Abstract

Travels With Toni

In this article the author presents his experience of a trip to Stockholm, Sweden on an invitation by U.S. writer Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel prize for literature for the year 1993. Toni Morrison's butter cakes and baby ghosts, her blade of blackbirds and her graveyard loves, her "Not Doctor Street" and "No Mercy Hospital" and all those maple syrup men "with the long-distance eyes" are a whole lot more transfiguring. The Nobelette arrived in Stockholm Monday morning overnight from Newark, to face at the airport, full of champagne, Novocain and sleeplessness, the first of dozens of press conferences. In a language not quite English, she was asked whether her winning such a prize would "improve racism" in the United States. No, she said: "I don't think it has any enormous impact on the way ordinary people feel, or the way politics runs its course."