Toni Morrison, author and editor, is the subject of an article in Cuba Now published in December of 2007.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
By Uriel Medina*
Cubanow--When the jury of the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel literature Price to Toni Morrison in 1993, they emphasized the merits of a “narrative characterised by the visionary force and a high poetic quality that represents an essential dimension of the American reality''.
Therefore, Chloe Anthony Wafford the US novel writer known as Toni Morrison became also the second US writer to receive that award, won in 1938 by Peal S. Buck. Toni was, however, the first afro American to receive it.
Some other colleagues of him had also received the award. Eight writers were distinguished with this price, among them Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner who she admired, John Steinbeck and three other writers such as the Canadian Samuel Bellow, (1976), the Polish Isaac Bashevis Singer, (1978) and the Russian Iossif Alesandrovich Brodskij, ( 1987) who assumed the US citizenship.
Toni Morrison was born in a working class environment, studied at the Howard University in Washington that is mostly of black people and in the Cornell University of Ithaca. She was graduated in Philology and Humanities.
As other writers, she started in the literature world as an editor and author. Her first work was The Bluest Eyes (1970), a book that not only was the starting point her writing, but that showed her social compromise and that was publisher when she was already 40 years old.
Afterwards came another novels: Sula (1973), La canción de Salomón (Salomon Song) (1977) and La isla de los caballeros (The island of gentleman) (1981), but her name was consolidated with Beloved (1986) with which she won the Pulitzer award and later on was taken to the big screen.
This woman, born in Ohio in 1931, has also taught literature at Texas, Howard and New Cork State Universities and today in Princenton. Toni Morrison also published her sixth novel Jazz and later on Jugando en la oscuridad (Playing in the dark) with great success with the critic and with the public.
She won the Nobel in 1993 when she had Publisher only six titles and had never resign to her poetic in defence of her community. The main topics of her novels is the life of the afro Americans and especially black women, being consistent with the defence of civil rights and the fight against racial and genre discrimination.
In 1999 she Publisher her nine book, Paradise and in 2003 Love. Morrison has also work as dramatist with pieces such as 1986 Dreaming Emmet and is the author of other non fiction prose books about social and political ideas, an example of this are Remember:The Journey to School Integration (April 2004) and The Black Book (1974).
Toni Morrison is very critical about the contemporary reality and about the US society, such as the war in Iraq and has made strong declarations in international stages, such as the opening of the Literary Hall of the XIX Guadalajara International Book Fair, Mexico, when she declared that “the US press has always being an arm of the government” and several times has emphasized that the mass media in her country belongs to “great corporations”. She has also condemned the media manipulations the people are systematically subject to in a process of disinformation:
“they decide what we see, what we listen to and what we read”.
A loyal defender of her ideas, she has pointed out the need to develop, as an alternative, “very deep research journalism”. This journalism, said the author of Beloved “talks about the war, about Bush’s Patriotic Act and has reached the public via internet”.
*The author is a Cuban journalist and writer.
December 28, 2007