By: Jane Tabet-Kirkpatrick
A photo taken by the author during a summer internship in Washington, D.C., USA in 2020.
Recently, while falling down a YouTube rabbit-hole during a sleepless night, I had the pleasure of stumbling upon Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech. Within her thirty-minute speech she reinforces the importance of narrative, and by natural extension, language. Both of these have entangled themselves throughout the course of human history, acting as a transcendent tool and a violent weapon.
In her speech, Morrison mentions the Tower of Babel, a biblical origin myth intended to explain the existence of various world languages. Intending to reach the heavens, the Babylonians begin the construction of a tower. When God saw this and felt his power threatened, he halted the progress by creating different languages so the workers could no longer communicate among themselves. The fractured working force made the continued construction of the tower impossible and forever altered humans’ ability to connect with one another.
Language is vital to human survival and success. It dictates our daily lives and takes many forms: it is used to extend a simple admission of existence to a passing neighbor, to order drinks at your favorite bar, or to navigate the whirls of public transportation. It is this same malleability, however, that makes it predisposed to manipulation. Language's natural aqueous form captures us, wraps us in its ambiguity, exposes our maleficent characteristics, and drowns us in shallow waters with every ignorant breath. As the Babylonians took their first step towards heaven they simultaneously made the first steps towards their demise.
The loaded power of language can be broken apart and dissected in a million ways, like shattered glass with powerful refractions and implications. Language is my chosen shard when writing this piece. As I am confronted daily by the media from the United States while living abroad, I feel like an omniscient observer, watching a constant state of unrest from a bird's eye view: a shooting once a week or more, an unhinged political debate devoid of facts and only meant to spur controversy, a stagnant government festering with hate, and most recently the murder of Jordan Neely on the New York subway.
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The story of Jordan Neely is one that deserves extrapolation and expansion for its nuance, its narrative, and its relevance to the exposure of powerful language. A homeless black man on a subway was placed in a 15 minute long choke hold by a white civilian patron (one who is notably a former U.S. Marine), eventually killing him. The homeless man was accused of “disrupting and threatening” other passengers, and for this it seems he paid the ultimate punishment. The subway cart was filled with other people, who watched and did not intervene. Their reaction to the violence taking place in front of them was to film and share what was happening. The man was questioned by the NYPD and released with no charges, no doubt continuing to confirm the existence of injustice that had planted itself firmly in the United States.
Thinking about this I’m once again drawn to Morrison’s prophetic words: “one of the principal ways in which we require and digest information is via narrative.” When I stand back and examine the United States with all of its factions and convoluted history, a clearly defined narrative paints itself with a clearly identifiable emotion—fear. We exist in a world with a boogey-man at every corner. We’re scared of our neighbor, going to school, ringing a doorbell, and antagonizing the wrong person in traffic. This growing narrative of fear has left us naked, stripped us of our trust in community and has sowed hatred with our neighbors. Our narratives of danger and crime have been used as poor excuses for the constant militarization of the police force, and have created the perfect conditions for us all to accept the need for punishment and violence as the only suitable recourse.
This notion of fearing everyone and everything deeply destroys the many pillars of community that provide us with the all important power of the people. We would rather watch an “unwanted” member of society die on the subway in front of us because we are briefly scared and uncomfortable.
The previous story exposes an exhaustive list of narratives within the United States, many of which I am unable to explore in this short for: what it means to be black, mentally ill, poor, etcetera etcetera. However, there is a crucial detail that was salient amidst the confusion and conflicting initial reports about the perpetrator: his status as an “ex-marine.” This is a detail that once again sets forth a specific narrative. The common idea that surrounds the title “ex-marine" is a picture of an outstanding citizen, one that, by the authority of the United States government, has been vetted enough to protect the public.
Morrison continues: “the systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.”
This violence crafted by narrative that Morrison mentions is palpable within Jordan Neely’s life and death. It forces an uncomfortable look at several factors revolving around fear, race, self defense, the military, and the prison system. These notions have subtly permeated our society, creating complacency of a system that poisons the communal drinking well and makes us accept and even abet the harshness that others are met with. A piece from New York Magazine, “Jordan Neely Was Already Dead”, summarizes the true effects of these ideologies : “Neely shouted in his last moments of his life, ‘I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die,’ the doomed man’s words were sadly accurate about the choices he believed New York offered: prison or death.”
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Morrison's words in 1993 leave me with hope and anger. The alarm signaling the importance of language and narrative has been ringing long before I have been around to hear it (and even long before Morrison, too). It’s the same way I feel when I discover that the radicals from the past foresaw the predicaments of the future. The part that makes me angry is to think that there was a future we could have started working for in the past. The hopefulness comes in waves; there has always been (and I pray always will be) this motivation to organize and mobilize our communities to reverse the harm and rewrite the damaging narratives.
The restructuring of narratives is one of the leading ways that change can occur; for example, through the language that we use or the stories we choose to teach. The ability to understand the experiences, and feelings of others is a rather obvious—but nevertheless necessary—condition for the future. It is vital to be able to articulate these narratives, understand them, and then use them as a point of communication and connection.
“Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life…” (read Morrisons full speech here: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/)
It is within this final quote from Morrison that I look with hopeful eyes toward the sky, I look for progress and change all while simultaneously praying we have not already buried heaven far beneath our feet.
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