fr
L’Enfant noir
L’Enfant noir is the first novel by Camara Laye, published in 1953 by Plon. It won the Charles-Veillon prize that same year, awarded by a Swiss patron to reconcile Europe through culture.
The work tells, in autobiographical form, the childhood of the narrator in a Guinea that was still deeply traditional. One follows the emotional development of a child rocked between the maternal world and the paternal world, between Quranic school and French school, between the circumcision ritual and departure for a distant country of which nothing is known. The style is stripped down, the language mastered, but it is above all the voice that charms: that of a man who remembers with the precision of a photographer and the melancholy of a musician.
L’Enfant noir is regularly taught in French and Guinean schools, and adapted to film in 1995 by Laurent Chevallier.