Toni Morrison. Foto: Caroll Taveras
La próxima semana participaré en el Festival América en Vincennes, París, donde se reunirán autores de países como Estados Unidos, Colombia, Chile, Perú (además de mi participación, estará Santiago Roncagliolo y Grecia Cáceres), México, Cuba, etc. con a condición de que hayan sido traducidos al francés. Pronto daré más datos sobre el Festival. Por ahora, me interesa comentar que la invitada de honor es la premio Nobel norteamericana Toni Morrison. Acá, entrevistada por The Guardian, por Emma Brockes, la autora habla sobre ser madre soltera, la muerte de su hija, por qué no dura el amor y en especial de su última novela Home. Una estupenda entrevista (en inglés).
Her latest novel, Home, is set in the aftermath of the Korean war and coincides with that sentimentalised period of American history that Morrison remembers rather differently. “I was trying to take the scab off the 50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please. There was a horrible war you didn’t call a war where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy.”
In Home, Frank, a veteran experiencing delusions brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his sister, Cee, mutilated in a medical experiment, find their way home to a town called Lotus, which as teenagers they did everything to escape. It is a classic Morrison setting, a hardscrabble town with no redeeming features, redeemed nonetheless by the topography of love.
All are variations on Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up, one of four children of a steel-worker and a housewife. Morrison can see both her parents in her character, her father’s attitude of “disdain”, her mother’s openness. She always felt superior, she says, a superiority born of opposition, the gut push-back against low expectation, although she suspects it was also just in her from birth. She was a child of the 1940s, when segregation laws were still in place, but Morrison was self-possessed and inclined to speak up.
“Other people thought that I wrote well, when I was at school. And I remember one teacher showed some little essay I wrote to subsequent classes, as an example of really flawless writing. But the grade he gave me was B. So I asked
(…)
The Bluest Eye had been published in 1970 and three years later she published Sula – the first time, she says, she really felt she was finding her voice. Nothing much can distract her when she’s writing, she says, although after she won the Nobel prize in 1993, celebrity came close. And, she supposes, “the times I didn’t write, maybe I was in love. Or beloved. Somebody was” – she bursts into laughter – “making me the object of love. It’s not bad. It’s short, but not bad.”
Why short?
“I mean, you can’t keep that up. Look, five years I spent on some books. I suppose you could love somebody for five years. Maybe. I don’t mean lust. You can do that for ever. But I mean really love them, the way you say you love children. I don’t know. But that means I would have to remember all the times I was in love.” She bursts out laughing. “Oh, gaaaad.”
Does she see that as a cost?
“It didn’t cost anything. To me. Everything outside, cost. I had to do something, be somewhere. There were certain things I could do with ease. Teach. And read books. And write them. And that area seems very natural to me. Things outside it, except with very, very, very close friends, are a little bit of an act. I mean, not in a bad way. Social.”him: well, if you think it’s so great, why do I have a B? And he said, ‘You misspelt raspberry.’” She throws back her head in laughter. “How do you spell raspberry?”
(…)
Home is bright and sharp and brutally real. When she sits at her desk, Morrison says, everything else disappears. “I feel totally curious and alive and in control. And almost… magnificent, when I write.” The book is dedicated to her son, Slade, who died 18 months ago and in the face of whose death she found herself wordless. She could not work. She could barely speak and didn’t want to hear comforting words from others.
“What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren’t. Somebody tries to say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ People say that to me. There’s no language for it. Sorry doesn’t do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.”
She tried to read a few books by writers about the death of their children but they annoyed her in the same way the comforters did. “Books that have been written about the death of a child, but are all about the author. And people who were trying to soothe me, were trying to sootheme. I never heard anything about him. They say it’s about the living, it’s not, it’s about the dead.”
She doesn’t want “closure”, she says. “It’s such an American thing. I want what I got.” Morrison gathers herself up. “Memory. And work. And” – she starts to laugh – “some more ibuprofen.”
