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How Does Toni Morrison Use Strong Language

791 Words4 Pages

It is important for authors to recount past traumas in their work because to keep history from repeating itself, one must speak of it. Based on the texts we've read like Beloved, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture and on, to get a strong response from a reader the author must use strong language or gruesome recounts of the past so that they can trigger their reader into visualizing as much as they can of a life under slavery. This can be a catalyst to thinking more consciously of what one says or does, in turn furthering society little by little from different types of oppression making it progress into the world it describes itself as. In Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Lecture, she creates a story about a blind …show more content…

[…] It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language–all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge of encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.” Here, she describes how language used violently has many dangers. These dangers can include unethical actions which further the point of language being a tool of power. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the life and hardships slaves faced is vividly described through Sethe's and Paul D 's recounts of the past. For example, ‘“Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Hungry, nigger?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Here you go.’ Occasionally, a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus.’” Here, Paul D. remembers the sexual humiliation a slave had to face by the white man, this case being of a slave being forced to give his master fellatio with his life on the line because he was hungry. The white master used his verbal power to take advantage of his slave. Also, by describing the slave “taking a bit of foreskin to Jesus”, the reader may start

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