting to know how did that happen. Who did that and why? You are forced into having a certain kind of language that will keep the reader asking those questions. In Jazz, just as I did before with The Bluest Eye, I put the whole plot on the first page. In fact, in the first edition the plot was on the cover, so that a person in a bookstore could read the cover and know right away what the book was about, and could, if they wished, dismiss it and buy another book. This seemed a suitable technique for Jazz because I thought of the plot in that novel, the threesome, as the melody of the piece, and it is fine to follow a melody—to feel the satisfaction of recognizing a melody whenever the narrator returns to it. That was the real art of the enterprise for me—bumping up against that melody time and again, seeing it from another point of view, seeing it afresh each time, playing it back and forth.

When Keith Jarret plays “Ol’ Man River,” the delight and satisfaction is not so much in the melody itself but in recognizing it when it surfaces and when it is hidden, and when it goes away completely, what is put in its place. Not so much in the original line as in all the echoes and shades and turns and pivots Jarret plays around it. I was trying to do something similar with the plot in Jazz. I wanted the story to be the vehicle that moved us from page one to the end, but I wanted the delight to be found in moving away from the story and coming back to it, looking around it, and through it, as though it was a prism, constantly turning.

This playful aspect of Jazz may well cause a great deal of dissatisfaction in readers who just want the melody, who want to know what happened, who did it and why. But the jazzlike structure wasn’t a secondary thing for me—it was the raison d’être of the book. The process of trial and error by which the narrator revealed the plot was as important and exciting to me as telling the story.

INTERVIEWER

You also divulge the plot early on in Beloved.

MORRISON

It seemed important to me that the action in Beloved—the fact of infanticide—be immediately known, but deferred, unseen. I wanted to give the reader all the information and the consequences surrounding the act, while avoiding engorging myself or the reader with the violence itself. I remember writing the sentence where Sethe cuts the throat of the child very, very late in the process of writing the book. I remember getting up from the table and walking outside for a long time—walking around the yard and coming back and revising it a little bit and going back out and in and rewriting the sentence over and over again . . . Each time I fixed that sentence so that it was exactly right, or so I thought, but then I would be unable to sit there and would have to go away and come back. I thought that the act itself had to be not only buried but also understated, because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself it would be obscene or pornographic.

INTERVIEWER

Style is obviously very important to you. Can you talk about this in relation to Jazz?

MORRISON

With Jazz, I wanted to convey the sense that a musician conveys—that he has more but he’s not gonna give it to you. It’s an exercise in restraint, a holding back—not because it’s not there, or because one had exhausted it, but because of the riches, and because it can be done again. That sense of knowing when to stop is a learned thing and I didn’t always have it. It was probably not until after I wrote Song of Solomon that I got to feeling secure enough to experience what it meant to be thrifty with images and language and so on. I was very conscious in writing Jazz of trying to blend that which is contrived and artificial with improvisation. I thought of myself as like the jazz musician—someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures. You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness—that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back—without actually wasting anything. You shouldn’t overgratify, you should never satiate. I’ve always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art—a yearning for more—is really very, very powerful. But there is at the same time a kind of contentment, knowing that at some other time there will indeed be more because the artist is endlessly inventive.

INTERVIEWER

Were there other . . . ingredients, structural entities?

MORRISON

Well, it seems to me that migration was a major event in the cultural history of this country. Now, I’m being very speculative about all of this—I guess that’s why I write novels—but it seems to me something modern and new happened after the Civil War. Of course, a number of things changed, but the era was most clearly marked by the disowning and dispossession of ex-slaves. These ex-slaves were sometimes taken into their local labor markets, but they often tried to escape their problems by migrating to the city. I was fascinated by the thought of what the city must have meant to them, these second- and third-generation ex-slaves, to rural people living there in their own number. The city must have seemed so exciting and wonderful, so much the place to be.

I was interested in how the city worked. How classes and groups and nationalities had the security of numbers within their own turfs and territories, but also felt the thrill of knowing that there were other turfs and other territories, and felt the real glamour and excitement of being in this throng. I was interested in how music changed in this country. Spirituals and gospel and blues represented one kind of response to slavery—they gave voice to the yearning for escape, in code, literally on the Underground Railroad.

