Toni Morrison: 'We used to be called citizens. Now we're called taxpayers'

On Friday night in New York, Toni Morrison held the audience rapt in a wide-ranging conversation with the New Yorker’s theatre critic Hilton Als. Over the course of an hour and a half, the author – resplendent in a glittery headscarf – was funny, provocative and insightful, ranging over her illustrious career and the issues that have informed her 11 novels, including American society, history and race.

On forgiveness

“The really vile and violent and bestial treatment of slaves and their descendants did not succeed in making those descendants reproduce that violence and that corruption and that bestiality. It’s contemporary, but the survivors and the family members who were killed in that church [in Charleston] did not say of the killer ‘I want him dead’ – it was something grander and more humane. It was eloquent and elegant, the response of forgiveness. We sometimes understand that generosity, and I’m not going to tear you up, as a kind of weakness whereas I always thought that that was extreme strength.”

On her experience of community in the deep south

“When we were travelling in the south, there were carriages where black people sat but the most important thing was the porters, who gave you twice as much orange juice and four sandwiches and two pillows – they were so excessively generous and kind that it was like a luxury car. I was thinking not too long ago that when I was at Cornell and I saw a black man I would run toward him – then I thought that these days, with all the discussion about black men as threats, I may not do that. But I certainly wouldn’t run toward a white man, I might just have to flip along by myself.”

On media manipulation

“I remember when the New York Times started using the word ‘try’ – so and so ‘tried’. No one ever does anything, they try. No one says the Treasury Department, they say Obama. They don’t say the FBI … the language is manipulated and strangled in such a way that you get the message although the veneer of accuracy and forthrightness is there. They’re not the only ones. I know that there’s a difference between the received story, not just in the press but in TV, and what was really going on.”

On female gods

“I think that in the beginning, there were a lot of female gods in early civilisation because men thought that women just gave birth by magic, whenever they felt like it. Then they began to have domesticated animals, and they could reproduce in three months or one month, and so the guys say ‘Hey, wait a minute – she’s not the one who gives life – we are!’ So all the gods changed names – there were some little girly gods around … that’s my historical view of the change.”

On writing the male lead character Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead III in Song of Solomon

“I do remember thinking ‘I don’t really know what the interior life of a man is’ – certainly as a writer. Just before that my father died and I remember thinking ‘I wonder what my father knew about his friends?’ I had this incredible serene feeling that I would know, that somehow it would come to me, that I could write about this and I felt secure and I felt strong.”

On her father’s hatred of white people

“Was he racist? Big time. He wouldn’t let white people in the house. My mother was just the opposite – she didn’t care who you were if you were nice to her. Later, I went down to the little town in Georgia where my father was born and one of the men who was a child at the time said that my father had seen two black men lynched on his street – they were businessmen, they had little stores and so on. He was 14 and he left and went to California and ended up living in Ohio. I think seeing that at 14 – the lynching of two neighbours – and that’s why he thought that white people were incorrigible.”

On the structure of her novels

“Everything I have written is a movement toward knowledge: if the main character doesn’t know something extremely important at the end of the book that he or she didn’t know at the beginning then it doesn’t work for me. It’s not like a happy ending, I don’t mean that, it’s not an a-ha moment, it’s just that you grow and learn.”

On the selfishness of the modern era

“I couldn’t write about now, I felt, because it was so slippery. Until I thought I knew – what was very definitive about now is that it’s so powerfully self-reverential. Selfies, look at me, novels about me, stories about me ...

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don’t use those words any more – it’s the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.”

On writing and her relationship with the readers

“It’s all about what I want to read. When I wrote The Bluest Eye uppermost in my mind was that I wanted to read this book and no one had written it, so I thought that maybe I would write it in order to read it. Then I just hope I can bring other readers along and make the outrageous but hopefully accurate assumption that whatever is within, the intimacy that I find with the language is also something that the reader can enter. We’re doing this together, me and you. Me the writer, you the reader, this is a cooperative adventure. And I try to open it up so that you can step in.”

On writing without a ‘white gaze’

“In American literature there are no black children that are not like Topsy [in Uncle Tom’s Cabin]. Nobody had ever written about how that kind of racism, even when it comes from within, hurts. When I wrote The Bluest Eye I was determined to take this child, even though it’s a tragic story, Pecola, to give her seriousness. The rest of it was trying to write without what I call a white gaze. I was always talking within [my] community which is what everybody else who was a writer did. Like Tolstoy – he wasn’t writing for a little coloured girl in Ohio, but nevertheless I was riveted and that was what I was trying to change.”