Three days after the death of writer Maryse Condé, the Elysée announced on Friday April 5 that the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, will pay a national tribute to her on April 15. The ceremony will be held on the site of the National Library of France, rue Richelieu, said the presidency, confirming information from the Outremers360 site.
Maryse Condé died on the night of Monday to Tuesday at the age of 90, in Apt (Vaucluse), after a life of humanist combat and exploration of West Indian and black identities. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre on February 11, 1934, she has written about thirty books, mainly fiction, about the history of Africa and its diaspora, the legacy of slavery and black identities. His great success in bookstores is Ségou, a fresco in two volumes (1984 and 1985) on the decline of the Bambara empire, in Mali, from the 18th century until the arrival of the French colonizers.
“A giant of letters, Maryse Condé knew how to paint sorrows and hopes, from Guadeloupe to Africa, from the Caribbean to Provence. In a language of struggle and splendor, unique, universal,” wrote the President of the Republic upon the announcement of his death. The president of the departmental council of Guadeloupe, Guy Losbar, called for “a national tribute, commensurate with his immeasurable talent”.
Having lived in several African countries (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea and Senegal), Maryse Condé criticized the limits of the concept of “negritude” proposed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor. 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 that she left permanently in 2013, to retire in a village in the Luberon, Gordes, in the south of France.
