Stories and roots of Black France – Corriere.it

He immersed his pen in the disasters of colonialism and its poisonous legacy Maryse CondeThe lady of French literature died on Monday, April 1, 2024, at the age of ninety, in a hospital in Abt, Provence, where she lived. She was born as Maryse Boucollon (Condé was her first husband's surname) on 11 February 1934 in Pointe-à-Pitre, on the island of Guadeloupe in the Antilles, an outer department of the Antilles. French Republicin a family Black bourgeoisie (His father was a banker, his mother a teacher) and he spoke French, not Creole: “Black skin, white masks,” to use the title of a famous essay by Frantz Fanon. Condé studied at the Sorbonne and lived in different African countries, from Ivory Coast to Senegal, then for a long period in the United States (where she taught at Columbia and Berkeley) and finally back to France.

A mother of four children, she began writing at the age of forty when she met her second husband. Richard Philcoxa white Englishman who would also be his translator: “I always wanted to do it, but I thought the writer had to be a white man from a developed country,” he explains in his autobiography. Life without rednesswhere she also says that Africa never considered her a daughter, at most as a cousin.

He has told something about himself and his history over the years Thirty books Writings that relied on the missing worlds of oral tradition and modernity. Among his most famous nicknames is Segou diptych (Earth walls and earth in crumb)the epic saga of pre-colonial Africa; I, Tituba, the Black Witch of Salema fictional biography of a Barbados slave accused of witchcraft in the famous trial of 1692; Mangrove crossingIts events take place in a small village in Guadeloupe. As the Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabankou wrote in his book

Intercultural relations, rejecting root myths and overcoming that idea Negritude It was proposed by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who aimed to liberate blacks from the inferiority complex imposed by the colonialists by restoring their privacy, and were at the heart of his poetry. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, in 2018, when the Swedish Academy, overshadowed by scandals, decided to suspend its recognition, Won the New Academy Awardan “alternative” Nobel Prize because it managed, as the jurors wrote, to depict “the devastation of colonialism and the chaos of postcolonialism.”

Everything in his books is told in delicious and spicy language, with A A very sarcastic and realistic voiceIt is very clear in the last account she dictated to her friend when she was already ill, New World Gospel (Giunti 2022), a contemporary, multicultural, fun and imaginative rereading of the Bible, in which Christ, called Pascal, was born in a Brazilian ashram to a mixed couple and is both black and white. A novel, of course, but also a small spiritual testimony to the need to fight to change the world.