Isabelle MONTPLAISIR An author from France and Senegal writing in French [Return to French — Page originale en français]

Isabelle Montplaisir, armed with her teacher's diploma, set out for Ivory Coast on her 22nd birthday, completely ignorant of the realities of life in the Africa of the 1960s. In September of 1968, she returned to France with a husband and a baby, totally unaware of the societal change that followed "Mai 68". In 1978, she left "l'Education Nationale" to take up a career as a fabric designer and stylist. For more than twelve years, she made fabrics and tapestries which she sold to most parts of the world. She travelled extensively, most of all to Latin America. During this time she wrote very little, concentrating on her fabric design. Then, suddenly, one day in January 1988, she discovered la Casamance and moved there, to a beautiful village, Fogny, at the end of the following year. For seven years she has learned to live with the place, its people, its fruits, their dress, their ways ... seven years of solitude, of conflict and happiness, as she said later. Today (2003), Isabelle heads the workshop-theatre of the Cours Sainte Marie de Hann in Dakar and makes most beautiful necklaces of her much favoured bronze pearls from Burkina and neolithic amazonites of the Aouzou Strip - of which Théodore Monod spoke so well. And now Isabelle Montplaisir writes more and more. (From the back cover of her novel Le rire des singes verts [The laughter of the green apes].

Publications

Le rire des singes verts [The Laughter of the Green Apes]. Saint Louis du Sénégal: Xamal, 2003. (189p.). ISBN 2-84402-054-2. Novel.

Editor ([email protected])
The University of Western Australia/French
Created: 9 July 2003
Archived: 19 December 2012
https://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/MontplaisirIsabelleEng.html