Prose for a wife and a mother after many people told her she would never make it
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In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential.
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PROSE FOR A WIFE AND A MOTHER AFTER MANY PEOPLE TOLD HER SHE WOULD NEVER MAKE IT FREE
Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. Like statist language, censored and censoring. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. So the question the children put to her: “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.įor parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision.
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Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.įinally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?” She does not answer, and the question is repeated. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. “Once upon a time there was an old woman. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps.
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Listen to an audio recording of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture