2019.08.13 教导托尼-莫里森

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Teaching Toni Morrison
My life was never the same after reading Beloved. And I hope my students’ won’t be either.

By Matthew A. Watson
AUGUST 13, 2019
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Toni Morrison
Christian Bourcart / Getty
Every year, I get goosebumps. “Here is your copy of Beloved or Song of Solomon or Home,” I say to my high-school students. And in that moment I am struck again by my awesome and humbling role in this seemingly mundane ritual: My God, I’m the person—me—who gets to introduce a new generation of readers to the work of Toni Morrison. I feel the tremendous honor of my role, and the tremendous weight of that responsibility.


Teaching Toni Morrison to teenage readers is tough. Many students have a tendency to seek out familiar territory in the books they read. Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? How will this heroine triumph over this villain? What trials will she overcome before the final chapter ends? This is the unambiguous landscape of most young-adult literature.

But Toni Morrison denies her reader easy identifications and tidy resolutions. Instead she offers them irresolvable moral dilemmas and insoluble contradictions. A heroine can act with unfathomable cruelty. Has Beloved’s Sethe, in her brutal act, done the right thing? Morrison herself said she could not answer that question.

Morrison invites my students to observe the messy complexity of human experience, to hear African American voices in the literature classroom, voices long absent. For generations, teachers of literature presented students with the American experiences of Roderick Usher’s paranoia, Huckleberry Finn’s colloquialism, Jay Gatsby’s ambition, Holden Caulfield’s disenchantment. Morrison enables students today to hear the richness of black experience, the dignity and the pain of characters silenced or ignored by the white mainstream, characters who nonetheless lived vibrant lives of love and sorrow, characters like Pecola Breedlove, Sula Peace, or Macon Dead. In Morrison’s late novel Home, a black soldier returns to the United States after a psychologically devastating experience in the Korean War of the early 1950s. Back on American soil, he encounters police harassment, Jim Crow segregation, and medical experimentation conducted on unwitting black subjects. When interviewed, Morrison said that she wanted to pull the veil back from the rose-colored lens through which so many Americans see the 1950s. Their Golden Age, she said, was someone else’s hell.


In a few days my classroom will be full of students again, and piles of crisp new paperbacks await them: Hamlet, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart, Beloved.

Over the course of the year, students will highlight passages in those paperbacks, dog-ear their pages, and stuff them into already overstuffed backpacks. A rich world awaits their discovery—and in it a chance to discover themselves. My life was never the same after reading Beloved. And I hope theirs won’t be either.

Matthew A. Watson is a teacher at Indian Hill High School near Cincinnati, Ohio.


教导托尼-莫里森
读完《亲爱的》后，我的生活从此改变了。我希望我的学生也是。

作者：Matthew A. Watson
2019年8月13日



托尼-莫里森
Christian Bourcart / Getty
每年，我都会起鸡皮疙瘩。"这是你的《亲爱的》或《所罗门之歌》或《家》，"我对我的高中生说。在那一刻，我再次被我在这个看似平凡的仪式中所扮演的令人敬畏和谦卑的角色所震撼：我的上帝，我是那个可以向新一代读者介绍托妮-莫里森作品的人。我感到我的角色的巨大荣誉，以及这一责任的巨大重量。


向青少年读者讲授托尼-莫里森是很困难的。许多学生倾向于在他们阅读的书籍中寻找熟悉的领域。谁是好人？谁是坏人？这个女英雄将如何战胜这个坏蛋？在最后一章结束之前，她将克服哪些考验？这是大多数青少年文学作品中毫不含糊的景观。

但托尼-莫里森拒绝让她的读者轻松地识别和整齐地解决。相反，她为他们提供了无法解决的道德困境和无法解决的矛盾。女主人公可以表现出深不可测的残忍。亲爱的》中的塞特，在她残酷的行为中，是否做了正确的事情？莫里森自己说她无法回答这个问题。

莫里森邀请我的学生观察人类经验的混乱复杂性，在文学课堂上听到非裔美国人的声音，这些声音长期缺席。几代人以来，文学教师向学生展示了罗德里克-厄舍的偏执、哈克贝利-芬的口语、杰伊-盖茨比的野心、霍尔登-考尔菲尔德的失望等美国经验。莫里森使今天的学生能够听到黑人经验的丰富性，听到被白人主流沉默或忽视的人物的尊严和痛苦，这些人物仍然过着充满活力的爱情和悲伤的生活，如佩科拉-布雷德洛夫、苏拉-和平或梅肯-达德。在莫里森的晚期小说《家》中，一名黑人士兵在50年代初的朝鲜战争中经历了心理上的摧残后回到了美国。回到美国本土后，他遇到了警察的骚扰、吉姆-克罗的隔离，以及在不知情的黑人身上进行的医学实验。在接受采访时，莫里森说，她想把面纱从玫瑰色的镜头中拉回来，许多美国人都是通过这个镜头来看待1950年代的。她说，他们的黄金时代是别人的地狱。


几天后，我的教室里将再次坐满学生，成堆的清脆的新书在等着他们。哈姆雷特》、《麦田里的守望者》、《了不起的盖茨比》、《物是人非》、《亲爱的》。

在这一年里，学生们将突出这些平装书中的段落，把书页塞进已经塞得满满的书包。一个丰富的世界在等待着他们的发现--在这个世界上有机会发现自己。读完《亲爱的》之后，我的生活就变得不一样了。我希望他们的生活也不会改变。

马修-A-沃森是俄亥俄州辛辛那提附近的印第安山高中的一名教师。