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René Maran (5 November 1887 – 9 May 1960) was a
Frenchpoet and
novelist, and the first black writer to win the French
Prix Goncourt (in 1921).
Biography
Maran was born on the boat carrying his parents to
Fort-de-France,
Martinique where he lived until the age of seven. After that he went to
Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending
boarding school in
Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in
French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt.[1]
W. E. B. Du Bois applauded Maran, saying of his writings in an article which would be incorporated into the pivotal
Harlem Renaissance text The New Negro, "Maran's attack on France and on the black French deputy from Senegal has gone into the courts and marks an era. Never before have Negroes criticized the work of the French in Africa."[2][3]
Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to
Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had "on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro".[4]
His novel Un Homme pareil aux autres is the subject of extensive analysis in the third chapter of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.
^DuBois, W. E. B. (1925).
"The Negro Mind Reaches Out". In
Locke, Alain LeRoy (ed.). The New Negro: An Interpretation (1927 ed.). Albert and Charles Boni. p. 385.
LCCN25025228.
OCLC639696145. I know two black men in France. One is Candace, black West Indian deputy, an out-and-out defender of the nation and more French than the French. The other is René Maran, black Goncourt prize-man and author of "Batouala." Maran's attack on France and on the black French deputy from Senegal has gone into the courts and marks an era. Never before have Negroes criticized the work of the French in Africa.