Inaugural Lecture for the Black Mountain Institute

On April 6, 2006, Toni Morrison gave the inaugural lecture for the Black Mountain Institute, now the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. She was introduced by Carol Harter, then the president of UNLV, and soon to assume the position of BMI’s executive director. Dr. Harter made the introduction.

Applause.

Toni Morrison: Thank you very much President Harter for the words and also for your legacy. I know the Institute is in good hands.

Applause.

And I would like to compliment this city, Las Vegas, for its participation in the network of Cities of Asylum thoroughly, initially pioneer-like in participating in this really extraordinary movement. 

Las Vegas, as you must know, is a city that has lived in the imaginations of the entire population for as long as it has existed. Real and surreal.

Laughter.

Urbane in the most intense ways and rural in the most comfortable ways. Exotic and down-home. It’s really the essence of the new world—constantly inventing, outrageously welcoming, both surprising and familiar. In short a city that I think is still in a class by itself.

Applause.

So 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. The university, a demonstrably varied population and the commitment and the pride that accompanies that kind of creativity, these are my first impressions anyway. 

But I want to begin my comments this evening with a personal anecdote that illustrates why my support for NANCA [North American Network of Cities of Asylum] from its beginnings in Europe to its current North American incarnation and why that support is really _____.

After New Orleans, and the cities and towns surrounding it, were pummeled and swept away by Hurricane Katrina, like many people, especially artists, I attended several fundraisers. And some were huge in very large halls packed with people of substance and reputation eager to give money.

Other venues were smaller but no less intense and also well intended [clean up] and up to four were so that I participated in. The last one was at St. Marks Church on East 10th Street in New York City. It’s a big run-down church, famous for its service to homeless people and hungry people, to anyone who needs a church in its community that is able — that needs their help. And I do have to say that, unlike the other fundraisers, at St. Marks the food was plentiful, home-cooked, absolutely delicious.

And I saw a lot of friends there, some I hadn’t seen in years scheduled to speak, read, perform, or just rant. 

Laughter.

But somewhere toward the end of that program a musician who in fact was from New Orleans stood up and was introduced. 

And I don’t recall where he was living at that point in New York—perhaps not quite a refugee but certainly a displaced person displaced by a natural catastrophe and a political one.

He was an older man, several people in the audience knew him and I didn’t. He just stood up and he played his saxophone and there was some accompaniment—I think a piano and some percussion—ut I really don’t remember. What I do remember is his music. 

You know there had been such grief, such _____, such outrage, and what we understood was a kind of contempt and complete disability on display by ______ and agencies and administration. The media itself, with some exceptions, after murmurs of pity began their routine of blaming the victims and praising themselves. The devastation was stark. And the deaths harrowing. The misinformation overwhelming. The malice disabling. And the heroics of people—ordinary heroics and spectacular heroics— were trivialized and trampled. So, it was difficult for some— impossible for most—to express any sliver of that combination of misery and helplessness and fury. But we tried at those fundraisers to say a thing, communicate a thing, anything that came close.

But for me finally that man with that saxophone did it. And his music took us to the place—that edge—where you think you’re gonna collapse, or _____, or burst into tears but you don’t because your music won’t let you—won’t let you fall into some swamp of pity or rage because what it is summoning will not allow collapse. It’s too intelligent for violence. It’s too deep for tears because the sorrow in it is coupled with resilience, a refined stabilizing core amidst the recognition of chaos and affront.

The music was overwhelming in its refusal to be overwhelmed by sorrow. And I suppose it was a transcendent moment for me that was unavailable in my own words, my own readings and speeches performances elsewhere.

It was a kind of moment that text, theater painting, any art form can provide.

Now, I do want to talk about the peril in which artists all over the world live, about the danger in some regions of simply practicing modern art.

But first I want to say that was satisfying and strengthening for me in that church was also something that was frightening, listening to an artist who had been washed out and away from his home. I became truly aware not of the danger to him but the danger to me, to us, without him, how disorderly unmanageable _______ my responses had been.

Every little gesture I made—readings and gifts and helping to find homes and jobs for a few people—it seemed less, routine, unmediated until I heard the musician. And I really do believe that had I not heard him I would still be pointlessly seething. How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork.

The Cities of Asylum takes care to ensure the lives of writers facing peril but along with that urgency I want to emphasize that their absence—not doom  ____ or choking off writers’ work—its cruel amputations are just as much a danger to us and the help we extend to them is a profound generosity to ourselves.

We know countries that can be identified by the flight of artists’ by their shores. These are regimes whose fear of free speech and unmonitored writing is truly justified because art like truth is trouble.

It’s real trouble for the war monger—and the torturer. The corporate thief. The political hack. The corrupt justice system. It’s trouble for the closed and antithetical. Trouble for comatose public or an ignorant bully, a sly racist and for predators feeding off the world’s resources.

The alarm that artists raise in part of the public’s mind is instructive because it is open, it’s vulnerable, because unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore, its historical suppression is the earliest harbinger of a slow, steady peeling away of subsequent rights and liberties to follow. 

The siege that writers feel themselves to be under is not confined to contemporary life. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself.

Feeling threatened, violated and outraged by artists in ____. Manet’s Olympia is shocking. It was at the turn of the century, and it is now. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate it were clear and effective signs that something truly important had taken place. We must be mindful, just as the network is, that cultural and political forces can sweep clean, clean away everything but the safe —everything but the state-approved art. When you gather to ensure havens for persecuted writers—when this city offers them shelter—you do more than support them. You confirm the conviction that a writer’s life and work are not gift to mankind but its necessity. 

I’ve been told that there are two human responses to chaos: naming and violence. 

Chaos is simply the unknown and the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—new species, a star, a formula, equation, prognosis. There’s also mapping, charting or devising proper nouns for the unnamed or the strict _______—geography, landscape, or population

And when chaos resists it either by re-forming itself or rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response as well as the most rational when confronting the unknown the catastrophic or the untamed or the wild or the wonton, the incorrigible—all terms used to describe the perceived resistance and the forms confronting it may be censure, incarceration via camps, polling places, prisons, or death. 

Singly or ____ [“and more?” “any more?”]

In addition to this naming and violence as a response to chaos there is a third response. Which I really haven’t heard much about. But it’s stillness. Stillness. 

That stillness can be passivity or dumbfoundedness. It can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. And those developing their craft or plying their trade near too or far away from the throng of raw power or military power or empire building and counting houses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos have to be nurtured, must be protected and it is right that such protection be initiated by writers and it is imperative that we accumulate safe environments not only to save the writers but to save ourselves. 

I believe the New Orleans musician is alright. He has friends after all, fans, a community. So I’m not worried about him. What I do worry about is the thought of—suppose he had not been there that particular moment. And that is the thought that leads me to contemplate with real dread the erasure of other voices—of unwritten novels, empty canvasses, poems whispered for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlaw languages flourishing underground or behind closed doors, of questions challenging authority never being ______ [“imposed?”], of unstaged plays and canceled performance. __________ [“It’s a nightmare”?]

It’s as though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink. And to assuage that nightmare a flame needs to be waved under the paper on which it is written to raise the text from oblivion into the light. 

And that to me is how the network of Cities of Asylum functions and that is not just a feel good program and it is certainly not a minor event. Because certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice or rights—or even the good will of others— writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning which sharpens our moral imagination. Thank you.