Laye Camara

Laye Camara (born January 1, 1928 in Kouroussa , † February 4, 1980 in Dakar ) was a Guinean writer of the Négritude . In English-language works and biographies, his first and last name is often interchanged ( Camara Laye ).

Life

Camara received his education at a Koran school and at a French school, which he continued in Conakry . He emigrated to Argenteuil in France in 1947 , became a car mechanic and worked in Paris for the car manufacturer Simca . At the same time he attended the technical college, and in 1953 he published his first novel L'enfant noir . In the same year he married Marie Lorifo. In 1956 he returned via Benin and Ghana to his homeland Guinea, which had become independent in 1958, and worked for the information ministry under the dictator Ahmed Sékou Touré , whose tyranny he denounced in his novel Dramouss (1966). In 1963 he emigrated to Dakar , where he died of a kidney infection in 1980.

In 2017, Toni Morrison praised Camara's novel Le Regard du roi from 1954, as it offered "refined, deeply African language images" that would be "placed in a discursive relationship with the world of the West". The typical literary topoi of threat, depravity and incomprehensibility, which would normally be used to describe Africa (Morrison refers here to Joseph Conrad , H. Rider Haggard and Elspeth Huxley ), would be made transparent as a limited perception of a culture. The readers could thus participate in the "failure of the racist view".

Works

• L'Enfant noir 1953, German one from Kurussa 1954; again in: Pierre Bertaux, Ed .: France told. 13 French storytellers Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1963 ISBN 3-596-29286-7 .
• Le Regard du roi (1954, German The King's Look 1963)
• Dramouss (1966, German Dramouss 1967)
• Le Maître de la Parole (1978)

literature

• Ada Uzoamaka Azodo: L 'imaginaire dans les romans de Camara Laye , 1993 (doctoral thesis, Lagos 1990). ISBN 0-8204-2039-5
• Germain Nyada: Childhood, Autobiography and Interculturality. A contribution to cross-lingual and (context) text-oriented literary theory , 2010 (dissertation, Bayreuth ). ISBN 978-3-643-10907-1 (via L'enfant noir )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Camara Laye - Biography ( Memento of the original from January 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. A note on his name 
2. ↑ Toni Morrison: The Origin of Others. About race, racism and literature . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2018, ISBN 978-3-498-04543-2 , pp. 100–105 (The English original was published in 2017 under the title "The Origins of Others".).

Web links

• Literature by and about Laye Camara in the catalog of the German National Library