Washes and Hues: Reading for Colour in Marie NDiaye

This article analyses Marie NDiaye’s experimentation with colour and colour values, and argues that she sets out to unsettle the way we think about colour. For the main part colour — and indeed colour blindness — in the author’s work have been explored through scrutiny of her progressively more detailed attentiveness to experiences and perceptions of skin colour in contemporary France. Yet colour is deployed and investigated in numerous distinctive and often painterly ways in her writing; ways which suggest her interest in other than racialized paradigms and which attune us to colour processing and human cognition, to emotional responses to colour, and to an ethical issue that is perpetually at stake in our engagement with her work: empathy. Through analysis of her colour-writing in selected texts, especially La Naufragée (1999), Rosie Carpe (2001), and Autoportrait en vert (2006), this article explores NDiaye’s chromatic experimentation as a linchpin for asking probing questions about emotion, memory, the senses, perception, self-perception, creativity, and mental disorder in modern and contemporary writing in French. Specific dimensions of the author’s colour practice, namely her interest in all-suffusing washes and her declining of hues of a given colour (here, yellow and green) are given detailed attention, and important painterly and literary intertexts are examined.