Maryse Condé, the French-Caribbean writer died on the verge of a Nobel

He wrote about Africa, slavery and multiple black identities. The French writer has died Maryse Condé, originally from the archipelago of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles, after a life spent fighting for her freedom and exploring the identities of blacks: she was 90 years old and in recent years her name has appeared many times among the possible winners of the Nobel Prize for the literature. Her husband Richard Philcox broke the news of her passing during the night in her sleep at the Apt hospital in the south of France to the France Presse agency.

Maryse Condé: “I, a black writer without blush”

Anais Ginori

06 July 2019

Born in Pointe-a-Pitre on February 11, 1934, Maryse Condé he wrote about thirty books on Africa and also taught extensively in the United States. Candidate several times for Nobel Prize for literaturein 2018 he won the Alternative Nobel, the one awarded by a series of Swedish academics when the Swedish Academy postponed the awarding of the prize due to a literary #MeToo involving an academic, forcing the prize to be stopped for a year. Receiving the award the writer said: “Guadeloupe is a small country, important for us who were born there, but only remembered on the occasion of hurricanes and earthquakes. I am happy that our country is now also known for other reasons, for this award literary work that I am really proud to receive.”

But Maryse Condé was also very well known in the United States, where he lived for twenty years in New York and directed a center for francophone studies at Columbia University, also teaching at Berkeley and Harvard.

“I have always worked with her in her various publishing houses and I deeply admired her influence and her courage. She inspired many writers to take the plunge and fight with her,” her publisher, Laurent Laffont, told AFP.

Only at the age of 42, after twelve years of life and hardship in Africa and thanks to his new partner, Richard Philcox, who became his translator, did he begin to write. In 1976 he published On Herémakhonfollowed by I follow (1984-1985), a bestseller about the Bambara empire in 19th-century Mali.

Maryse Condé lived in Gordes, a small Provençal village in the Vaucluse region of southern France. Suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, she moved there with her husband in the 1980s. It was there that she dictated her latest book to a friend, The Gospel of the New Worldpublished in Italy by Giunti, his rewriting of the New Testament.

Until her late adolescence, Maryse Condé said she didn’t realize be black. She had never heard of slavery or Africa. Her mother, a teacher, banished Creole in favor of French in the family home in Pointe-à-Pitre, where Maryse was born on February 11, 1934, the youngest of eight children.

Only in Paris, where he arrived at the age of 19, did he understand that color had a meaning. It was the 1950s: the colonies were becoming emancipated and black intellectuals were in full swing. Here she met the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire, who opened her eyes: “I understood that I was neither French nor European. That I belonged to another world and that I had to learn to tear apart the lies and discover the truth about my society and about myself itself”, he recalled in a documentary, A singular voicededicated to her in 2011.

In his career he has published around twenty novels, among which we remember, The earthen walls, The earth in crumbs e The crossing of the mangrovepublished by Edizioni Lavoro; I, Tituba black witch of Salem (Joints); Wicked life (winner of the 1988 Anaïs Nin Prize of the Académie française; and/or) and the autobiography Life without blush (The Turtle), in which she confides that she has not “managed to become African” and speaks of an “abyss between West Indians and Africans”.

In 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron received the writer at the Elysée, awarding her the highest decoration of the Legion d’Onore and declared: «Maryse Condé taught me about Africa».