Product Description

Rene Maran, for most students of Black African writing, is/was the pioneer of pioneers. Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1921, Maran’s first novel Batouala was quickly translated into English, German, Russian, and Spanish. The work became a “classic” and Maran the man to see in Paris for visiting Black Americans and Africans. As the years passed the work was “remembered” more than it was read, however, though its author remained an important fixture of the black scene in the French capital.
Praised more and more “in absentia” and long out of print except in a modest French edition by Albin Michel, the original publisher, Batouala- and all the fairly large corpus of Maran’s work in poetry, fiction, juvenile fables and histories- long had deserved a hard scrutiny by an African scholar-poet who could read the works in an African perspective (and in the original French) but without the “blinders” usually acquired by West and Equatorial French Africans as they rose in the French educational system.
It is to be expected that in the sixty years since the Prix Goncourt opinions as to what Maran was up to and what he had achieved will have evolved. What is shocking, however, even granted six decades of change, is how imprisoned Maran was in the inferiority induced by the racism and cultural intolerance of his time. Nowhere, it is now clear, did Maran genuinely identify with Africans, nor, he confessed over and over, could he ever love a Black woman

207 pages
Paperback Binding
Three Continents Press inc
Published 1984

ISBN 9780914478942Binding Paperback