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Biographies

Speakers: 50th Anniversary of the 1st International Congress of Black Writers and Artists
September 19-22, 2006

• M. René Depestre
• Mme Yandé Christiane Diop
• M. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• M. Edouard Glissant
• M. Jean-Robert Pitte
• M. Maurice Quénet
• M. Noureini Tidjani-Serpos
• M. Wole Soyinka

René Depestre

René Depestre was born in 1926 in Jacmel (Haiti). He published his first poems, Etincelles, at age 19. He opposed the regime of dictator Lascot and was involved in his fall in 1946 but was forced to go into exile by the junta which replaced the dictator.

He then spent several years in Paris, where he began to study political science and humanities at the Sorbonne. After tumultuous travels in Europe and South America (Chile, Argentina, Brazil), traveling from one continent to the other as a consequence of Cold War events, he settled down in Cuba, where he spent close to twenty years. He broke off with Fidel Castro's revolution in 1978 and finally took up residence in France, becoming a French citizen with the rest of his family in 1991. In 1979, he began working in the UNESCO Secretariat, first in the office of the Director General, Mr. M’Bow, and later in the culture sector (artistic creation programs). He retired in 1986 and moved to the Aude region in Southern France in order to dedicate his life to literature.

René Depestre wrote many collections of poems (his complete poetic works will be published by Seghers in the fall of 2006). His latest volume, Non-assistance à poètes en danger, was published in 2005, with a preface by Michel Onfray. He also wrote several essays: Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (1980), Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (1998) and more recently Le métier à métisser (2004). He published narration in prose as well: Le mât de cocagne (a novel, 1979) and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988), which received the Renaudot prize, while his collection of stories, Alleluia pour une femme-jardin (1981) was honored by the Goncourt jury. His book about 'solar erotism' Eros dans un train chinois was also well received by the media. In 1993, his Anthologie personnelle received the Apollinaire prize for poetry. Other literary awards attracted attention to the Franco-Haitian writer: prize of the Société des Gens de Lettres for best novel, Antigone prize from the city of Montpellier (1989), prize of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique for best novel, Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1994) for his entire works, the top poetry award from the French Academy, and the Carbet de la Caraïbe prize.

All literary genres (verse, prose, letters, narrative, autobiography) are combined in Encore une mer à traverser (2005) in order to communicate to the reader the experience of a rich and, at times, tragic life of an exile who eventually finds existential peace in Lézignan-Corbières (Aude), where, in an Indian summer of creativity, the writing of poems and novels became his principal means of "salvation.”

 

Yandé Christiane Diop

Mme Yandé Christiane Diop has been the Director of Presence Africaine Press since her husband died. She is also the General Secretary of the African Community of Culture (CAC). Her desire to pursue her husband's work provides her with the necessary passion, drive, and inspiration.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Professor Gates is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of Civil Rights : An A-to-Z Reference of the Movement that Changed America (2005) and of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana, which is published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). He is the author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (2004), In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative (2004), written with Hollis Robbins, and Wonders of the African World (1999), the book companion to the six-hour BBC/PBS television series of the same name. His most recent PBS series, for which he was Executive Producer, African American Lives, premiered in February 2006. With Cornel West, Professor Gates co-authored The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (2000).

Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1989), 1989 winner of the American Book Award: and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford, 1992.) He has also authored Colored People: A Memoir (Knopf, 1994), which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997). Professor Gates has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W.W. Norton, 1996); and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (Oxford, 1991). In addition, Professor Gates is co-editor of Transition magazine. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates' publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for the New Yorker.

Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1973 in English Language and Literature. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke universities. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999).

 

Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant, Ph.D. in Literature, “one of the greatest contemporary French writers about universalism” (Jacques Cellard, Le Monde) was born in Sainte-Marie (Martinique). Educated at Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnology at the Musée de l'Homme.

