2024-04-03 10:38:36
Early this Tuesday, April 2, the news of the death of Maryse Conde at 87 years old Apt, a French commune located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, together with her husband and fellow translator Richard Philcox. It was the latter who confirmed the news and clarified that he died during the night in a hospital in the same French town.
Maryse was a writer born in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in February 1937, “in the midst of an embryonic black bourgeoisie,” as she herself declared at the time. She grew up reading French literature and then writing it, discovering and portraying that (fortuitous and painful) familiar rise of hers from her grandmother, who was a slave to white people from the countryside.
It was until he moved to study Paris in 1953 at the Lycée Fénelon and after meeting Françoise Bruhat and Jean Bruhat, daughter and father, the latter being a scholar and academic at the Sorbonne, that Condé understood the world in which he lived and that He simply took on the themes that would accompany him since then: colonialism, colonization, dispossession, slavery, identity, creolism, among others.
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Although by then she did not have Condé as her last name nor had she gone through the desolation of an unwanted pregnancy that she described in depth in her autobiography, the path that the then writer would follow forever was already outlined. Just a few years later she married Mamadou Conde, from whom she forever took her last name, although the contract lasted only a short time because, in her words, it was not what she expected, since it was, in short, very normal for herself. In the meantime, she learned of the deaths of her mother and father, in 1953 and 1959 respectively.
She later lived in Africa, first in the Ivory Coast, where she worked as a French teacher; then, in a passage of just over three years between Guinea and Ghana, she wrote her first and unfinished novel, which is in the digital library Manioc, specialized in Caribbean, Amazonian and Guyana literature. Already in Ghana, she wrote the first draft of Heremakhonon, today recognized as his debut film. After a hustle that forced her to live illegally due to the retention of her passport, she spent time in London as a BBC reporter. But she later returned to Ghana, where she separated again, only to later go to Senegal, a latitude where she would finally meet who would be her second and only husband, Richard Philcox, a professor of British origin.
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His letters
Although his works are full of cultural, gender and racial problems, the African diaspora, slavery, feminism, the consequences of colonialism, that is, themes with “a certain political importance”, his work, despite the fact that since 1988 it has been translated into Spanish, there is not much that has been published for its Spanish-speaking readers.
Although his work amounts to twenty books, only the following are available translated into Spanish:
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- Ségou: The walls of the earth (1984)
- Ségou: The Crumbling Earth (1985)
- I, Tituba, the Black Witch of Salem (1986)
- The Tree of Life (1987)
- The New World Colony (1993)
- The Last of the African Kings (1994)
- The Desired (2021)
- Life without makeup (2020)
- The gospel of the new world (2021)
- Story of a cannibal woman (2024)
Finally, despite the fact that her name was constantly being considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, she never managed to be awarded it. Yes, on the other hand, with the Premio Right Livelihoodin 2018, which has been known since its founding and for its (in)direct relationship as the Alternative Nobel Prize.
Until her last days, despite her complex state of health, she did not stop writing: she dictated as best she could to her husband, who was always at her side. She never stopped being, Maryse Conde“a genuine and totally Guadeloupean writer.”
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2024-04-03 10:38:36