I was also concerned with personal life. How did people love one another? What did they think was free? At that time, when the ex-slaves were moving into the city, running away from something that was constricting and killing them and dispossessing them over and over and over again, they were in a very limiting environment. But when you listen to their music—the beginnings of jazz—you realized that they are talking about something else. They are talking about love, about loss. But there is such grandeur, such satisfaction in those lyrics . . . they’re never happy—somebody’s always leaving—but they’re not whining. It’s as though the whole tragedy of choosing somebody, risking love, risking emotion, risking sensuality, and then losing it all didn’t matter, since it was their choice. Exercising choice in who you love was a major, major thing. And the music reinforced the idea of love as a space where one could negotiate freedom.

Obviously, jazz was considered—as all new music is—to be devil music; too sensual and provocative, and so on. But for some black people jazz meant claiming their own bodies. You can imagine what that must have meant for people whose bodies had been owned, who had been slaves as children, or who remembered their parents’ being slaves. Blues and jazz represented ownership of one’s own emotions. So of course it is excessive and overdone: tragedy in jazz is relished, almost as though a happy ending would take away some of its glamour, its flair. Now advertisers use jazz on television to communicate authenticity and modernity; to say “trust me,” and to say “hip.”

These days the city still retains the quality of excitement it had in the jazz age—only now we associate that excitement with a different kind of danger. We chant and scream and act alarmed about the homeless; we say we want our streets back, but it is from our awareness of homelessness and our employment of strategies to deal with it that we get our sense of the urban. Feeling as though we have the armor, the shields, the moxie, the strength, the toughness, and the smarts to be engaged and survive encounters with the unpredictable, the alien, the strange, and the violent is an intrinsic part of what it means to live in the city. When people “complain” about homelessness they are actually bragging about it: New York has more homeless than San Francisco. No, no, no, San Francisco has more homeless. No, you haven’t been to Detroit. We are almost competitive about our endurance, which I think is one of the reasons why we accept homelessness so easily.

INTERVIEWER

So the city freed the ex-slaves from their history?

MORRISON

In part, yes. The city was seductive to them because it promised forgetfulness. It offered the possibility of freedom—freedom, as you put it, from history. But although history should not become a straitjacket, which overwhelms and binds, neither should it be forgotten. One must critique it, test it, confront it, and understand it in order to achieve a freedom that is more than license, to achieve true, adult agency. If you penetrate the seduction of the city, then it becomes possible to confront your own history—to forget what ought to be forgotten and use what is useful—such true agency is made possible.

INTERVIEWER

How do visual images influence your work?

MORRISON

I was having some difficulty describing a scene in Song of Solomon . . . of a man running away from some obligations and himself. I used an Edvard Munch painting almost literally. He is walking and there is nobody on his side of the street. Everybody is on the other side.

INTERVIEWER

Song of Solomon is such a painted book in comparison with some of your others likeBeloved, which is sepia toned.

MORRISON

Part of that has to do with the visual images that I got being aware that in historical terms women, black people in general, were very attracted to very bright-colored clothing. Most people are frightened by color anyway.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

MORRISON

They just are. In this culture quiet colors are considered elegant. Civilized Western people wouldn’t buy bloodred sheets or dishes. There may be something more to it than what I am suggesting. But the slave population had no access even to what color there was, because they wore slave clothes, hand-me-downs, work clothes made out of burlap and sacking. For them a colored dress would be luxurious; it wouldn’t matter whether it was rich or poor cloth . . . just to have a red or a yellow dress. I stripped Beloved of color so that there are only the small moments when Sethe runs amok buying ribbons and bows, enjoying herself the way children enjoy that kind of color. The whole business of color was why slavery was able to last such a long time. It wasn’t as though you had a class of convicts who could dress themselves up and pass themselves off. No, these were people marked because of their skin color, as well as other features. So color is a signifying mark. Baby Suggs dreams of color and says, “Bring me a little lavender.” It is a kind of luxury. We are so inundated with color and visuals. I just wanted to pull it back so that one could feel that hunger and that delight. I couldn’t do that if I had made it the painterly book Song of Solomon was.

