Toni Morrison remembered by Édouard Louis: ‘Her laugh was her revenge against the world’
For Toni Morrison (Fragments)
A friend wrote to me the day before yesterday: “Toni Morrison is dead.” I feel sad, numb. Phrases go through me: “The greatest writer of all time is dead. She will never be able to laugh again.” On the internet, I read “she is immortal” and I hate this lie. Nobody is immortal. She is no longer here, she will write no more, we are without her now. That’s all.
I only met her once. I’ve never forgotten it.
The House of Literature in Oslo had invited me to give a lecture several months previously. The artistic director, Andreas Delsett, had just created a series of meetings inviting an author to talk about another author. When he asked me to be part of this series and asked who I wanted to talk about, I answered immediately: “Toni Morrison”. Later, Morrison read the lecture I had written about her. We wrote to each other, and we agreed that I would go and have lunch with her one Saturday afternoon at her house in Grand View, a few miles outside New York City. For several days, this was all I thought about. So, this Saturday came and I turned up at the door of her house, on the banks of the Hudson river, in one of those small American communities that you could not really call a village. I had taken a taxi from New York and during the whole journey I felt a kind of anxiety: that I wouldn’t be at my best, up to being received by someone like her.
A woman opened the door and showed me into the living room, where she – Toni Morrison – was sitting on the sofa. I saw her face for the first time. She smiled and said, in her deep, deep voice: “Nice to meet you, Monsieur Louis.” Immediately, I was no longer afraid. She asked me what I wanted to drink, and I answered with a question: “What are you drinking?” She shrugged: “Vodka.” I said: “With something in it?” And she laughed. ”No, neat of course.” I laughed with her, and said: “Then I’ll take the same thing.”
We talked about literature, mostly about William Faulkner and James Baldwin. She told me that many Americans who criticise Faulkner don’t understand him, and that to reduce him to his racist remarks is absurd. She thought the opposite, that we had to take into account his racism, to go beyond what he had written, but that it was no reason for us not to admire him. We talked about Édouard Glissant’s major work, Faulkner, Mississippi, in which he analyses Faulkner’s racism, and shows that at the same time, Faulkner, through his poetry, his writing, his revival of the tragedy, has produced tools and thoughts that can be used to question all forms of oppression, of power, all ideas of legitimacy. Glissant wrote: “Faulkner’s work will be ‘done’ when black Americans have gone through ‘internal’ criticism and when they have integrated this into their futures.” Listening to her, I thought she had not only gone beyond Faulkner, but had made this possible, too.
She told me about her visits to the south of France with Baldwin, and she exclaimed: “He was the funniest person I have known! He didn’t stop making jokes!” I imagined them, next to each other, laughing for a long, long time.
In the conference at the House of Literature, I tried to show how her novels, especially God Help the Child and Beloved, allowed us to make a radical and powerful analysis at the same time of power and violence. Beloved is the story of Sethe, a slave, who one day flees the property where she is held. She leaves, runs through the forests, braves brambles and traps, crosses rivers. She manages to escape and take refuge in a small town, but very quickly the slavers find her. When the whites come to try to take her back, she hides inside a barn with her children. At this moment, the tragedy at the heart of the story happens: hearing the men approach the barn where she hides, Sethe kills one of her daughters by cutting her throat. We understand that Sethe’s gesture – killing her child, a baby – is not a violence that she uses in response to the violence of slavery, nor even violence to protect oneself from the violence of slavery, but rather the violence of slavery that has been spread into her whole body. It is the white slavers who are responsible for the child’s death, it is they who should be condemned for this particular gesture. The question traditionally asked in politics, “Is it legitimate to respond to violence with violence”, is rendered obsolete by Beloved, since Sethe’s act of violence is not a response to the slave violence, it is the slavery violence itself, the violence that the dominant power forcibly instilled into Sethe, along with fear, threats and death. In short, the dominant ones are always responsible. Power makes violence flow from one body to another, like an electric current.
No book had demonstrated this with as much force, beauty and power as Beloved. The day I met her, I told her that on a different level, we could genuinely argue, after reading Beloved, that if a protester burns a car during a riot, it is the government that has produced the politically violent context that should be held responsible for this act, that the government should pay for the damage done to the car. Because it is the government that has the power to make or break a violent context, like the slavers with Sethe, though, of course, these are two very different levels of violence. She smiled and said: “We never know how a book we write will be of use.”
