Tony Morrison: A Writer Who Became America's Conscience
NEW BOOK OF LEGENDARY AMERICAN WRITER TONY Morrison “God save my child” was published in her homeland, in the States, back in 2015, but we published it quite recently. This is a story about the betrayal of the closest people - parents - with whom the main character has to face, barely born into the world. Thanks to Eksmo Publishers, Russian readers were finally able to get to the last novel of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize laureates. We tell how one of the main writers of the 20th century managed to find her own incomparable voice.
February 18, Tony Morrison, born as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, will turn 86 years old. Morrison is not just the author of eleven novels, short stories, fairy tales, plays and non-fiction, a teacher at Princeton University and the last American to date who won the Nobel Prize. During her long career, she became the mouthpiece of the will of "black America": Morrison as a political figure and as an image of the transformation of American literature of the twentieth century is now more influential than Morrison the writer. Over the years, the social and political role for her has become more important than literature. It is impossible not to compare mathress with one of her favorite authors, Leo Tolstoy: both individuals are so large-scale that they are constantly torn between different ways of carrying knowledge and good to people, because the idea of goodness for Morrison is key.
Chloe Ardelia was born in 1931 in Lorraine, Ohio. At twelve, she adopted Catholicism, and with him the name of Anthony - the abbreviation "Tony" became her pseudonym. Names - real and fictional, "convenient" and "inconvenient" (that is, poorly remembered by the white masters of slaves) - will remain one of the central themes of the writer's work.
Before the university, Tony perceived the stories of her parents about the South, from where the family left from segregation, as well as African-American folklore — like stories from another world. In an interview, she said that she could not believe that her father had seen a man being lynched, and that parents had to drink water from a fountain "for blacks". At the university, where Morrison studied English literature, she first encountered systematic racism, but really understood what segregation is, during a tour of the theater troupe: they were denied an overnight stay in a hotel book and not only that. Even then, she decided that she wanted to engage in the struggle with the division of the world into "black" and "white."
Before writing, Morrison had an equally prolific editorial career at Random House. The first publications of Angela Davis in the USA, the autobiography of Muhammad Ali and many other books that changed the world, were the result of anger and a desire for change that appeared in Morrison in his youth. Career in publishing was preceded by teaching at university and marriage (from her husband, a Hawaiian architect, Tony, and got the surname Morrison): to work at a textbook publishing house, and then at Random House Tony left after divorce, being the mother of two sons.
Morrison immediately shows the world why she wants to write books: to tell the constantly hushed up and, worse, simply not enough interesting history for many of the oppressed minority.
Between work and taking care of children, Morrison began to write, and in 1970 her first book, The Bluest Eyes, came out about the girl Pekole, shy of her black skin and dreaming of blue eyes. Since we are talking about the novel by Tony Morrison, we must understand that the plot included incest, child abuse, racial and social issues. From the time of their appearance to this day, it is for these reasons that they are constantly trying to ban it for sale and library access. Behind the story of Pekola, whose family constantly reminds her of how “ugly” she is, the stories of her parents and the adoptive family in which she ends up loom. All the motives and stylistic techniques that distinguish Morrison's prose are already present in one form or another in The Bluest Eyes: here are changes of points of view and accompanying changes of language, and metaphors, and magical realism, and global reflections on the nature of good and evil. The debutant Morrison immediately shows the world why she wants to write books: to tell the constantly silent and, what is worse, the history of the oppressed minority is not interesting enough for many.
Morrison’s third book, The Song of Solomon, brought her real glory and praise from critics - and everything would be fine if it were not tried to be banned from time to time. The story of the Milkman of Macon Dead (Dead) of the Third, his family and loved ones in a small town in Michigan, most of all resembles Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. To this novel, Morrison festered the perfect style of narration, in which the past and the present intertwine, unobtrusively change points of view, and symbolism reaches the level of world history (all the names of the characters are taken from the Bible, one of the heroines named Pilate is an image of a medieval saint, and about his the ancestors of the Milkman must find out in the town of Shalimar). Terrorism, the search for roots and oneself in this world are added to madness, sex, violence and racism in the Song of Solomon. However, against the backdrop of horror, only the idea of good as a saving power appears more clearly.
In addition to many awards, the book is listed, for example, in the list of favorite works of Barack Obama and immediately entered the reading list of the book club Oprah Winfrey, which will play a major role in the film adaptation of the most famous novel Morrison - "Beloved", which will be released ten years later. The most complex and perfect text of Morrison is a fantastic parable, based on the biography of a runaway slave Margaret Garner. This is the heartbreaking story of a mother who is forced to kill her own daughter in order to save her from slavery and pay for this decision her whole life. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and to this day is considered one of the main American novels of the twentieth century.