INTERVIEWER

Is that what you are referring to when you speak about needing to find a controlling image?

MORRISON

Sometimes, yes. There are three or four in Song of Solomon, I knew that I wanted it to be painterly, and I wanted the opening to be red, white, and blue. I also knew that in some sense he would have to “fly.” In Song of Solomon it was the first time that I had written about a man who was the central, the driving engine of the narrative; I was a little unsure about my ability to feel comfortable inside him. I could always look at him and write from the outside, but those would have been just perceptions. I had to be able not only to look at him but to feel how it really must have felt. So in trying to think about this, the image in my mind was a train. All the previous books have been women centered, and they have been pretty much in the neighborhood and in the yard; this was going to move out. So, I had this feeling about a train . . . sort of revving up, then moving out as he does, and then it sort of highballs at the end; it speeds up, but it doesn’t brake, it just highballs and leaves you sort of suspended. So that image controlled the structure for me, although that is not something I articulate or even make reference to; it only matters that it works for me. Other books look like spirals, likeSula.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe the controlling image of Jazz?

MORRISON

Jazz was very complicated because I wanted to re-represent two contradictory things—artifice and improvisation—where you have an artwork, planned, thought through, but at the same time appears invented, like jazz. I thought of the image being a book. Physically a book, but at the same time it is writing itself. Imagining itself. Talking. Aware of what it is doing. It watches itself think and imagine. That seemed to me to be a combination of artifice and improvisation—where you practice and plan in order to invent. Also the willingness to fail, to be wrong, because jazz is performance. In a performance you make mistakes, and you don’t have the luxury of revision that a writer has; you have to make something out of a mistake, and if you do it well enough it will take you to another place where you never would have gone had you not made that error. So, you have to be able to risk making that error in performance. Dancers do it all the time, as well as jazz musicians. Jazz predicts its own story. Sometimes it is wrong because of faulty vision. It simply did not imagine those characters well enough, admits it was wrong, and the characters talk back the way jazz musicians do. It has to listen to the characters it has invented and then learn something from them. It was the most intricate thing I had done, though I wanted to tell a very simple story about people who do not know that they are living in the jazz age and to never use the word.

INTERVIEWER

One way to achieve this structurally is to have several voices speaking throughout each book. Why do you do this?

MORRISON

It’s important not to have a totalizing view. In American literature we have been so totalized—as though there is only one version. We are not one indistinguishable block of people who always behave the same way.

INTERVIEWER

Is that what you mean by totalized?

MORRISON

 Yes. A definitive or an authoritarian view from somebody else or someone speaking for us. No singularity and no diversity. I try to give some credibility to all sorts of voices, each of which is profoundly different. Because what strikes me about African American culture is its variety. In so much of contemporary music everybody sounds alike. But when you think about black music, you think about the difference between Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet or Satchmo or Miles Davis. They don’t sound anything alike, but you know that they are all black performers, because of whatever that quality is that makes you realize, Oh yes, this is part of something called the African American music tradition. There is no black woman popular singer, jazz singer, blues singer who sounds like any other. Billie Holiday does not sound like Aretha, doesn’t sound like Nina, doesn’t sound like Sarah, doesn’t sound like any of them. They are really powerfully different. And they will tell you that they couldn’t possibly have made it as singers if they sounded like somebody else. If someone comes along sounding like Ella Fitzgerald, they will say, Oh we have one of those . . . It’s interesting to me how those women have this very distinct, unmistakable image. I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.

INTERVIEWER

First African American?

MORRISON

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

. . . rather than the whole of literature?

MORRISON

Oh yes.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

MORRISON

It’s richer. It has more complex sources. It pulls from something that’s closer to the edge, it’s much more modern. It has a human future.

INTERVIEWER

Wouldn’t you rather be known as a great exponent of literature rather than as an African American writer?

