Happy birthday, Toni Morrison | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times
One of my favorite authors----
n 1993, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; no American writer since has received the honor. In her acceptance speech, Morrison spoke about the importance and power of language.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek -- it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language -- all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Morrison's most recent book is the 2008 novel "A Mercy," which was an LA Times bestseller. In our review, Judith Freeman wrote that the book is "a work of poetry and intelligence, and a continuation of what John Updike has called her 'noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African American.'"
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