NDiaye, Marie

The French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, Loiret, about fifty kilometres south of Paris. When her brother Pap was three and Marie one, their Senegalese father went back to Senegal and they moved with their mother to the Paris suburb of Bourg-la-Reine. NDiaye has said she felt fortunate growing up in the safety of a middle-class Paris suburb although, "even though there were no social problems in my school, I still felt like an outsider." As a child, she considered herself first of all to be French, and she rarely reflected about the colour of her skin. She was disappointed when she finally went to Africa to see her father. Noticing the colour of her skin and hearing her name, people though she was like them; but she did not feel that she belonged at all. "The strange thing is that it is in my own country, in France, that people see me as a foreigner."