Maryse Condé, Grand prix of the multiracial novel.

With the earthquake in Haiti, nature seems to be baited with a terrible cruelty on one of the poorest countries and most vulnerable of planet. 

From Martinique, everyone in these tragic days feels Haitian. Why, yes why such an amount of eagerness on a so poor and ravaged ground formerly so rich today. Let us not seek metaphysics explanations or others, but simply geophysics, the plate tectonics. As many other Haiti countries “badly” is placed, directly on the fault.

Today Haiti, tomorrow Cuba, Martinique and others….we will continue to cry of deaths innocent, of deaths for nothing and that for a long time. The man who cannot resign himself, let us roll up our handles for Haiti today, think her wounds, and for those wishing she pries for less suffering.

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By writing her novel “While waiting for the rise of water”, Maryse Condé, shows how much she is conscious of the  climate changes of the planet and their repercussion on the personal identity which live since always on the islands.

The great questions ”who I am ?" and “where I go?” better still  “where do we go?” are indirectly registered in her major reflection on the identity.

Babakar is doctor. He only lives with his memories of a African childhood, a mother to the blue eyes which comes to visit him in dream, of an old love, Azelia, disappeared also, and other dreams of youth of before his exile in Guadeloupe, cradle of his family. But the chance or providence, places a child on his road and obliges him to give up his loneliness, with his phantoms.

Small Anaïs has only him. Her mother, an Haitian refugee, died by putting her at the world, bequeathing her escape and her misery to him. Babakar wants to offer another future to him. They fly away for Haiti, this island martyrized by violence, the corrupted governments, the rebellious bands, but so beautiful, so spellbinding. Babakar seeks the family of Anaïs, an aunt, an uncle, of the person and can count only on him and his two friends Movar and Fouad. Men who resemble to him, exiled, solitary, in search of themselves and which find in Haiti of the answers to their search, a place of peace in the middle of the debris...

Maryse Condé was born in 1937 with Point-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe.

In 1953, she left to study at the Fénelon College then at the Sorbonne, where she studied English.

She get married with Mamadou Condé, a African actor, in 1959. after she finished studies, she taught in Guinea, in Ghana, and Senegal.

She was also a journalist at the BBC and in France.

In 1981, she divorced and get married in second wedding with Richard Philcox, the translator of the majority of her novels into English.

After many years of teaching to Columbia University, she shares today her time between her native island and New York. …