Invisible Ink

[Languid piano plays. Niela Orr begins to speak as the music continues]

NIELA ORR: My life changed the summer of 2005 when I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon for the first time. I was sixteen, and I had never read anything like it. It was complex, and beautiful, and challenging, and it was entirely about Black life.

And the language felt “lived-in” to me, felt like real approximations of the kinds of things my great-grandmother used to say. 

Morrison ends the book by writing: “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” 

[Languid piano continues to play along with slow, easy riffs from a saxophone. As Orr begins to speak, the piano and sax fade away.]

ORR: It’s a riddle I still consider to this day. Back then, I was particularly struck by the italicized emphasis on “ride.” It communicated writerly intention I hadn’t known was possible. The formatting of this one word demonstrated radical care that thrilled me. 

Ride; the word’s slant, along with the rest of the sentence, suggested leaning into experience. All kinds of possibilities opened up for me with that reading. 

I went on to study Morrison’s body of work in my last two years of high school, and then in college, and then in my graduate writing program. Now her books are friends on the shelf, immersions into language and the familiar points-of-view of my favorite characters, like Sula, and Nell, and Milkman, and JD.

I regularly pull them down to remind myself of some detail I'd forgotten, or to recreate the conditions of discovery. Leaf to a random page in a Morrison book, and you’ll find something alluring.

Morrison’s books demand to be re-read. 

Back then, I took refuge in re-engaging them. They were a place to be, to hang out in after school. I was repeatedly edified by returning to the material. I’d find new things to appreciate each time.

I found immense value in the intricacy of Morrison’s writing, and her resistance to be easily understood, at least on the first read. Her books demanded effort, and I wanted to work.

In addition to providing a place to escape, Morrison herself was a model for the kind of professional I could be, as a writer and editor, and, more broadly, as an interpreter of my own interior life, and as a conceiver of my own liberation. 

As she wrote in her book, Playing in the Dark, “my work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African American woman in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world.” In that same book, she said that her project as a writer rises from delight. 

She found delight in reading, writing, and speaking publicly about things that mattered to her, whether at Harvard, or Princeton, where she taught for many years, or to the Nobel committee. 

[The sound of an auditorium full of people cuts in]

Or to an auditorium full of bookish Las Vegans.

[The distant voice of a man speaking into a microphone: “Please turn off all cellphones…” As announcements continue, Orr continues her narration.]

ORR: Fifteen years ago this month, on April 6, 2006, Morrison spoke to a crowded lecture hall on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

[The grainy recording of voices from the lecture continues intercut with Orrs narration.]

CAROL C. HARTER [from archival recording]: To our immense pleasure and admiration I’d like to introduce our speaker…

ORR: The Nobel prize winner was at UNLV to deliver the inaugural Black Mountain Institute lecture to an audience of more than a thousand eager listeners.

HARTER: …one of the most lauded and accomplished writers of our time, Toni Morrison. 

[Audience applause. The sound fades away before Orr narrates.]

ORR: Now, I have to warn you, the audio recording of the lecture is not very good. As you listen, you might find yourself straining to understand the full meaning of her words.

The tape is illegible, it sounds like it’s recorded by someone who was sitting in the back of the lecture hall who keeps fidgeting with the recorder. 

[Sounds of white noise, audience applause, and the shuffling around of a recorder all at once.]

ORR: The tape mostly resists understanding, but not in the subversive way Morrison’s writing does. For this reason, I’ll be a kind of intermediary between 2006 Morrison and you, translating her speech.

[We can hear from the archive of the lecture that Toni Morrison has walked up to the podium and begun to speak. The recording of her voice is intercut with Niela Orr from the present.]

TONI MORRISON [voice & mic sounds]: … I would like to compliment this city, Las Vegas…

ORR: Known for her elegant prose, rigorous literary scholarship, and incisive, incantatory novels, that night, Morrison turned her brilliant imagination to the notion of asylum. 

MORRISON: The Cities of Asylum takes care to ensure the life of writers facing peril, but along with that urgency, I want to emphasize that their absence… 

ORR: She talked about the role Las Vegas would play as an emerging safe haven for persecuted writers and their families.

By that point, Morrison’s bona fides as a writer, editor, and lecturer had been firmly established already. But this appearance highlighted an underreported aspect of her legacy, that of an advocate for humanitarian projects, like City of Asylum.

MORRISON: … Inevitable because creativity in some ways, in ordinary ways, in extraordinary ways, in experimental ways, creativity, obviously, thrives here.

ORR: In her address, she engaged the idea of place-making, a core theme in much of her writing. 