His first poems (Un champ d'îles, La terre inquiète and Les Indes) won him a place in Jean Paris' Anthologie de la poésie nouvelle. He played a major role in the Black African cultural renaissance (Congress of Black Writers and Artists of Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959) and wrote in the periodical Les Lettres nouvelles. The Renaudot prize, which he won in 1958 for his first novel, La Lézarde, strengthened his reputation. Cofounder with Paul Niger of the Front antillo-guyanais in 1959, and close to Algerian intellectuals, he was expelled from Guadeloupe and placed under house arrest in France. In 1961, he published a play, Monsieur Toussaint, and, in 1964, he published a second novel, Le Quatrième Siècle.

After returning to Martinique in 1965, he founded a teaching and research institution, the Institut martiniquais d'études, and a social sciences journal, Acoma. His work became increasingly diverse: he added to his series of novels with Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony; he began to write poetry again with Boises, Pays rêvé, pays réel and Fastes; and he expanded on his earlier reflections with three major essays, L'Intention poétique, Le Discours antillais and Poétique de la relation.

He was Director of the Unesco Courier from 1982 to 1988. In 1989, he was named "Distinguished University Professor" by the Louisiana State University (LSU), where he became the Director of the Centre d'études françaises et francophones. Since 1995, he is also "Distinguished Professor of French" at the City University of New York (CUNY).

 

Jean-Robert Pitte

Born on August 12, 1949 in Paris (15th District), Jean-Robert Pitte grew up in Pré-Saint-Gervais (Seine-Saint-Denis). He obtained his high school diploma (Baccalauréat) in philosophy in 1966. Originally, he had planned to enroll in a tourism school, but he decided to study geography at the Sorbonne. He passed an exam to receive tenure as a professor of geography in 1971 and wrote two doctoral dissertations, one in 1975 (on Mauritania, where he spent two years) and the other in 1986 (on European chestnut groves). In 1978, he married Mayumi, a Japanese journalist, with whom he had a child, Delphine, now 24. His book Histoire du paysage français was awarded the French Academy prize in 1983. From 1993 to 1995, he was head of mission at the Ministry of Higher Education. In 2003, he was named President of the University of Paris Sorbonne – Paris 4. In 2005, Jean-Robert Pitte announced the opening of a campus of the Sorbonne in the United Arab Emirates. In 2006, he published an essay on French universities, Jeunes, on vous ment – Reconstruire l’Université (Fayard). Jean-Robert Pitte is also Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

 

Noureini Tidjani-Serpos

 

Wole Soyinka

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Wole Soyinka has published more than thirty works, and continues to be active with various international artistic and human rights organizations. A Yoruba born in Western Nigeria and educated in Ibadan, Wole Soyinka continued his studies at the University of Leeds, England, earning an Honours degree in English, then joined the Royal Court Theatre, London, as a play-reader. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller grant and returned to Nigeria, where he researched theatre, and founded two theatre companies. More recently, during the past two years, he has held a Fellowship at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Soyinka's first plays, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel, were written in Leeds and London, first performed at Ibadan in 1959, with The Lion and the Jewel receiving its London premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London in the sixties. Other works for theater have included The Trials of Brother Jero, Jero's Metamorphosis, A Dance of the Forests, Kongi's Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, The Strong Breed, The Road, Death and the King's Horseman, A Play of Giants, Requiem for a Futurologist. He has adapted The Bacchae for the British National Theatre where it was performed under the title The Bacchae of Euripedes, Opera Wonyosi from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, set in an African context, and King Baabu from Alfred Jarry's King Ubu. His adaptation has been described as taking Ubu's savage satire to the limits of the grotesque.

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters and Season of Anomy. Autobiographical works include The Man Died: Prison Notes, Aké: The Years of Childhood and IBADAN, The Penkelemes Years. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World and Art, Dialogue and Outrage while his political and other thematic writings are contained in The Open Sore of a Continent and The Burden of Memory, Muse of Forgiveness. His poems are collected in Idanre and Other Poems, Poems from Prison, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Ogun Abibiman, Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, SAMARKAND and Other Markets I Have Known. His most recent work, You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir,” was published in April earlier this year.

Wole Soyinka has held several university positions, still lectures extensively, and is currently Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, and is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.