MORRISON

It’s very important to me that my work be African American; if it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too. It just so happens that that space for me is African American; it could be Catholic, it could be Midwestern. I’m those things too, and they are all important.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think people ask, Why don’t you write something that we can understand? Do you threaten them by not writing in the typical Western, linear, chronological way?

MORRISON

I don’t think that they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people? For them perhaps that’s a kind of a compliment. They’re saying, You write well enough, I would even let you write about me. They couldn’t say that to anybody else. I mean, could I have gone up to André Gide and said, Yes, but when are you going to get serious and start writing about black people? I don’t think he would know how to answer that question. Just as I don’t. He would say, What? I will if I want to, or, Who are you? What is behind that question is, there’s the center, which is white, and then there are these regional blacks or Asians, or any sort of marginal people. That question can only be asked from the center. Bill Moyers asked me that when-are-you-going-to-write-about question on television. I just said, Well, maybe one day . . . but I couldn’t say to him, you know, you can only ask that question from the center. The center of the world! I mean he’s a white male. He’s asking a marginal person when are you going to get to the center, when are you going to write about white people. I can’t say, Bill, why are you asking me that question? Or, As long as that question seems reasonable is as long as I won’t, can’t. The point is that he’s patronizing; he’s saying, You write well enough; you could come on into the center if you wanted to. You don’t have to stay out there on the margins. And I’m saying, Yeah, well, I’m gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me.

Maybe it’s a false claim, but not fully. I’m sure it was true for the ones we think of as giants now. Joyce is a good example. He moved here and there, but he wrote about Ireland wherever he was, didn’t care where he was. I am sure people said to him, Why . . .? Maybe the French asked, When you gonna write about Paris?

INTERVIEWER

What do you appreciate most in Joyce?

MORRISON

It is amazing how certain kinds of irony and humor travel. Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don’t know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn’t know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn’t have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think if he had been reviewed he would have worked less?

MORRISON

Oh, if he’d cared about it, he’d have been very self-conscious. That’s a hard attitude to maintain, to pretend you don’t care, pretend you don’t read.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read your reviews?

MORRISON

I read everything.

INTERVIEWER

Really? You look deadly serious.

MORRISON

I read everything written about me that I see.

INTERVIEWER

Why is that?

MORRISON

I have to know what’s going on!

INTERVIEWER

You want to see how you’re coming across?

MORRISON

No, no. It’s not about me or my work, it’s about what is going on. I have to get a sense, particularly of what’s going on with women’s work or African American work, contemporary work. I teach a literature course. So I read any information that’s going to help me teach.

INTERVIEWER

Are you ever really surprised when they compare you to the magic realists, such as Gabriel García Márquez?

MORRISON

Yes, I used to be. It doesn’t mean anything to me. Schools are only important to me when I’m teaching literature. It doesn’t mean anything to me when I’m sitting here with a big pile of blank yellow paper . . . what do I say? I’m a magic realist? Each subject matter demands its own form, you know.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you teach undergraduates?

MORRISON

Here at Princeton, they really do value undergraduates, which is nice because a lot of universities value only the graduate school or the professional research schools. I like Princeton’s notion. I would have loved that for my own children. I don’t like freshman and sophomores being treated as the staging ground or the playground or the canvas on which graduate students learn how to teach. They need the best instruction. I’ve always thought the public schools needed to study the best literature. I always taught Oedipus Rex to all kinds of what they used to call remedial or development classes. The reason those kids are in those classes is that they’re bored to death; so you can’t give them boring things. You have to give them the best there is to engage them.

INTERVIEWER

One of your sons is a musician. Were you ever musical, did you ever play the piano?

MORRISON

No, but I come from a family of highly skilled musicians. Highly skilled, meaning most of them couldn’t read music but they could play everything that they heard . . . instantly. They sent us, my sister and me, to music lessons. They were sending me off to learn how to do something that they could do naturally. I thought I was deficient, retarded. They didn’t explain that perhaps it’s more important that you learn how to read music . . . that it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. I thought we were sort of lame people going off to learn how to walk, while, you know, they all just stood up and did it naturally.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think there is an education for becoming a writer? Reading perhaps?

