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Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993
| 33 min.
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"Once
upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru,
perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one
exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
"Once upon a time
there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."
In the version I know the woman
is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside
of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among
her people she is both the law and its transgression. 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.
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. 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. They stand before her, and one of them says,
"Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding
living or dead?"
Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot
see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color,
gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman's
silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she
says. "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. It is in your hands."
Her
answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way
or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to
stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
For 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. The blind woman shifts attention
away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.
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. So I
choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. 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. 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. 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. She believes that if the bird in the
hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For
her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding
language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored
and censoring. 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. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts
the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation,
it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story,
fill baffling silences. 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. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental.
Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning
false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
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. 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. But she knows
tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile
heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no
access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who
obey, or in order to force obedience.
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.
The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary,
nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist
would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep
citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses,
post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language
to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language
to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive,
mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing
geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the
language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated
to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied
and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language
crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however
stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not
beating at all - if the bird is already dead.
She has thought about
what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not
insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations
for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses of exclusion
blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.
The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a
misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that
precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would
have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven,
she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature,
a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other
views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have
been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as
life; not heaven as post-life.
She would not want to leave her young
visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely
to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined
and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes
in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place
where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the
graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long
remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple
words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused
to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing
to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging
their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability
of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that
language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can
never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance
to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether
it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen
silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But
who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited
because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by
the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?
Word-work is sublime, she thinks,
because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human
difference - the way in which we are like no other life.
We die.
That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of
our lives.
"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question.
Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they
hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures
towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard
was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now
is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."
They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only
a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been
before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse
about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including
the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question
meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no
silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An
old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe
either, who can?
But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good
opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She
keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation,
in sophisticated, privileged space.
Nothing, no word follows her
declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available
in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed,
fill it with language invented on the spot.
"Is there no speech,"
they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier
of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education
at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as
to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and
wisdom?
"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only
you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could
not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language
was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible
was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned
so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?
"Do we have to
begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought
and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is
there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass
you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television
script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.
"Why
didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the
lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi
you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are
young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible.
What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where,
as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our
inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only
cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves
again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty
when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?
"You trivialize
us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our
lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected
to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult.
The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our
lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical,
creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your
reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames
and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's
hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can
never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill.
But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the
world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what
to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels
fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that
tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects
us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be
a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To
be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that
cannot bear your company.
"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines
at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they
sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they
knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their
last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting
their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for
the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving
them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves
and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.
"The inn
door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon
bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug
of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces
of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One
helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next
stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."
It's
quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the
silence.
"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with
the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How
lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997
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