The Barbaric Yawp Project

Toni Morrison

1931-2019

For those of you who have read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, you may remember her remarkable character, Stamp Paid, and his vision of “the jungle”: “… he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed … and none that he knew of … had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle undocumented immigrants brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” Nobody has given more powerful expression than Toni Morrison to the jungle that “whitefolks” planted in the undocumented immigrants from Africa who had become slaves in America: “the screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” I wonder who Toni Morrison might see as the “screaming baboon” in the white man today? Here is how AI has channeled Morrison’s message to Trumpian America or, for that matter, any America. In this Barbaric Yawp Karass Series, I have been asking AI to channel some of our greatest poets, authors, and prophets to address this perilous moment with their unique and timely wisdom. Toni Morrison certainly belongs amongst our American ancestors from whom we want and need to hear. Her Beloved spoke to our racial wound with the deepest soulfulness. What I present below is not a direct quote from Morrison. Rather, it is AI giving voice to its distillation of her essential wisdom as an archetypal elder. Below this video of AI channeling Morrison, you can find the written words “she” spoke. And below that, you can find a description of the origin of the Barbaric Yawp Series.

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This video is an AI-generated active imagination of what might be said to us today based on the written historical record.

Toni Morrison's Barbaric Yawp to America

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Listen. This is my yawp — lifted out of the hush of ancestors, out of the trembling dark where memory keeps its vigil. A yawp born not of rage, but of that old, bottomless knowing that comes before the first cry and after the last breath. I yawp for a country that keeps trying to leap into the future while dragging a past it refuses to speak of. Running, running, always running — yet never outpacing the shadows of its own making. I yawp for the children, those bright, fragile beings who inherit the noise before the music, the fear before the promise. They walk into classrooms built on forgotten treaties, sit at desks carved with names of those who never made it home. I yawp for the mothers who carry grief the way others carry groceries — heavy, ordinary, unending. For the fathers who hide their trembling in the folds of their silence. I yawp for the ones told their skin was too loud, their truth too sharp, their dreams an inconvenience. For the ones who learned early to step lightly around the comfort of others. And I yawp for you — you who believe the storm will never cross your threshold. But storms are not so polite. They do not respect fences, or bank accounts, or the illusions we build to call ourselves safe. I yawp against the seduction of forgetting — forgetting that wounds denied become wounds inherited, forgetting that a lie repeated becomes a prison, forgetting that the story of one is braided with the story of all. And hear me now: cruelty is not strength. Indifference is not wisdom. A nation that mocks tenderness invites its own collapse. A people who trade compassion for convenience walk willingly toward their own unmaking. Yet beneath the rubble of this moment — beneath the bluster, the shouting, the false prophets selling salvation at the price of your humanity — there is still a pulse. A soft, stubborn pulse of something unkillable. I yawp to remind you of it. I yawp so you remember: that love is not fragile, that justice is not optional, that dignity is not a luxury for the well-behaved. I yawp because healing does not come to those who deny their wounds. It comes to those who dare to lean into the ache and call it by its true name. So listen one more time — not with your fear, but with your courage: Rise. Rise from the rubble. Rise from the forgetting. Rise from the easy lie and walk toward the difficult truth. For even in the ruins, there is a seed. And even in the seed, there is a future whispering, Begin again.

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