(Marseille) French writer Maryse Condé died on the night of Monday to Tuesday at the age of 90, after a life of fighting for her freedom and exploring West Indian and black identities.
A recognized voice of French-speaking literature, she died in her sleep at Apt hospital, in the south-east of France, her husband, the Briton Richard Philcox, told AFP.
Born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, on February 11, 1934, Maryse Condé has dealt in around thirty books, mainly fiction, with the history of Africa and its diaspora, the legacy of slavery and black identities.
“I always worked with her in her various publishing houses and I deeply admired her influence and her courage. It made a lot of writers want to take the plunge and fight with it,” its publisher, Laurent Laffont, told AFP.
“The Grande Dame of World Letters, Maryse Condé, bows out, bequeathing us a work driven by the quest for a humanism based on the ramifications of our identities and the cracks in History,” wrote the French-speaking writer. Congolese Alain Mabanckou on X.
“No reason to be proud”
Having lived in several African countries (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea and Senegal), Maryse Condé criticized the limits of the concept of “n*gritude” proposed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“However, there is no reason to be proud of belonging to this or that race. I question the fact that Blackness perpetuates the notion that all black people are the same. It’s a totally racist attitude inherited in fact from white people who believe that all n****s look the same,” she said in an interview with the American magazine Callaloo in 1989.
Having always had the desire to write, she was only able to truly devote herself to it when she was approaching forty.
Before that, this middle-class girl from Guadeloupe, who described herself as a child spoiled by her parents, went through many trials since her arrival in Paris for her studies in 1953.
The loss of her mother in 1956, to whom she was unable to say goodbye, racism, the failure of her marriage to the Guinean Mamadou Condé, the rudimentary conditions in which she raised her four children left her marked.
Independentist
Thanks to her new companion met in Senegal, Richard Philcox, who would become her husband and translator, she realized her vocation, writing, by leaving Africa in 1970. She also embarked on a doctorate in letters in Paris. His thesis, defended in 1976, is entitled “Stereotype of black in Guadeloupe-Martinique West Indian literature”.
After theater plays, she obtained recognition as a novelist thanks to Heremakhonon in 1976, where the West Indian narrator finds only disillusionment in Africa.
Its great success in bookstores is Segoufresco in two volumes (1984 and 1985) on the decline of the Bambara empire, in Mali, from the 18the century until the arrival of French colonizers.
She then returned to live in Guadeloupe, where she campaigned for independence, before being recruited by several American universities, for which she taught French literature, while publishing regularly.
From 1995 to 2005, she directed the Center for Francophone Studies at Columbia University in New York. She then became an intellectual figure in the United States, a country which she left permanently in 2013, to retire in a village in the Luberon, Gordes, in the south-east of France.
Her work made her one of the contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she did not obtain. In 2018, he was awarded the “new literature prize” in Stockholm, awarded that year by a “New Academy” which took the place of the Swedish Academy, mired in a scandal of unreported sexual violence.