COLUMNISTS Not until this month, when Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, did most of her fellow citizens discover that she was living in self-imposed political exile. In an interview with the magazine Les Inrockuptibles last summer, in between her reflections on Tolstoy and Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, the subject of being black in France came up. Ms NDiaye’s Frenchness is much like Barack Obama’s Americanness. Her African father left her a foreign-sounding name but returned home before he could have much influence over her upbringing. She grew up in a world that she describes as “100 per cent French”. Her own acquaintance with Africa was acquired only as an adult.
Nor has racism been much of a problem for her personally, Ms NDiaye says, since as a novelist she does not apply for jobs. But she resents the frequency with which her brother, a historian, gets stopped by the police, and blames it on an “atmosphere of surveillance and vulgarity” that has arisen in France since Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007. “I find that France monstrous,” she told Les Inrocks. “The fact that we decided to live in Berlin two years ago is not unrelated to that. We left just after the elections, in large part because of Sarkozy, although I realise it may sound snobby to say so.”
