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Reviewed by:
  • Toni Morrison: Conversations, and: Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word
  • David Seed (bio)
Toni Morrison: Conversations. Ed. Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 224 pages. $50.00 cloth; $22.00 paper.
Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. 128 pages. $16.99 cloth.

Carolyn C. Denard's collection Toni Morrison: Conversations presents twenty-five interviews with Toni Morrison from 1976 to 2005. They offer commentary on Morrison's writing and also on the importance of race in American culture. Morrison admits the influence of James Baldwin, Latin American writers, and even William Faulkner, whose novels alerted her to the relation between race and language. Indeed, she stresses that her "relish for language" (38) has been a key motivation in her fiction. In 1992 she located the main problem facing the African American writer as how to "alter language" (74); in other words, how to open up language from its embedded ideological positions. This could have two aspects. First, the writer could voice the unspoken—one of Morrison's key discoveries when researching slavery was the "bit" used to gag slaves. In common with the early fiction of Alice Walker, Morrison wanted to establish the African American woman as a subject in her own right by writing against subject taboos and by demythologizing the black woman. Second, as Morrison tells her students at Princeton and elsewhere, "You start by saying, in the beginning was dispossession and violence" (33) and then proceed with the arduous task of learning to "read race" (203).

Faulkner has been a key figure for Morrison; in one of her interviews, she wryly recalls giving a detailed lecture on the oblique race references in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to an unresponsive group of students. As part of her attempt to transform narrative language, Morrison describes how she turned to folklore and jazz, the latter offering a looser, more improvised model of expression. The variety of her experiments reflects Morrison's conviction that African American culture is diverse and constantly evolving. In 1998, in a rare show of indignation, Morrison rejected the label feminist to describe her novel Paradise (1999), insisting that she wrote to "open doors" (140) and not to conform to any system. Elsewhere in this [End Page 187] volume she sets on record her hatred of the "totalizing view" (86) as one always imposed by others.

Morrison describes her writings as attempts at recovering what was buried or suppressed in the past. Perhaps signaling again the influence of Faulkner, though with totally different implications, she has stated that "there is infinitely more past than there is future" (27), and her fiction has frequently been the fruit of intensive historical research. As she argued in Playing in the Dark (1992), American cultural identity has been complexly shaped by an Africanist presence. Morrison's personal experience connects with her perception of history when she recalls that as a child, she wanted to feel American, but her impulse was blocked or marginalized by race. The triple concerns of language, race, and gender all intersect in Morrison's career. Her attempts to create a nonracist, racialized narrative language represent her efforts to voice different, often suppressed aspects of African American culture. They also reflect her consciousness that black American women writers are the only group not to take the "white world as the central stage in the text" (108). Again and again Morrison has repeated that she consciously avoids writing for a white readership, and in this she contrasts her practice with that of many black male writers: "They like to win. They want to know who is on top. They want to be recognized by white men as the best" (119). Morrison's desire for an independence of vision and method could be seen as a continuation and evolution of the negotiations of nineteenth-century African American writers, whose work was frequently sanitized by white editors.

Morrison's perception of history is not archival but rather a recognition of how it impacts the present. She describes the O. J. Simpson case as being essentially about...

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