African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives

13. “Both Print and Oral” and “Talking about Race”: Transforming Toni Morrison’s Language Issues into Teaching Issues

242 Joyce Irene Middleton 242 13 “Both Print and Oral” and “Talking about Race”: Transforming Toni Morrison’s Language Issues into Teaching Issues Joyce Irene Middleton There were two kinds of education going on: one was the education in the schools which was print-oriented; and right side by side with it was this other way of looking at the world that was not only different than what we learned about in school, it was coming through another sense. People told stories. Also there was the radio; I was a radio child. You get in the habit of gathering information that way, and imagining the rest. —Toni Morrison, Interview with Kathy Neustadt In this country, . . . American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination WHEN TONI MORRISON WON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, she told a Washington Post reporter that one of her interests as a teacher of literature at Princeton University was to enable her students to “talk about race.” While teaching is not an explicit subject matter that Morrison interrogates through her writing, her critique of conflicts in cultural language use mirrors many of the teaching issues in our classrooms. Her work encourages teachers and scholars in rhetoric and composition to explore the implications of her interests in writing to current academic research on race, literacy, and teaching. Morrison’s writings ask her readers to think about language issues that modern Western traditions of schooling do not, but should, address. This essay shows how Morrison’s “Both Print and Oral” and “Talking about Race” 243 language issues may be articulated as teaching issues to help students think critically about issues of race, gender, culture, and writing in the academy. Using Morrison’s nonfiction (including her Nobel lecture), I analyze her language issues as teaching issues, I explore the usefulness of theories of orality to student discussions about personal and cultural language use, and I explore the pedagogical implications of Morrison’s claims about writing in a racialized society. Orality and Literacy in Morrison’s Nonfiction Although Morrison’s ethos and influence is probably viewed more as a fiction writer than as a nonfiction writer, she has produced a substantial body of interviews and essays that focus on her strong interest in contemporary language use and pedagogy. Her topics, familiar to those of us who teach rhetoric, writing, and literacy, include discussions of memory (see McConkey, 1996), audience, revision, pathos, listening, aurality/orality, and essential relationships between race, gender, and writing. A close analysis of the subliminal language features that she self-consciously structures in her writing shows how orality and literacy work together, in a language that is “both print and oral” (Morrison, 1984b, p. 341). For example, in an early essay, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Morrison writes about her literary imagination as a Black woman writer. As she expresses her broad interests in language, she implicitly rereads Western canonical literary values and discusses a range of rhetoric and literacy issues—oral and written memory, listening and reading, construction of audience, and a writer’s ethos. Her particular interest in memory as a subject matter focuses on the relationship between memory and rhetorical invention—a “form of willed creation” (Morrison, 1984a, p. 385) that “ignites some process of invention” (p. 386). Morrison speaks here as a writer of fiction, but her concern with how to move her audience is clearly rhetorical. Her audience analysis critiques familiar, traditional conceptions of readers and creates new ones. She writes: I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the non-narrative, nonliterary experience of the text, which makes it difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data. . . . I want him to respond on the same plane as an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination. (Morrison, 1984a, p. 387) 244 Joyce Irene Middleton Morrison’s explicit focus on the “nonliterary experience” and on an imagined “illiterate” or “preliterate” response to her work signifies her search for shifting the habits of readers trained in modern Western patriarchal traditions of reading and literacy (especially students). Further, with her interest in subjectivity and intimacy...