Paris (AFP)
French-speaking readers will be able to hear again the singular voice of Toni Morrison with the publication Thursday of "The source of self-esteem", a collection that brings together about forty texts of the Nobel laureate of literature.
Previous the release of the posthumous book of the legend of the American letters, a new unpublished of the author of "Beloved" is published Wednesday in the magazine America of which she was the godmother.
Published by Christian Bourgois, "The source of self-esteem" brings together essays, speeches and reflections of the writer, best known in France and in the French-speaking world for her novels.
All the texts presented in the book are unpublished in French (with the exception of the Stockholm speech pronounced by the writer when she received the Nobel Prize in 1993).
Entitled "Peril", the first text of this anthology (432 pages, 23 euros) explains why writers are threats to authoritarian regimes. "Writers - journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights - can disrupt social oppression that works like a coma on the population, as comrades call" peace + "...," she writes in this text a speech delivered in April 2008.
"The life and work of a writer are not a gift to humanity: they are its necessary condition," she insists.
- Tribute to James Baldwin -
We find in the collection of texts on "the deaths of 9/11" or others on the situation of black Americans. One literally gets distracted from reading his funeral tribute to James Baldwin (1924-1987).
"You offered me the language in which to reside (...) I think your thoughts, spoken and written, for so long that I believed them to be mine.I see the world through your eyes for so long that I believed that this Clear vision, so clear, was my own vision, "writes Toni Morrison about the author of" I am not your Negro ".
"It is you," she continues, "who has given us the courage to appropriate a foreign, hostile, totally white geography because you have discovered that this world (ie history) is no longer white and it will never be again.
Another text, from Toni Morrison's personal archive, looks back on the writing of "Beloved", his masterpiece published in 1987. "I started thinking about + Beloved + in 1983. Since the beginning of my years of writing, I was pushed by my complicated relationship to history, "says the writer, granddaughter of slaves.
In the text that gives her title to the collection, "The Source of Self-Esteem" (from a lecture in March 1992), Toni Morrison explains that she wrote "Beloved" (true story of a slave who kills her child so that she does not live as a slave in her turn) to try to tell a story of slavery without sinking into "pornography".
"It is very easy to write on such a subject and find yourself in the position of a voyeur where, in fact, violence, monstrosities, pain and suffering become their own pretext for reading," she says. on guard.
"What I needed then, to deal with what I thought impossible to master, was a little bridle, a concrete thing, an image from the world of what was concrete (...) And for me, this image, this concrete thing, became the bit, "says the writer.
The bit, that instrument for the beasts of burden, that the slave whites sent to their slaves, men and women, to "silence them". "It was also used a lot for white women," says the novelist who was also all feminist fights.
This aspect of his work is highlighted in Toni Morrison's only "recitative" novel during his long career, unpublished in French, and published by America. In this 1983 text, she sketches the fate of two women, one black, the other white, but blurs the benchmarks of racial construction to better unveil the mechanics of oppression and exclusion.
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