Strolling in the American Literature Garden [Part 19]

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

Writer Toni Morrison.

She writes works steeped in 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, studying Latin and reading works of Russian, English and French literature. She attended college and graduate school and taught at several universities in the United States. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Social 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 ​​and have been the subject of numerous scholarly works.

Her works vividly represent a fundamental aspect of American reality through a novel art characterized by intense imagination and extremely rich poetry; revolving around the journey of black people in America, each work is her attempt to separate African-American culture from the profound influence of European culture, exposing to light the dark history of a race that was treated cruelly and degraded, an unimaginably painful past of an era lacking love.

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

The work is about the impact of racial prejudice on a black girl who dreams of having blue eyes, the symbol of white American beauty; the novel Sula (1973) tells the story of the friendship between two black women. The work became a "best-seller" and won the National Book Award; Song of Solomon (1977) is a blend of realism, fable and fantasy. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Beloved (1987) explores the theme of slavery, she pointed out the horrifying impact of slavery on the feelings of a mother. The incident took place in the state of Ohio after the end of the Civil War, the story of a black slave woman who thought it was better to kill her own daughter than to send her child to 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 uncompromising, rich, graceful, strange, rough, lyrical, sinful, colloquial, and to the point.” The novel was adapted into a film in 1998.

Toni Morrison chose the name of a musical genre typical of black Americans to name her profound work Jazz (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 all over the world. And it is the turn of the novel to perform that role, to play new tunes, to open an investigation…”.

The novel Jazz tells a story of black love almost as fateful as in an ancient Greek tragedy. The story takes place in the black Harlem area of ​​New York in 1926, during the Jazz decade. There are two lovers, both in their fifties, Joe and Violette. Joe sells cosmetics in his home store; his wife works as a hairdresser. Joe falls in love with a young girl named Dorcus, whose family is in turmoil. Violette is initially jealous of Dorcus, who has stolen her husband's soul; she tries to understand why she has the magic to seduce her husband so that she can imitate her; gradually she feels attached to her.

In the work, the author also revisits the 19th century with cotton plantations and black slaves. The work recalls a hundred years of black blood and tears; people were burned alive, skinned for very small things, always oppressed.

Source: https://baoquocte.vn/dao-choi-vuon-van-my-ky-19-282669.html