Faced with the French extreme right, Marie NDiaye stepped up to support her brother. The French author, on tour this week in New York for the translation of her novel Vengeance is minedenounced “the delirious violence” against Pap Ndiaye when he was Minister of National Education.
“When my brother was appointed minister (in May 2022) the reactions of the extreme right were beyond what I imagined,” lamented Marie NDiaye, on the sidelines of a literary meeting at the Villa Albertine in Manhattan , the cultural services of the French Embassy in the United States.
Marie NDiaye criticizes “the awful Philippe de Villiers”
“I thought they would advance a little more masked. But no, they advanced openly with delirious, incredible violence,” denounced the 56-year-old author, who, with her older brother Pap Ndiaye, was born to a Senegalese father and a French mother.
“The awful Philippe de Villiers, at the time of the appointment of Gabriel Attal, undoubtedly to publicize the sexual orientation of the new minister (of National Education), wrote: “after the woke minister, here is the LGBT+ minister “. These people are obsessed! », exclaimed Marie NDiaye.
Pap Ndiaye led National Education from May 2022 to last July and was the favorite target of the right and the far right, with a “wokism” trial brought against him. “Despite everything, even if we know who these people are, it was still a source of astonishment,” breathed Marie NDiaye, whose novel Vengeance is mine (Gallimard – 2021) is released this week in the United States under the title Vengeance Is Mine at Penguin Random House.
The award-winning author in France and abroad has a great reputation in the United States where her books, such as her Goncourt Prize in 2009 Three powerful women, are translated. THE New York Times and the Washington Post also mentioned on Wednesday a literary work imbued with mystery. “Marie NDiaye had no intention of answering the questions she raised” and that she left “readers guessing,” headline the two major American dailies. “What I love above all else in the novel is its fundamental impurity. It is full of things that are wrong, errors and impurities. He is anything but perfection,” she replied.