Las Vegas belongs to NANCA, the North American Cities of Asylum program, which, in turn, formed from the International Institute of Modern Letters. 

Black Mountain Institute’s first executive director, Dr. Carol C. Harter, hoped BMI would attract worldwide talent and hoped to open its doors to writers seeking refuge. 

MORRISON: The help we extend to them is a profound generosity to ourselves.

ORR: Morrison praised BMI’s initiative. Her address was global in scope. She wanted to discuss “the peril in which artists all over the world live, about the danger in some regions of simply practicing modern art.” 

MORRISON: …in the efforts to censure, starve, regulate and annihilate it, were clear and effective signs that something truly important had taken place. 

ORR: Eight months removed from hurricane Katrina, Morrison touched on the stark devastation there, and told the audience about how she had encountered a hurricane survivor in New York city.

[A plaintive saxophone riff fades in underneath the narration.]

ORR: He played a song on his saxophone, splendid music that, as Morrison put it, was “overwhelming in its refusal to be overwhelmed by sorrow.” 

MORRISON: A musician, who, in fact, was from New Orleans, stood up and was introduced. He just stood up and played the saxophone…

[Toni Morrison’s voice fades away as the interlaced sound of a languid, jazzy piano and saxophone gets louder. The instruments play for a moment before they fade away again.]

ORR: Morrison invoked the artists working near the “throng of military power or empire building.” But, as one might expect, the place she addressed most directly was Las Vegas.

“Las Vegas, as you must know,—

MORRISON: ...is a city that has lived in the imaginations of the entire population for as long as it has existed. Real and surreal.”

ORR: At just 116 years-old, Las Vegas is one of America’s newer major cities, and is still making itself. 

In 2006, when Morrison visited BMI, her appearance helped Vegas’ literary community to better shape itself. Las Vegas Weekly laid out the project in an article called “Can They Build A Culture?” They, meaning BMI. 

[Morrison begins speaking before Orr translates the rough audio for us. As Orr speaks, Morrison’s voice floats in the background, echoing Orr.]

MORRISON: I would like to compliment this city...

ORR: “I would like to compliment this city, Las Vegas, for its participation in the network of City of Asylum thoroughly, initially pioneer-like in participating in this really extraordinary movement.”

Morrison’s voice fades away as Orr finishes her quote. 

ORR: Morrison helped Las Vegas become a refuge by vouching for its legitimacy as an arts center and signal-boosting its participation in the City of Asylum program. As Morrison said in her lecture, “it is imperative that we accumulate safe environments, not only to save the writers, but to save ourselves.” 

[The same piano from before plays a slow, meandering song in that same languid style. A saxophone joins in, riffing on the same notes. It fades away as Orr begins her narration again.]

ORR: Black Mountain Institute has maintained its mission, and since 2006, it has hosted three City 0f Asylum fellows and their families. In 2014, BMI’s City of Asylum fellow was Hossein Abkenar, a Cannes-award winning screenwriter and novelist whose work, which concerns Iranian history, revolution, and women’s rights, is banned in his native Iran.

He has spoken about the peace he and his son, Nima, had found in Las Vegas. He spoke of a room, a protected place to try out ideas. 

“I am a writer,” he said. “For me, a small room, a table and pieces of paper to write on are enough. It does not matter where in the world this room is located. Tehran, Paris, Las Vegas ... I want to write in a state of peace and fearlessness.”

[Piano playing fades in]

ORR: Morrison highlighted the type of persecution writers like Hossein were fleeing from. When speaking about censorship and the erasure of other voices, she said, “it’s as though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”

[Piano playing continues as applause from Toni Morrison’s lecture cuts in. Morrison begins to speak.]

MORRISON: So, it’s probably inevitable that leaders…

[Toni Morrison’s voice continues underneath the sound of Orr translating the audio for us again.]

ORR: “It’s probably inevitable that leaders in this community—with I’m sure some prodding—but nevertheless they agreed some years ago to become an asylum haven, inevitable because creativity in some way—in extraordinary ways, in experimental ways, creativity obviously thrives here.”

[A saxophone and piano play in unison for a moment before fading away]

ORR: Hi, Ahmed, how's it going? 

AHMED NAJI: We are recording. Hi, Niela, how is it going? How’s Philly?

ORR: [laughter] Good. It's getting warm here. 

[Naji and Orr’s conversation continues in the background as Orr narrates.]

ORR: Listening to Morrison’s remarks, I naturally think of my friend, Ahmed Naji, BMI’s current City of Asylum fellow. 

