Born in Guadeloupe, Marie-Laure Soukaïna Edom is a multi-talented artist, who has built bridges between her Guadeloupean origins and her life in southern Africa, in Zimbabwe.
In the north-east of Zimbabwe, in Harare, the capital of 2.8 million inhabitants, lives Marie-Laure Soukaïna Edom, a Guadeloupean who is fundamentally attached to her native land and deeply in love with Zimbabwe. Dancer, teacher, translator and interpreter, she made this landlocked country a place where she could flourish in her Art.
A country in southern Africa, surrounded by four neighbors, Zambia to the north, Mozambique to the east, Botswana to the west and South Africa to the south, Zimbabwe is crossed by the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is home to natural wonders like the Victoria Falls, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. A country whose riches she loves to describe.
Born in Guadeloupe, Marie-Laure has been passionate about dance from a very young age. She trained with Reney Deshauteurs, an emblematic figure of dance in the Antilles-Guyana. His talent led him to apply for a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture, which opened the doors to the Alvin Ailey school in New York, a temple of contemporary dance.
After traveling back and forth between the United States and Guadeloupe, she chose to settle in Zimbabwe. “
The father of my children is Zimbabwean” she explains bluntly.
There, she worked for 18 years with the Zimbabwe National Ballet, before embarking on a new adventure: the creation of an artistic center, Afrikera Art Trust, in 2014. The name, a contraction of Africa and Karukera, reflects his desire to bring the two cultures together.
An artist, Marie-Laure is also a pragmatic woman. A mother, she was able to divide her time between her works and her work as a freelance translator and interpreter. “This allows me to have a more flexible schedule where I can indulge in my passion, dance, dance production“, she confides.
She also worked for five years at the French embassy in Harare.
Even far from her native Guadeloupe, Marie-Laure finds familiar echoes in Zimbabwe. Certain sounds of local dialects remind him of Creole, and the tradition of tales, very alive in Zimbabwe, evokes those heard and told in the territory.
From there was born his Ngano project, which means “tale” in Shona, one of the Bantu languages of Zimbabwe. Through this initiative, she seeks to explore the similarities between Guadeloupean and Zimbabwean stories.
Marie-Laure sometimes admits to regretting the absence of the sea in Zimbabwe. “If I want to take a swim in the sea, I have to go to Mozambique or South Africa“, she smiles. But she marvels every day at the beauty and diversity of her adopted country.
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