MARSEILLES.- Great voice of the literature francfona, the writer Guadalupe Maryse Cond died early today – April 2 – in the Apt hospital (Vaucluse), according to what her husband, Richard Philcox, informed AFP.
Born in Pointe-Pitre on February 11, 1934, Maryse Cond addressed topics such as Africa, slavery, and multiple Afro-descendant identities in thirty books.
She was also well known in the United States, where she lived for 20 to the In New York. He inaugurated and directed a center for French-language studies at Columbia University.
“I always worked with her in different publishing houses and I deeply admired her influence, her courage. She inspired many writers to take the plunge,” her editor, Laurent Laffont, told AFP.
Until the end of her adolescence, Maryse Cond did not realize that she was of African descent. She had never heard of slavery or Africa.
A writer who is up for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times
Her mother, a teacher, forbade her to speak Creole and forced her to learn French.
It was upon his arrival in Paris, at the age of 19, that he realized the barrier that the color of his skin represented.
Meet the Martinique writer Aim Csaire, the voice of blackness in French literature.
A single mother, she moves to Guinea, a country that has just gained its independence, and there she lives with many difficulties.
It was not until he was 42 that he began to write, after 12 years of hardship, and he achieved it thanks to Richard Philcox, who would become his translator.
In 1976 he published Heremakhononthen A mixture (1984-1985), a bestseller, about the Bambara empire in 19th century Mali.
She was also the author of The desired and of I Tituba, the black witch of Salem. His name had been mentioned several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Maryse Cond lived in Gordes, a small Provençal village in Vaucluse, in the south of France. Affected by a neurodegenerative disease, she settled there with her husband in the 1980s. It was there that she dictated her last book to a friend of hers, The Gospel of the new worldhis rewriting of the New Testament.
FUENTE: AFP
