• Toni Morrison. Death of the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

At twenty years of age they gave me a scholarship to go to study literature at a Catholic university in Chicago, Loyola ( Louyoula , I would learn to call her so that they would understand me). In the middle of the campus there was a statue of the corresponding warrior of God that you freaked out. I, at that time and at that age, freaked out with everything and everything that freaked out adhered me. With the pedestal plate, which explained that San Ignacio came from the Basque Country , freaked out. With the plaque that the Government of Navarra had placed in Hemingway's birthplace, he freaked out (what magical or geostrategic connection was there between the Southwest shore of Lake Michigan and the Basque Mountains?). With the first book in English that I read in my life, I freaked out, and that book was Sula by Toni Morrison. He freaked out that Toni was the name of a woman who neither feels a man nor pretends to impersonate a man. I freaked out with that freedom of gender as I freaked out with the teacher who sent us to read the book: a blonde pin-up curdled with tattoos and with her makeup eyes like Amy Winehouse (who then petated him). I was freaking out that a feminist like Mrs. (or Ms. , what did I know if I was married) Ullmann could be a pivot, because the patriarchate had taught me that succulent women are always at the service of male pleasure and nothing else.

"Cristina, please read the penetration scene," Ullmann asked me, but in English. Reading in English aloud and that none of the thirty native English speakers in the classroom laughed at me was also fickle (there are few things as flabby as respect for those who are not in a privileged situation). I wasn't sure that I understood the teacher well, I didn't remember reading any insight into the chapter we were going to analyze that afternoon. "The insight?" I asked, dead of shame. "Yes, the stick scene." Indeed, in Sula it happens that a black girl and a white girl, very small, stick a stick in the ground while they talk and while they are silent about how life is going. The stick pierces the ground gently, effortlessly, because the more it penetrates, the more humid the earth finds. I freaked out how the metaphor had gone unnoticed and how the teacher did not see a metaphor, but a genuine delocalized sexual game. Feminist, interracial and intergenerational literary christening, spontaneous alliance of the like-minded with Sula as a motive: how well written by one and how well read by many others, mommy!

----

CRISTINA MORALES is the author of Easy Reading, Herralde Prize 2018.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • literature
  • culture

Literature The Man I Didn't Find

Death of Andrea Camilleri Camilleri's Montalbano: Stoic, hedonistic, ironic

Culture Miguel Delibes, village praise