Strolling through the American Cultural Garden [Part 19]

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was an African American female editor and author who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, the American Book Award, and was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).

Author Toni Morrison.

She wrote works imbued with the traditions of the American South, the painful land of Black slaves from distant Africa and their descendants.

Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a working-class Black family. As a child, she loved literature, studied Latin, and read works of Russian, English, and French literature. She attended undergraduate and graduate school and taught at several universities across the United States. She has also been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Social Sciences and Exact Sciences since 1981.

Morrison is the author of 11 novels, as well as children's books and collections of poetry and essays. Her novels have been translated into 25 languages worldwide and have been the subject of numerous studies.

Her works vividly portray a fundamental face of American reality through a novelistic art characterized by intense imagination and rich poetic quality; revolving around the journey of Black people in America, each work is an attempt to separate African American culture from the pervasive influence of European culture, exposing to light the dark chapters of a race subjected to brutal treatment and degradation, an unimaginably painful past of an era devoid of love.

In 1970, Morrison published his first novel, *The Bluest Eye*, which attracted the attention of critics and the public alike for its profound portrayal of the lives and fates of African Americans in the years following the Great Depression .

The work depicts the impact of racial prejudice on a Black girl who dreams of having blue eyes, the symbol of beauty for white Americans; the novel Sula (1973) tells the story of the friendship between two Black women. It became a bestseller and won the National Book Award; Song of Solomon (1977) is a blend of realism, allegory, and fantasy. The novel won the National Book Critics Award and the Academy Award for Literature and Arts.

Her novel, * Beloved * (1987), explores the theme of slavery, highlighting the horrific impact of slavery on a mother's emotions. Set in Ohio after the end of the Civil War, the story follows a Black enslaved woman who believes she would rather kill her own daughter than send her into slavery. *Beloved* is considered Morrison's most successful and best-selling work.

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (born 1939) wrote, “ Beloved is written in a prose that is not extreme, but is rich, charming, strange, rough, lyrical, sinful, and at the same time colloquial and direct on many issues.” The novel was adapted into a film in 1998.

Toni Morrison chose the name of a genre of music typical of Black Americans to title her profound work, *Jazz * (1992). The name “Jazz” is symbolic. She said: “Music helped us overcome three hundred years of oppression. It allowed Black people to discover themselves. Today, it is spread throughout the world. And now it is the turn of the novel to fulfill that role, to play new melodies, to open the investigation…”

The novel Jazz Music tells a story of a Black love affair almost as fateful as in ancient Greek tragedy. It takes place in the Black neighborhood of Harlem, New York, in 1926, during the Jazz Age. There are two lovers, Joe and Violette, both in their fifties. Joe sells cosmetics at his home shop; his wife is a hairdresser. Joe falls madly in love with a young woman named Dorcus, whose family is troubled. Violette is initially jealous of Dorcus, who she believes stole her husband's heart; she tries to understand why Dorcus has such a captivating charm to emulate her; gradually, she feels drawn to her.

In the work, the author also revisits the 19th century with its cotton plantations and Black slaves. The work evokes a century of blood and tears of Black people; people burned alive, skinned for trivial matters, and constantly oppressed.

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