Students Attend Toni Morrison Lecture

Don Reese

 

On Tuesday, March 8, my AP English Language and Composition class took a short ride on the T to Harvard, where we visited the Natural History Museum and attended one of Toni Morrison's lectures, delivered as part of her appointment as Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Upper School teachers were incredibly supportive and flexible in helping to cover my classes and to allow a few of their students to take most of a day away from their classes so that they could take advantage of our School's proximity to some of the rich cultural resources of Boston.

 

Morrison's talks are titled "The Literature of Belonging," and they comprise a series of meditations on the uses of language to divide and to unite people.

 

The particular lecture that we attended was titled "On Being and Becoming the Stranger," and it featured Morrison's reading of an essay, "Strangers," that the class had read the day before. Morrison, who is now 85 years old, averred that she is doing her best writing and thinking now (even though, she joked, she remembers almost nothing that has happened to her since she turned 20).

 

The students had to line up for the free tickets at noon, and in the interval between obtaining tickets and attending the lecture at 4 p.m., they visited Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography to do some pre-thinking about strangers and friends.

 

The lecture, in the stately, polished-wood splendor of Sanders Theater on Harvard's campus, was enlightening in many ways. Alexis Ifill '17, who first suggested the fieldtrip, notes, "One of the more memorable quotes I heard from her was 'you can be from [anywhere] and you're from that place. But to be American, you have to be white.' It seemed radical at first, but it's really a powerful analysis of racial inequity in America." Morrison went on to say that the vehemence of the opposition to President Obama was a result of it becoming obvious that "white isn't enough anymore."

 

The experience also showed the students the link between the words on the page and the human behind them. As Sarah Smith '17 remarked, "It was very cool to hear the author read a story that we had just read." Several students remarked that the Q & A period was their favorite because Morrison loosened up and spoke, humorously, about presidential politics. Julia Whalen '17 was impressed with Morrison's being "smart, funny, completely unreserved."

 

In all, it was a deep dive into literary culture for our students, and they came away impressed and intrigued.