“The theme requires us to come to terms with being, fearing or accepting the stranger,” she explained.
Yet whether it is Chinese peasants moving into bloated cities, Mexicans crossing into the United States or Arabs and Africans heading for Europe, what most intrigues her is what happens when they reach their destination, how they adjust, how they are received. Morrison said in her opening lecture, listing workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants and armies among those affected. “Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it ever has been,” Ms. The phenomenon is hardly new, but it is certainly topical. For her it’s the perfect metaphor for those millions set adrift in search of new homes, wandering, as she put it, “like nomads between despair and hope, breath and death.” Morrison’s starting point is Géricault’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), which shows distraught survivors struggling to stay afloat after a shipwreck. A result is “The Foreigner’s Home,” a multidisciplinary program focused on the pain - and rewards - of displacement, immigration and exile. It has invited Toni Morrison, the most recent American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, to lead a “conversation” among the arts around a theme of her choice. The Louvre has now set out to prove that this need not be so. More often, it seems, they are self-referential, defining their own vocabularies, speaking their own languages. 20 - Different cultural disciplines may share audiences, yet art, theater, movies, music, dance and literature rarely commune directly with one another.
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