NAJI: …and I was like, you know what? I can give you this article in 30 minutes. [Orr laughs] I have been writing the same article for 10 years now... 

[Both Naji and Orr laugh. Their conversation continues inaudibly and fades away]

ORR: Ahmed is someone who I feel really lucky to know. Whether it’s texting him about a graphic novel he reviewed, or comparing notes on political talking head shows, I value his incredible personality and his iconoclastic way of thinking.

It’s possible to sip wine and laugh so hard at his stories that it becomes physically uncomfortable to finish your meal. 

[The sound of Orr continuing to describe her memory with Ahmed fades away. As Orr’s narration fades, eerie ambient music starts.]

ORR: In 2016, Ahmed served 10 months of his 2-year sentence in Cairo’s Tora Prison for the charge of “violating public modesty” after a reader claimed he experienced heart palpitations while reading Ahmed’s novel, Using Life. 

[Ominous music continues for a few moments.]

ORR: In an excerpt from his memoir, Rotten Evidence, which was published in The Believer in February 2021, Ahmed wonders if his writing was worth all the pain and suffering he endured during his legal ordeal.

Morrison’s line about invisible ink recalls an anecdote Ahmed mentions in Rotten Evidence. In the story, Ahmed describes a fellow prisoner at Tora, who spent his days writing his autobiography, only to have it confiscated and burned upon his release. 

All of those memories documented, only to be destroyed. The man was presented with two options: to remember it all and start over again, or to live with the agony of writing a life story only to realize that the conditions of his imprisonment had rendered the memoir in invisible ink. 

The man wept. And, later, he was carried out of the prison.

[Ominous music plays out.]

ORR: It’s not that Morrison understood the complexity of refuge and asylum because her work contains so many imaginings of it.

She started early in grad school. Her thesis was about “the alienated” in works by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. In her writing, she manifested the rooms both Woolf and Hossein Abkenar considered necessary for their creative freedom.

Quite a few of Morrison’s novels interrogate the idea of sanctuary or asylum.

MORRISON: The very first book I wrote, called The Bluest Eye, was one where I was not really thinking about publishing or reviewers or other readers, it was a book I wanted to read, and I couldn’t find it anywhere...

ORR: In her work, she creates zones of hope and terror, places where her characters sometimes misguidedly think potential and violence are confined within. But Morrison’s work is partly about the inevitability of confrontation, both physical and ideological.  It concerns the futility of escape. In her work, nowhere is truly safe.

[Sounds of birds, cicadas and voices from Beloved’s film adaptation. Dialogue from the movie plays:“Baby Suggs used to preach right here.” Baby Suggs says, “Let the children come!” and laughs. The sound fades away as Orr speaks.]

ORR: In the Pulitzer prize-winning Beloved, Black people gather in a protected enclave for the formerly enslaved, a Cincinnati forest opening called “the clearing.” A wise woman, named Baby Suggs, preaches in the clearing about the importance of self-love. 

[Audio from Beloved’s film adaptation continues. Dialogue from the character Baby Suggs in a convictive preacher’s tone: “Let your wives and your children see you dance!” A crowd of men holler affirmatively. Then, the sound of laughing, hollering, and rhythmic stomping.]

ORR: The clearing is a hopeful hub. A place of respite nestled inside of an oppressive, anti-Black United States.

[As audio from Beloved’s film adaptation finishes, men stomp in unison and cheer as Baby Suggs begins to hum.]

ORR: In April 2006, when Morrison spoke at BMI, she was probably at work on A Mercy, her masterful late novel on America in the seventeenth  century. The novel focuses on this country before it had a name and an official ethos, even though then, as Morrison shows, it was still a troubled place. 

Fleeing racism, sexism, colonization, slavery and smallpox, the indigenous and Black protagonists of A Mercy navigate a world where there is very little mercy to be found. 

The world she described in A Mercy was, for all of its characters, the essence of the new world, constantly reinventing itself.

As I consider that cruel, inhospitable social environment and the dangerous wilderness of the early America described in A Mercy, my mind flashes to Las Vegas. It still retains much of that pioneer mentality, especially as the city stretches beyond its own limits. 

[Archival sound from Morrion’s 2006 lecture at BMI cuts back in. There is an echo and the sound of empty air in the auditorium as she speaks.]

MORRISON: “It’s really the essence of the new world—constantly inventing, outrageously welcoming, both surprising and familiar.”

[As the sound of Morrison’s lecture fades out, a contemporary lo-fi beat begins to play in the background.]

