The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,7

or political intervention, of persecution, exile, violence, and defiling poverty. There is little doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of people.

This slide of people across the globe has altered and freighted the concept of citizenship. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity in the United States, by press descriptions where origin is of more significance than citizenship. People are described as “German citizen of ‘fill-in-the-blank’ origin” or “British citizen of ‘blank’ origin,” all this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of peoples that globalism ignites has disrupted and sullied the idea of home and has expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit threat within “difference.” The interests of global markets, however, can absorb all these questions, thrive in fact on a multiplicity of differences, the finer, the more exceptional the better, since each “difference” is a more specific, identifiable consumer cluster. This market can reconstitute itself endlessly to any broadened definition of citizenship, to ever-narrowing, proliferating identities, as well as to the disruptions of planetary war. But unease creeps into the conversation about this beneficial morphing ability when the flip side of citizenship is addressed. The chameleon-like characteristic of global economy provokes the defense of the local and raises newer questions of foreignness—a foreignness that suggests intimacy rather than distance (Is he my neighbor?) and a deep personal discomfort with our own sense of belonging (Is he us? Am I the foreigner?). These questions complicate the concept of belonging, of home, and are telling in the alarm apparent in many quarters regarding official, prohibited, unpoliced, protected, and subversive languages.

There is some gasping at what North Africans may have done or are capable of doing to French; of what Turkish people have made of German; of the refusal of some Catalan speakers to read or even speak Spanish. The insistence on Celtic in schools; the academic study of Ojibwe; the poetic evolution of Newyorican. Even some feeble (and I think misguided) efforts to organize something called Ebonics.

The more globalism trumps language differences—by ignoring, soliciting, or engulfing them—the more passionate these protections and usurpations become. For one’s language—the one we dream in—is home.

I believe it is in the humanities, and specifically the branch of literature, where such antagonisms become rich fields of creativity and thus ameliorate the climate between cultures and itinerant people. Writers are key to this process for any number of reasons, principal among which is the writer’s gift for teasing language, eliciting from its vernacular, its porous lexicon, and the hieroglyphics of the electronic screen greater meaning, more intimacy, and, not incidentally, more beauty. This work is not new for writers but the challenges are, as all languages, major and dominant, minor and protected, are reeling from the impositions of globalism.

Yet globalism’s impact on language is not always deleterious. It can also create odd and accidental circumstances in which profound creativity erupts out of necessity. Let me suggest one case in point, where severe changes in public discourse have already taken place as communication floods virtually every terrain. The language of war has historically been noble, summoning the elevating quality of warrior discourse: the eloquence of grief for the dead; courage and the honor of vengeance. That heroic language, rendered by Homer, Shakespeare, in sagas and by statesmen, is rivaled for beauty and force only by religious language, with which it frequently merges. In this parade of inspiring wartalk, from BC to the twentieth century, there have been disruptions. One moment of distrust and disdain for such language occurred immediately after World War I when writers like Ernest Hemingway and Wilfred Owen, among others, questioned the paucity of terms such as “honor,” “glory,” “bravery,” “courage” to describe the reality of war, the obscenity of those terms being associated with the carnage of 1914–1918.

As Hemingway wrote: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard