In her address, Morrison related the story of her invitation to a popular talk show. She was excited to go, she says, but as a challenge to both herself and the host, she accepted only conditionally: she would go if the conversation would not touch the topic of race.
She thought about all the other things she could talk about. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ influence on her own work. The romanticism of poverty in American literature. Her personal views on teaching and writing.
“You can see I was loaded with topics,” she said.
The host agreed. But once she was backstage, she was told the pact would be broken—race was simply too exciting not to talk about, her interviewer opined.
“I have a yearning for an environment where every sentence I speak or write is not being seen as mere protest or mere advocacy,” she said.
Nevertheless, she said, she has always insisted on her identification as a black woman.
“I didn’t want to be the just-happened-to-be-black author,” she said. Her goal in insisting that those two words be part of her lexicon was an effort to stretch the vocabulary of the literary world.
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