ORR: I lived in Vegas for a year and three months, and I discovered firsthand that it’s fun to walk down Las Vegas Boulevard, as I have done many times, both alone and with friends, to fall into a fantasy, a play self that sparkles under the thousands of bulbs in Strip signage. But just as in Morrison’s novels, there is no escape in Vegas. 

What I’ve learned is that you bring yourself wherever you go. That was never truer than when I lived in the city. I already had family and close friends at home, but I found more of my people there, a community of writers and artists making work in the shadow of billboards and gigantic, fabulous resorts. 

Some of my friends are homegrown talent, and others are transplants, like I was. 

Second to finding more kindred spirits, I found a professional role that suited me, and a way to make a living at my chosen craft. In Las Vegas, I’ve learned that you don’t really escape; you just find more of who you really are.

It’s hard to find true silence or darkness in downtown Las Vegas, where I lived for most of my stay. But there’s the quiet you discover when you deliberately choose tranquility in a city the tourism board markets for its rowdiness. 

The middle of the night in the desert is time to compose work and tap into a version of oneself that is at once both simpler and more complex—a self-critical mirage, but lured, nevertheless, by whatever shape it takes in twilight. A moon dog in the night sky; the distant star of an idea appearing more clearly in the dark. 

In an essay called “Peril,” about artists under siege, Morrison explained that there are typically two responses to chaos: naming and violence. 

But there is also a third response: stillness. “Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness,” she said, “it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”

[The sound of an old TV interview fades in.]

INTERVIEWER: ...when they went to bed, that silence in the house, you were very lonely. And I think writing must be brilliant if you’re lonely…

The sound of the interviewer fades away as she continues the question.

ORR: In a 1988 interview, she teased out this kind of quietude:

[The interview fades in again, with Morrison answering the question.]

MORRISON: The solitude is critical. People have said that unhappy childhoods make good writers because they tend to read because they’re miserable or escape. And the solitude, and the loneliness, or the aloneness in which you only have your own company. And if that isn’t sufficient, then you will invent other company, and that is what fiction is.

[Lo-fi music plays again]

ORR: When I broke up with my ex-husband in 2012, I found myself in a Morrisonian state. As a newly single woman, I was stuck between pain and possibility. Upset with the loss of a sense of permanence—of home—in that relationship, I felt adrift. 

In my crisis, the only thing that I could rely on was my mother’s love, the support of friends, and words. Coddled by my mom and my girlfriends, I still wasn’t completely satisfied. 

So, I ran to a tattoo shop in South Philly. 

[The buzz of a tattoo gun starts.]

ORR: My friend, Tishaenah, came with me, and asked me, “are you sure you wanna do this?”

I don’t know if y’all know this, but it’s not a good idea to get tattooed when you’re in a vulnerable state, like after you get divorced. I assured Tishaenah that yes, I wanted to, and mindlessly stared at the designs on the walls, even though I already had a plan. 

[The tattoo gun continues buzzing, shaking as it renders ink into flesh, and then finishes.]

ORR: A few hours later, two of my favorite quotes were immortalized on my wrists: the word “always” from Sula, spoken by a character who wanted to remind another of her everlasting spirit, which would remain even after she died. The other was “ride the air,” in honor of Song of Solomon’s closing line. 

I know that the phrase is not the same as Morrison’s sentence. 

And believe you me, I know it’s much less elegant. Okay, it’s a-heck-of-a-lot cornier. It sounds like a refrigerator magnet, or one of those “dance like no one is watching” posters you see in a guidance counselor’s office. But in its own way, “ride the air” has provided a kind of guidance to me and has been a grounding force in my life. I didn’t want the whole line anyway; I only wanted a few words that would act as an anchor in moments when I felt meek or afraid. I got the tattoos inked so that only I could read them. 

Years later, in August 2018, a few months after I started editing for The Believer, I surrendered to a feeling in the air. 

At the second annual Believer Festival, I leaned into my boss’s suggestion to come out to Las Vegas and spend time in the city, to get to know the people I worked with who lived there. 

I appreciate bearing witness to that dream being refined fifteen years after Morrison’s lecture in this desert landscape. Las Vegas, where the ink, like the summer air, is desperately dry, dry, and incredibly visible.

[The saxophone and piano from before play again, this time more active and emotive than languid.]

Nine years after I got them, my own ink is dry; the black dye already becoming a faded grey. Still, the tattoos are an everlasting reminder of permanence during an unwieldy time. 

They are a way of reminding me that words are my home, and that Morrison helped foster that feeling.

[The saxophone and piano play out.]

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