Morrison and Memorial

An excerpt from an interview with Morrison: 

"There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300 foot tower. There's no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place does not exist (that I know of), the book had to."  -- Toni Morrison, "A Bench By the Road"

Memorialization and Enforced Silence: 

"All of Morrison's works are about silence as well as about language, whether that silence is metaphysical or physically enforced by circumstance. All African Americans, like a great many immigrants to America, write and speak in a language they do not own as theirs. Historically, the dominant culture has enforced black silence through illiteracy, through the metaphoric and the actual insertion of the bit in the mouth [. . .]. Morrison indicates in each of her novels that images of the zero, the absence, the silence that is both chosen and enforced, are ideologically and politically revelatory." -- Barbara Hill Rigney, "'A Story to Pass On': Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved"