Migritude’s Progress: Fatou Diome’s Twenty-Five Years in Afrique(s)-sur-Rhine

Novelist Fatou Diome, Senegalese migrant to France, in 2019 reached the twenty-fifth year in her adopted country. Silver-anniversary motives encouraged the author to chart the quarter century of progress of this “megaphone of migritude,” as Lila Azam Zanganeh notably called her. Moving from the rich exegeses of the liminal, haunted, frequently abjected, migritude conditions of her fictional—and often autobiographical—heroines, Diome has now arrived inside the Hexagon, where her words harmonize with a sizable chorus of interior-left establishment voices. However, she has not abandoned her powerful interest in the complexities of migritude’s pains and difficult opportunities. On the contrary, in Marianne porte plainte! Identité nationale: Des passerelles, pas des barrières! (Marianne Complains! National Identity: Gangways, Not Barriers!) (2017), Diome takes up the many threads of the migritude tapestry so fully depicted in her novels and reweaves them into a portrait of an ideal new multicultural French identity.