For more than a decade, Morrison's words are important for millions of people not only in artistic texts: her political comments are interpreted and quoted more often than replicas of pop stars. So, one of Morrison’s most famous quotes about the Bill Clinton scandal in 1998: “Despite the skin color, this is our first black president,” was understood as a defense of Clinton’s innocence. The writer herself meant not the truth of the story, but the method of investigation and the discourse of accusation, when a person is automatically guilty and his symbolic guilt before the community is more important than his actual guilt. A key commentary on the 2015 scandals around the killings of African-American teens by white policemen was a quote from an interview with Morrison for The Daily Telegraph: “They say to me," We need to start a conversation about race, ". Here it is. Only when a policeman shoots himself in the back to an unarmed white teenager, and when white is sentenced for the rape of a black woman. Then if you ask me: "Is the conversation over?" - I will answer you - yes. "
In her lectures, articles, in non-fiction and in novels, Morrison had time to comprehend almost all topics one way or another connected with African-American culture: the Grace deals with the life of slaves in the 17th century, and the novel Jazz is dedicated to history and sociology. African American music and designed as a jazz composition, consisting of solo improvisations, combined into a single whole. But the main themes still remain universal: the tragic relations of parents and daughters, the search for their own corner, their world — the Morrison characters change names, get names by mistake or do not get names at all (the daughter of the heroine Satie dies in infancy, and the mother has no money to to engrave her name on the grave - enough only for the word "Beloved"). The name as a sign of belonging to a certain community and as a symbol of the split integrity of the person does not let the writer to this day.
In her eleventh novel, which Morrison began back in 2008, the writer first turns to contemporary material. In the millennial life, the problems of color and acceptance of oneself, which should have become history long ago, are alive, because the memory of parental shame, of parental self-hatred and misunderstanding of the causes of this hatred is alive. The key theme, “God save my child,” as Morrison herself formulates in the book and in the interview, is the idea of responsibility for the future of her children. Both love and hate, felt in childhood, remain with the future generation, and the less the parent understands about himself, the more suffering the child will suffer.
Bride - a successful businesswoman, the creator of the cosmetics line for people of all skin colors YOU, GIRL and the fatal beauty: her incredible blue-black skin and stunning hair attract the attention of all and are her main weapon in the fight against her own childhood, in which this skin and hair were the reason for the departure of the father from the family (the girl was blacker than both parents) and the deliberately evil detachment of the mother — blackness was the embodiment of the shame of people who lived in a world that had recently withdrawn from the separation of worlds into “black” and “white”. Mother Bride lives with the thinking of her parents in the era of segregation, the heroine herself seems to be independent of her mother's phantoms, until the break with her lover proves that she is much more difficult to break free from the past than it seemed.
Internalized racism, like internal misogyny, is much more difficult to get rid of - especially remarkable are the words of Mother Bride from the beginning of the book: "To feed your daughter with a breast was for me just the same as giving a tits to some pathetic black woman." Morrison herself for many years has been studying the question of belonging to a community as a social and metaphysical phenomenon. Until now, in the African American community, it is important how dark you are, and the affair with white can be shameful, while the sense of progress, of liberation from slavery, is that color ceases to matter.
For Morrison, it was so important to convey his ideas that they overshadowed reality itself and the people whose life circumstances these ideas should illustrate.
Through stories of violence, tragedies and perversions, the writer tells about the good. For her, the idea of goodness as a conscious choice, as an active life position of an “adult” person, is most important, so none of her novels seems unbearable. The world of her books is terrible, but there is always, if not God's, then author's craft. However, therein lies the main problem of her latest novel - the mismatch of goals and means. A large family matriarch, grandmother and political activist, an R & B fan and a Kendrick Lamar fan, Morrison still doesn’t see the life of the millennials from the inside. While writing the novel, she watched TV shows and read magazines so that, as she said in an interview with The Guardian, to raise the “very modern, very comfortable, blunt” language that she wanted to use in the text to the level of fiction. And this condescension and misunderstanding of the real language and the world of the millennials is read very quickly: its heroes turn out to be too flat, too stereotyped.
The fact is that one of the aspirations of the writer herself has already been fulfilled: a businesswoman-millennial can be anything - smart or stupid, punchy or stepping over her own timidity, she can be as much wounded in life, but she definitely won’t think and speak bot glossy magazine. She has her head on her shoulders. On the other hand, for Morrison, it was so important to convey his ideas that they overshadowed reality itself and the people whose life circumstances these ideas should illustrate. In the novel there are bright and interesting passages, and Morrison's thoughts are still worth their weight in gold, but the game is not in his field, unfortunately, significantly reduces his chances of falling into one row with the former classic.
Nevertheless, Morrison is that modern voice of conscience, which is necessary for any century. Her seriousness and open moralism are bathed by an amazing literary talent and the scale of the task: to tell stories that they don’t want to hear, without a romantic flair, idealization and simplifications. And if at first consideration the problems of the African-American population may seem interesting for a person in Russia, they are universal in fact. Are we talking about anti-Semitism, the fear of "Caucasian nationality", the internal problems of each individual national community, each community and those external attributes that begin to distinguish this community, violence and love in the family. It’s provocative, but it’s very accurate that Morrison poses questions, the answers to which we are yet to find. However, the creative path of Morrison herself and the history of the struggle for human rights throughout the 20th century show that, despite all the terrible potholes of history, the path has been chosen the right one.
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