Chloe Wofford

Más abajo ponemos una entrevista a Toni Morrison, autora de Beloved, y de The Bluest Eye. Morrison había leído a Hemingway, Faulkner o Willa Cather pero tenían trazos racistas. ¿Su autor favorito? James Baldwin. También había leído a Chinua Achebe y a Zora Neale Hurston, pero ninguno de ellos había escrito sobre el ser negro, el cómo se sentía ante el racismo, en una sociedad dominada por blancos. Y eso es lo que planteó Morrison en sus escritos: el sentimiento de inferioridad por tener otro color de piel.

También un vocabulario encontramos deadpan.

Morrison con sus hijos

Brevemente

El verdadero nombre de Toni Morrison es Chloe Ardelia Wofford. Se convirtió en católica a los 12 años y tomó el nombre de bautismo de Anthony, que llevó a su sobre nombre: Toni.

Mientras enseñaba en Howard, Washington, D.C., conoció a Harold Morrison, con quién se casó en 1958.

Chloe Wofford Talks about Toni Morrison

The woman breezing into a Princeton, N.J., restaurant… is Toni Morrison, 63,… the 1993 Nobel Prize winner for literature. Heads turn as she moves to a table…

"Princeton's fine for me right now," she explains as we sit down to lunch. "I have wonderful students and good friends here. Besides, I'm in the middle of a new novel and I don't want to think about where I'm living."…

As a luncheon companion, she is great fun -- a woman of subversive jokes, gossip and surprising bits of self-revelation… The stories Morrison likes to tell, have this deadpan quality to them… One suspects that Morrison long ago figured out how to battle the cruelties of race with her wit…

Q: What role did books play in your childhood?

A: Major. A driving thing. The security I felt, the pleasure, when new books arrived was immense. My mother belonged to a book club, one of those early ones. And that was hard-earned money, you know.

Q: As a young reader, when you encountered racial stereotypes in the classics of American literature – in Ernest Hemingway or Willa Cather or William Faulkner -- how did you deal with them?

A: I skipped that part. Read over it. Because I loved those books. I loved them. So when they said these things that were profoundly racist, I forgave them. As for Faulkner, I read him with enormous pleasure. He seemed to me the only writer who took black people seriously. Which is not to say he was, or was not, a bigot...

Q: Which authors influenced you when you began writing?

A: James Baldwin. He could say something in a phrase that clarified all sorts of conflicting feelings. Before Baldwin, I got excited by fiction through reading the African novelists, men and women -- Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye. Also Bessie Head and the Negritude Movement, including Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire. They did not explain their black world. Or clarify it. Or justify it. White writers had always taken white centrality for granted. They inhabited their world in a central position and everything nonwhite was "other." These African writers took their blackness as central and the whites were the "other."…

Q: When you began writing, the best-known black literary voices were male -- Ralph Ellison, Baldwin, Richard Wright. Did you make a conscious effort to change that?

A: When I began writing I didn't write against existing voices. There had been some women writing – Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, though I hadn't read Hurston yet. When I began, there was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society -- a black female and a child. I wanted to write about what it was like to be the subject of racism. It had a specificity that was damaging. And if there was no support system in the community and in the family, it could cause spiritual death, self-loathing, terrible things.

Once I did that, I wanted to write another book. By the time I wrote the third one, I began to think in terms of what had gone on before -- whether my territory was different. I felt what I was doing was so unique that I didn't think a man could possibly understand what the little girl in "The Bluest Eye" was feeling. I did not think a white person could describe it. So I thought I was telling a tale untold… (Chloe Wofford Talks about Toni Morrison)

Vocabulario

Deadpan: looking or seeming serious when you are telling a joke.

A deadpan expression/voice

Es un adjetivo que describe maneras sin emociones. Es otra forma de hacer humor sin cambios en las emociones o el lenguaje del cuerpo. Esta forma también es llamada dry humor o dry wit.

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Fuentes

Toni Morrison, Wikipedia