A major figure in postcolonial literature

1984. On the set of “apostrophes”, Maryse Condé explains to Bernard Pivot her love at first sight for the city of Ségou, in Mali, which led him to write a novel with the eponymous title. This is the first time that the literary journalist has received a black writer. After a first book, “Heremakhonon”, published in 1976, “Ségou” (Robert Laffont, 1984 and 1985), a historic novel in two volumes, will make it known to the general public.

She was then 50 years old. “I was not an early writer, scribbling great texts at 16. My first novel appeared at my 42 years, when others are starting to put away their papers and gums […] . In fact, I only started writing when I had fewer problems and I was able to swap paper dramas against real dramas ”she confides in “La Vie unparalle” (JC Lattès, 2012).

This late literary awakening did not prevent him from becoming a figure in French -speaking literature. Author of around thirty novels, essays and plays, translated in more than 20 languages, she is crowned in 2018 by the Nobel Prize for “Alternative” literature.

A critical and lucid look

In this exciting documentary, Xavier Luce, a researcher in literature, returns to the history of the one who was born Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon in 1934, in Guadeloupe. He details this “Life before writing” But also that after, who leads the Pointe-à-Pitre writer to Conakry, via Paris, Cotonou and Dakar, which constitutes the raw material of his romantic and theatrical work. In Paris, she discovered, at 16, racism and becomes aware of the gap between her western bourgeois education and her West Indian identity.

Faced with her political disillusionment (but also in love), especially with regard to African independence, she sharpens a critical and lucid look. Witness his works, which deconstruct the dominant historical accounts and give a place to the forgotten of history, especially to black women. Until his death in 2024, at 90, and despite a disabling disease, Maryse Condé will continue to denounce with force the inheritances of slavery and colonialism. It has imposed itself as an essential voice and as a major figure in postcolonial literature alongside Césaire, Fanon and Sliding.

◗ Monday April 14 at 11:45 p.m. on France 3. Documentary by Stéphane Correa and Xavier Luce (2023). 52 min. (Available in replay on France.TV).