We continued to drink vodka and we laughed a lot. It was one of the most surprising things for me, that laugh of hers. She laughed while talking of the political catastrophe in the United States, she laughed, even in speaking of the most tragic things. At one point, I asked her where the toilet was. Going there, I saw the letter she had received for the Nobel prize. I found it funny that the letter was there, as if, despite being proud of having received the prize, she wanted to keep a certain distance from, and irony towards, such institutions.
Later, when we talked about politics and how her work made me reflect on things, she suggested we go to see a frame hanging on the wall in the next room. She encouraged me, smiling, and said: “You will like it.” She guided me with her voice, and I was faced with a framed letter informing her that her book Paradise had been banned in jails in Texas. It specified that the novel contained “information of a racial nature” that a “reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve a breakdown of prison through inmate disruption such as strikes or riots”. She laughed, again: “Can you imagine… this country is so racist!” I understood that her laugh was a revenge against the world, a way of letting the power know that it could not get her, that she would fight it without ever being touched by it. In a celebrated television interview, she once said: “I am not a victim. I refuse to be one.”
She told me of a trip she had made. She was crossing the United States and she met an autonomous community made up of people who had fled racist American society to live in a self-managed, self-run group. At the entrance to the perimeter of where this community lived, a poster said something like: “Come, and be prepared.” I believe – though I’m not entirely sure – she told me that this “be prepared” meant that people entering the community had to come with the goods they possessed in order to be able to pool them. She said she asked herself: “These people were fleeing American society, and the first thing they instituted was a rule, a warning, to be prepared. We can never escape all this?”
The afternoon was moving on and we were on the fourth or fifth glass of vodka. Because of the alcohol, the atmosphere became more open around me, and I laughed more easily. That’s when she told me that she did not understand this new fashion in literature to write about oneself, about one’s own life. It’s the only moment in the day when I felt at odds with her. She kindly said: “You, when you write about yourself, it’s a way of writing about the world, but most people who write about themselves do not write about anything but themselves.” I was touched by this compliment, but I told her that I didn’t see a problem in writing about oneself and only oneself, since no experience is unique, that everything we saw had been lived or would be lived by others. I said that I even saw in today’s autobiography the possibility of a renewal of literature. She said: “We do not have to agree on everything.” And we laughed again.
Her son arrived. He was returning from the store where he had bought a watch, as she had asked. He shouted from the door: “I have the watch!” She replied: “You found the pink one? The pink one is the most beautiful.” Then, for the next half-hour we set up her watch. I know it’s silly, but I was moved to see a woman as grand as her do something so trivial. I thought the whole world should be able to see that scene, because literature can be such an intimidating thing. Maybe writers should sometimes show themselves in their daily life, so their writing is less frightening. So the life of a writer appears as what it is, an almost normal life. Maybe then, people would feel allowed to write more.
I remember her first question was: “I wonder why and how a young, white, French, gay man is so interested in a black, American, heterosexual woman from a very different generation.” I answered: “Not only because you wrote the most important books on racism, but because your books go so far in the analysis of the mechanisms of violence that they speak to all people who have experienced this oppression – women, LGBT people, the poor.” I found my answer clumsy; still today I try to find a more accurate reply.
I don’t want this evoking of memories to ever stop. When I left, I was drunk on the vodka. I was worried about having stayed too long, not having noticed the time pass. She signed a copy of The Bluest Eye for me. I had handed her a Bic pen, and she said: “No, not with that.” She used a fountain pen. She asked me what I was reading. The day before, I had seen my friend, the poet Ocean Vuong. I had his book in my backpack. I gave it to her. She told me about her publisher in France whom she really liked, Dominique Bourgeois. She offered to read me the first lines of the novel on which she was working. I remember the first sentence – short, incisive, a little like the first sentence of God Help the Child: “It’s not my fault.” She suggested I go and admire the pontoon behind her house, which sinks into the Hudson river. I took this picture.
Photograph by Édouard Louis.
One day I will write better and more extensively on how her books have changed literature.