MORRISON

That has only limited value.

INTERVIEWER

Travel the world? Take courses in sociology, history?

MORRISON

Or stay home . . . I don’t think they have to go anywhere.

INTERVIEWER

Some people say, Oh, I can’t write a book until I’ve lived my life, until I’ve had experiences.

MORRISON

That may be—maybe they can’t. But look at the people who never went anywhere and just thought it up. Thomas Mann. I guess he took a few little trips . . . I think you either have or you acquire this sort of imagination. Sometimes you do need a stimulus. But I myself don’t ever go anywhere for stimulation. I don’t want to go anywhere. If I could just sit in one spot I would be happy. I don’t trust the ones who say I have to go do something before I can write. You see, I don’t write autobiographically. First of all, I’m not interested in real-life people as subjects for fiction—including myself. If I write about somebody who’s a historical figure like Margaret Garner, I really don’t know anything about her. What I knew came from reading two interviews with her. They said, Isn’t this extraordinary. Here’s a woman who escaped into Cincinnati from the horrors of slavery and was not crazy. Though she’d killed her child, she was not foaming at the mouth. She was very calm; she said, I’d do it again. That was more than enough to fire my imagination.

INTERVIEWER

She was sort of a cause célèbre?

MORRISON

She was. Her real life was much more awful than it’s rendered in the novel, but if I had known all there was to know about her I never would have written it. It would have been finished; there would have been no place in there for me. It would be like a recipe already cooked. There you are. You’re already this person. Why should I get to steal from you? I don’t like that. What I really love is the process of invention. To have characters move from the curl all the way to a full-fledged person, that’s interesting.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever write out of anger or any other emotion?

MORRISON

No. Anger is a very intense but tiny emotion, you know. It doesn’t last. It doesn’t produce anything. It’s not creative . . . at least not for me. I mean these books take at least three years!

INTERVIEWER

That is a long time to be angry.

MORRISON

Yes. I don’t trust that stuff anyway. I don’t like those little quick emotions, like, I’m lonely,ohhh, God . . . I don’t like those emotions as fuel. I mean, I have them, but— 

INTERVIEWER

—they’re not a good muse?

MORRISON

No, and if it’s not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it’s nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That’s all there is. 

>via: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-...

 

HISTORY: Potato chips (or crisps) - a black invention

POTATO CHIPS
- A BLACK INVENTION

Potato chip (or crisps) sales generate about $6 billion dollars in sales every year and is one of the world’s most popular snack foods.

As popular as it is today, one would think it was the brain child of some White man named “Lays” or something…. but this is not the case. 

As we’ve already discussed, African-Americans learned to preserve foods through the frying process from Native Americans. However, what led George (Speck) Crum, the son of a Native-American mother and African-American father, to invent the potato chip was not his heritage but an opportunity for revenge.

Born as George Speck in 1828…he adopted the professional name “Crum,” a name his father also used in his career as a jockey. In his early years, Crum worked as a trapper and a mountain guide in the Adirondacks before he realized his talents with food.

In the summer of 1853, Crum was working as a chef at the Moon Lake Lodge, an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs. As the story goes, Crum was cooking in the kitchen one day when a guest sent back the restaurant’s popular French-fried potatoes complaining that they were too thick. An angry Crum grabbed a new potato and sliced it spitefully thin, so thin that the guest would not be able to eat it with a fork. Fried in oil and salted, these crispy potato slices were sent out. And the guest loved them! Crum had stumbled upon what would become America’s favorite snack.

So, it was a complete accident. From then on, the chips, which Crum named “Saratoga Chips,” appeared on the Moon Lake Lodge’s menu as a house specialty.

In 1860 George Crum opened his own restaurant [“Crum’s House”] on Malta Avenue in Saratoga Lake featuring potato chips in baskets on each table. The restaurant was successful for 30 years, serving several rich and famous guests of Saratoga. Crum closed his establishment in 1890, and he died later in 1914 at the age of 86.

Of course, others would come along and realize the profitability of potato chips and the rest is [White] history…

(via The Free George, George Crum’s Memorial)