Staff OBOUO TV
Fatou-Diome is a woman of letters born in 1968 on the small island of Niodor in Senegal. Raised by her grandmother, she quickly discovered a passion for French literature by going to school in hiding because her grandmother refuses the fact that her little one has an education.
But Fatou perseveres and thanks to the help of one of her teachers who succeeded in convincing her grandmother, continues her studies.
Fatou rebellious at heart, has never been in keeping with the traditions of her country and has always walked with men instead of helping women in various domestic tasks.
Instead, Fatou Diome prefers to write and decides to leave her village in order to be able to continue her studies in other cities in Senegal.
She manages herself to finance her studies, doing several jobs from an early age before starting university studies in Dakar. At that time, she had only one dream: to become a French teacher.
But that will change during a meeting. Her meeting with a French man with whom she falls madly in love.
Fatou Diome gives up everything and decides to leave Senegal native in order to follow him to France.
Arrival in France, she is disillusioned. She gets married and undergoes the racisme of his beautiful family who refuses to accept and integrate him. She divorces two years after her arrival.
This is where the ordeal begins, she is forced to have to do the housework in order to provide for her needs and to pay for her studies for six years.
After all that, Fatou Diome graduates of letters and philosophy at the University of Strasbourg before deciding to teach there.
In 2003, she published her first novel which is very successful: The belly of the Atlantic. This novel highlights the emigration dreams of Senegalese youth who see the opportunity to emigrate to a European country as a godsend and the only way to become “rich”. The novel received the Chantal Lapicque Hemispheres Prize as well as the LiBeraturpreis literary prize.
Thanks to this sudden fame, Fatou Diome took the opportunity to launch new books: Kétala in 2006, Inassaouvies - nos vies in 2008, Those who wait in 2010, Impossible to grow in 2013 and more recently Les Veilleurs de Sangomar in 2019.
Fatou Diome is also making a name for herself thanks to her fight for Pan-Africanism for which she has been invited on various French sets over the years. Fatou Diome recalls the colonial past of many European countries and the consequences still visible today on African countries.
She now lives in Strasbourg and has published her sixth novel “Les veilleurs de Sangomar” in which Fatou Diome gives voice to Coumba, a young widowed woman living on the Pointe de Sangomar.
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