# data[].attributes.body
Toni Morrison: Beyond Fiction is a Digital Humanities Project created by students in the ENG 477 Toni Morrison seminar in conjunction with Professor Tisha Brooks in the English Department. This student-curated exhibit includes excerpts from a rich and varied collection of Morrison’s non-fictional work. In addition to seeing and hearing passages, selected and read by students in the ENG 477 course, you will also hear their reflections on Morrison’s writing and the discoveries they have made through encountering her work.

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "Rootedness: The Ancestors as Foundation” 

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "Rootedness: The Ancestors as Foundation” 

# data[].attributes.body
Morrison states in her essay Rootedness: The Ancestors as Foundations, “For a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours; we don't have exclusive rights to it.” (58)

# data[].attributes.body
"I have suspected, more often than not, that I know more than she did, that I know more than my grandfather and my great-grandmother did, but  I also know that I'm wiser than they were. And whenever I have tried earnestly to diminish their vision and prove to myself that I know more, and when I have tried to speculate on their interior life and match it up with my own. I have been overwhelmed every time by the richness of theirs compared to my own.. they are my entrance into my own interior life... I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth" (73-74).

# data[].attributes.body
This is an excerpt from an article titled She and Me by Toni Morrison in which after a hard day’s work, Morrison goes to her father for empathy, but instead receives this life advice.

"1. Whatever the work, do it well, not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn't make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are."

# data[].attributes.body
From Morrison’s essay, “From A Knowing So Deep”, she says, "There is movement in the shadow of a sun that is old now. There, just there. Coming from the rim of the world. A disturbing disturbance that is not a hawk nor stormy weather, but a dark woman, of all things. My sister, my me -- rustling, like life." (33)

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.body
“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.”

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature" 

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature" 

# data[].attributes.body
“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 the 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.”

# data[].attributes.body
"If each hour of every day brings fresh reasons to weep, the same hour is full of cause for congratulations: Our scholarship illuminates our past, our political astuteness brightens our future, and the ties that bind us to other women are in constant repair in order to build strength in this present, now."

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation"

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation"

# data[].attributes.body
Toni Morrison's essay, "Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation" cohesively illustrates the purpose behind her writing. She states, "If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed experience of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams--which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust" (Morrison, 64).

# data[].attributes.body
"So the literature you live and write asks and give no quarter.  When you sculpt or paint, organize or refute, manage, teach, nourish, investigate or love, you do not blink.  Your gaze, so lovingly unforgiving, stills, agitates, and stills again.  Wild or serene, vulnerable or steel trap; you are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.  Porch or horizon, your sweep is grand."

# data[].attributes.body
“It’s a kind of literary archeology; on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act… to yield up a kind of a truth.”

# data[].attributes.body
In her essay "She and Me", Toni Morrison says, "I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, wide-hearted and narrow, and have many kinds of jobs, but from that moment on, I never considered the level of labor to be the measure of self or placed the security of a job above the value of the home.”

# data[].attributes.headline
 "The Nobel Lecture in Literature" (1993)

# data[].attributes.subject
 "The Nobel Lecture in Literature" (1993)

# data[].attributes.body
"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." (200)

# data[].attributes.body
The following passage is from "The Site Of Memory".
" "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how is appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding"".

# data[].attributes.headline
 "A Slow Walk of Trees" by Toni Morrison

# data[].attributes.subject
 "A Slow Walk of Trees" by Toni Morrison

# data[].attributes.body
"Hopeless, he'd said. Hopeless. For he was certain that white people of every political, religious, geographical, and economic background would band together against black people everywhere when they felt the threat of our progress. And a hundred years after he sought safety from the white man's "promise," somebody put a bullet in Martin Luther King's brain."

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture on Literature" 

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture on Literature" 

# data[].attributes.body
In Toni Morrison’s "The Nobel Lecture in Literature" she states that "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" (201).

# data[].attributes.body
“For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism – a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American” (Morrison 38).

# data[].attributes.body
“It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as is moves relentlessly towards the bottom line and the bottom-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.”

# data[].attributes.headline
  Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.subject
  Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.body
"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 towards the place where meaning may lie."

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "The Dead of September 11"

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "The Dead of September 11"

# data[].attributes.body
“Some have God’s words; others have songs of comfort for the bereaved.  If I can pluck courage here, I would like to speak directly to the dead – the September dead.  Those children of ancestors born in every continent on the planet…But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know about or believe about nations, war leaders, the governed and un-governable; all I suspect about armor and entrails…the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz…To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy…I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say…and I have nothing to give either – except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine…”

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "Romancing the Shadow." 

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "Romancing the Shadow." 

# data[].attributes.body
“Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me” (Morrison, 38).

# data[].attributes.body
So I grew up in a basically racist household with more than a child's share of contempt for white people.  And for each white friend I acquired who made a small crack in that contempt, there was another who repaired it.  For each one who related to me as a person, there was one who in my presence at least, became actively "white."

# data[].attributes.body
"Reading makes it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one's own mind dancing with another's."

# data[].attributes.headline
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.subject
 Toni Morrison's "The Nobel Lecture in Literature"

# data[].attributes.body
From her speech "The Nobel Lecture in Literature," Morrison writes, “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.”