«All literature is assault on the border» said Kafka. Through your writings,
your actions, your commitments, you yourself managed to break all the
borders, those of geography, those of society, those of culture.
You were born in the Midwest, in a time of industrial prosperity, but you
have been raised in the memory of the southern plantations. Your roots draw from
two sources of modern America: economic rationalism and identities
You were still a child, when you were a
your parents, who came from the South and emigrated to North America, told you
stories of ghosts who had marked the vigils of their youth, to
introduce you to the black culture of their origins. Very quickly, as soon as you were in
age of reading them, you have enriched this oral material with classic novels from
Jane Austen or Tolstoy, before later discovering Virginia Woolf and William
Faulkner. Probably the profession of your father, welder in a factory
manufacturing belt, inspired you to melt
together these different influences and combine the black coal of the early ages and
the tinplate of modern times.
Without going back over the prestigious course that saw you dedicated, like
Faulkner and Hemingway, by the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993,
wishes to tell you that you represent in our eyes the most beautiful part of America,
the one who bases her love of freedom on the most intense dreams. The one who offers
to a black child born in a modest environment, in segregation, in a
Ohio’s Middle Town, the Fate of the Greatest Novelist
American of his time.
This passion will grow within you and you put all your strength and gifts to
literary cause. In 1949, you enrolled at Howard University
to study literature, and then you defended a thesis in 1953 on suicide in
William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf at Cornell University. At 39, you write your
1st novel, The bluest eye. But it is especially Beloved, which comes out in 1988, which unveils,
to the world, your immense talent. The book gets the Pulitzer Prize. It will be adapted
and dedicated «best novel of the last 25 years» by the
New York Times literary supplement in 2006.
Anxious to share your passion, you will try to transmit it, in
teaching in several universities, including the famous University of
Princeton, where you will be an admired teacher. Very quickly, you arouse respect,
admiration, fascination in those who come to you. We want to see you, we
wants to listen to you, we want to ask you questions. Several institutions
prestigious, such as the University of Oxford and the Higher Normal School, you
Doctor Honoris Causa. Magician of the verb, your talent exceeds the
borders and your voice conquers all audiences: your works are translated into 50
languages and read around the world. In 2006, you are the guest of honour of the
Louvre, around a theme that is particularly important to you, Stranger
in his country.”
Your novels are voices, ghostly and unheard of voices to which
you give life, through the magical power of writing. These multiple voices
intersect and respond, discordant or melodious, forming a
renewed polyphony. You enter into what is foreign to you, and your
sensitivity makes the unknown familiar and poetic the singular.
Alongside a Ralph Ellison, a Richard Wright, a Chester Himes or
again from a James Baldwyn, you are the first woman writer to have
rehabilitated the painful history of African Americans.
Against all odds, you will fight to reveal to the world the
artistic wealth of black Americans. When you are an editor at
Random House in New York, in charge of the black literature sector,
you contribute to its promotion and dissemination, notably by publishing
autobiographies of Mohamed Ali and Angela David, and an anthology
of black writers, The black book. Mixing, in your novels, the
mythical, you know that to better look at the future, you must know
reclaim its past. Icon of the universal dimension of tragedy
of black Americans, you will, through your works, give back their history,
their dignity, but also their freedom.
Each of your novels is a unique work, a diamond patiently
a musical score. You will manage to offer literature this
that jazz musicians brought to the music: a revolution. You
mix dialect and learned language, you add words, verbs and
sense, you sprinkle all of your multiple influences, mixed
that give birth to a delicate dish, you thus manage to
find harmony in this beautiful dissonance.
But the tone of a work that would stick to the bitter observation of this
My dear Toni Morrison, if she did not oppose him,
the strength of a song and the awakening of hope. You are not content to
remind contemporary societies of the need to remember
and the need for dignity for all. Despite their
dramatic tone and sacrificial destinies of your heroines, your novels
breathe a pleasure of living. Your painting of the wild Eden that was
America’s pioneers and your paintings of maternal instinct that the
women paradoxically give to your conception of the fragility of
human happiness a primitive force that pleases the reader.
If we are gathered around you today, dear Toni Morrison,
it is precisely to thank you for this gift that you have given us
through the years of a work carried by a breath and by a humanity
outstanding. You are also very involved in defending rights
You are fighting for freedom, equality and fraternity, these values of
our Republic which, thanks to your commitment, become values
shared. Literature, however, is your greatest struggle because you
know that language, the place of oppression, is also that of resistance,
that the verb is a weapon, that art is a means of liberation and
for, as Albert Camus said, everything that degrades the
culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude.”
Dear Toni Morrison, on behalf of the President of the Republic, and
the powers vested in us, we give you the badges
Officer in the order of the Legion of Honor.