Color literature

During the last week of his reign, Barack Obama was questioned about the reference books he had always come across, telling books that rooted the image and meaning of the black American. Some of them must be the writings of Tony Morrison (Nobel 1994), missing Tuesday at the age of 88, age in the novel, literature and criticism. There is a wonderful literature that can be called "color literature". Or oppression, agony, pain and slavery. He had authors. James Baldwin and Arthur Healey are still present.

The composers are Maya Angelo and Tony Morrison. The relative difference lies in the magnificence and simplicity in the hollow of this sad world that has lived for decades in its internal and external exile, until it comes out of its shell and begins to tell the incredible.

For me, the works of Maya Angelo are more about Morrison: "Now, I know why birds sing in their cages" and "in the early morning," and I think his poetry in the drawing of Negro life is more simple and more beautiful than Morrison's. Morrison tried to play the magic or fantasy game in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez created it. Critics think that has succeeded. In any case, all American "negro" literature is based on the tragedy of slavery, which then continued through the black "ghetto".

In this ghetto, aside from the oppression of the white man, life was also tragic, guided by poverty, agony and families with declining values. This literature had therefore a rhythm: complaint and rebellion, as evidenced by the works of James Baldwin, who eventually fled Harlem in New York to live in the freedoms of southern France. But he brought with him to the vast and tolerant mountains a skin he could not change and memories he could not uproot on his own. It's like a nail, cut it off and repel it again.

All this was in the twentieth century etiquette. Many things have changed in the life of the black American who replaced Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Or where some of his artists have become the best paid in the country. Or as African-American men and women progress in Congress, in state governance and in the legal profession. But literature itself continues to drown because of the events of the past. Even the Negro comedy persists on the culture of persecution and the history of color.