Morisson Expounds on Race

Nobel Prize-winning novelist and Princeton Professor Toni Morrison spoke before a packed Sanders Theatre yesterday.

Morrison's address, "Goodbye to All That": Race, Surrogacy and Farewell," was the fifth in a series of lectures celebrating the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

"Our race-based culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it exists as a virus or a rich harvest of possibilities," she said.

Morrison discussed the role of the "black author" which many have thrust upon her. She spoke of one television interview before which she asked the interviewer if they could discuss issues outside of race.

"I thought that it would elicit my views on teaching and writing. I thought that I would talk about motherhood," Morrison said. "I thought that I would talk about Gerard Manley Hopkins or about how poverty is romanticized in American culture."

But at the last minute, the interviewer reneged on their agreement, saying that the topic was "simply too exciting."

"I have a yearning for an environment where every sentence I speak or write is not being seen as mere protest or mere advocacy," she added.

Morrison also talked about the question of identity that writers from every immigrant and ethnic group in the U.S. have had to face.

"It is the question of, are you a black writer or a universal writer? Implying that the two are incompatible," she said.

"I wanted to read the world and misread it, to write the world and unwrite it.... I wanted my work to form a union of aesthetics and ethics," she said.

Morrison used the issue of race as a springboard for a discussion of the evolution of relations between white women and black women in literature.

Morrison began by talking about the role black women played as surrogate mothers, or "ubiquitous mammies" to white women. The dynamics of these relationships, she said, were most evident in farewell scenes in books like

Gone with the Wind.

For Morrison, the portrayal of these relationships and the language used to describe them changed dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s, as evidenced in the works of authors like Carson McCullers and Harper Lee.

"Surely the Harlem Renaissance and the introduction of minority voices had a share in these changes," Morrison said.

She then read a farewell scene from her own Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved" as an example of the more contemporary portrayals of such relationships.

Morrison finished her lecture by speaking about the opportunities that she feels currently exist for literature.

"There exists the material with which a new paradigm of relations can be born," she said. "Writers have already said goodbye to the old ways...it would be nice in this case if life would imitate art."

Following her lecture, Morrison opened the floor up for a brief question and answer session with the audience.

When Emily J. Carmichael `04 asked Morrison if she was ever afraid of using elements of her own experience in her work, Morrison answered resoundingly.

"I get scared walking down the street," Morrison quipped. "[but] that is the one place I have no fear...There's nothing I am afraid to write, nothing at all."

Following the event, Morrison went to a reception and dinner at the Faculty Club with Radcliffe administrators and other guests.

"I think her talk was beautiful," said Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "To hear her use of language and the way she reads both her own work and that of others was just amazing."

"It is no exaggeration to say that Morrison is the most celebrated author in the United States," said Literature concentration chair Barbara Johnson, who introduced the author. "Only Shakespeare rivals her for the number of senior theses written about her work."

-Staff writer Joseph P. Flood can be reached at flood@fas.harvard.edu.