The French writer from the Guadeloupe archipelago, Maryse Conde, died Monday night into Tuesday at the age of 90, after a life of fighting for her freedom and exploring the identities of West Indian and black peoples.
Her British husband, Richard Philcox, explained to the agency that the writer, who was considered one of the most prominent writers of Francophone literature, died in her sleep in Abt Hospital in southeastern France.
Maryse Conde, born in Pointe-a-Pitre on February 11, 1934, dealt with topics centered on the history of Africa and African communities in the world, in about thirty books, most of them novels, as well as the issues of slavery and black identities.
Her publisher, Laurent Lafon, said, “I have always worked with her in the various publishing houses that I dealt with, and I was greatly impressed by her influence and courage. She made many writers want to (…) fight with her.”
As for the Congolese writer Alain Mabanko, he wrote in a post on the “X” network, “The grand dame of world literature, Maryse Condé, is withdrawing, and bequeathing to us a work based on the search for humanity based on the repercussions of our identities and the cracks in history.”
Maryse Conde, who lived in a number of African countries (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal), criticized the limitations of the concept of “Negro” proposed by the Martinican Aime Césaire and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“However, there is no reason to be proud of belonging to this or that race,” she said in an interview with the American magazine “Calaloo” in 1989. “I question the fact that Negritude perpetuates the idea that all blacks are the same. It is a completely racist attitude that is actually inherited from whites who believe That all Negroes are the same.”
Although she always had the desire to write, she was not able to truly devote herself to it until she was close to forty.
Before that, this middle-class girl in Guadeloupe, who described herself as a child spoiled by her parents, went through a number of experiences since she moved to Paris to study in 1953.
A group of factors left an impact on her life, from the death of her mother in 1956 without being able to say goodbye to her, racism, the failure of her marriage to Guinean Mamadou Koundé, and the primitive conditions in which she raised her four children.
