'Amada': a monumental novel, finally in Catalan

That a novel of the importance ofBelovedThe fact that it was never translated into Catalan is one of those things that infuriates. How many future writers could have seen themselves reflected in them if the publishing system had done its job more than thirty years ago? And, much more importantly, how many readers would have raised the bar of their reading comprehension and wouldn't be seduced by any bound nonsense lining the new releases shelves? Reading books of the quality and complexity ofBelovedIt acts as an antidote to banal and commonplace literature. Reading it in Esther Tallada's magnificent translation is, moreover, a luxury.

Therefore, we will no longer complain and do as he did Toni Morrison (1931-2019)A single mother of two, rising every day at four in the morning to write this passionate, bloody work, poised between reality and nightmare, teeming with love and death. A testament and a vengeance written in the name of her entire community, heirs to slavery, one of the most shameful crimes committed by the white colonial West. Some say that the explosion of great American literature (like that of music) in the 20th century can be explained by the original sin of slavery. That Faulkner, McCullers, and all those who came after cannot be understood without the corpses and blood of the millions of Black slaves who were executed or exploited to death throughout the 19th century. That the ghosts and wandering spirits of all those men and women who had the misfortune of having to live under the boot of a master who whipped and raped them while making them work from sunrise to sunset, are the ones who whisper to us "the problem with the world is that there are white people," as one of the protagonists says inBeloved.

With axe blows

The novel, originally published in 1987, features a very special ghost. Her name is Amada, and she is a dead child and a living girl, or perhaps a living child and a dead girl, a ghost who returns to the realm of the living to reclaim the mother she no longer has. Amada is always more than what each character sees, and in fact, she is more than one thing to each of them: she catalyzes their revelations. The story begins without hesitation and moves forward with a slashing slash: there is a house where a mother and a teenage daughter take refuge, the remnants of a larger family, but also a furious and unwelcome ghost with whom they have reached a kind of understanding. The arrival of a man, Paul D., whom the mother had met many years before on a slave plantation, disrupts this pact and is the trigger that unleashes memories of the past, forcing them to relive the hell they thought they had escaped.

The incredibly skillful and deeply human hands of a monumental writer like Morrison unlock the miracle: leaping between characters' points of view and moving back and forth between past and present actions, with prose that goes directly where it needs to go, and that is also rich, exuberant, and visceral, the story unfolds gradually, because telling it linearly would not do justice to what the author wants to convey, which is nothing less than making readers feel the experience of slavery. It is a world in which people suddenly disappear, never to be seen again, not by accident, but as a matter of everyday policy, a world in which some people have absolute power over others.

Morrison got his hands dirty, wrung out arguments and wit, and painted the bodies of Black people hanging from trees, making phrases bloom from their mouths that, even today, more than thirty years later, remind us that, in a world where human beings are commodities, everything has a price. But he was also able to show us the other side of all the horror, and on that other side of the coin he wrote reconciliation and hope.