Born in 1968 in Niodor, Senegal, she is a French-Senegalese woman of letters. She was born on the small island of Niodior, in the Saloum Delta, in Serer country, southwest Senegal. A natural child, her parents were therefore not married, and she was raised by her grandmother, Animata. Her name comes from Sine Saloum, where the Diome are Niominka. She fell in love with a Frenchman, married, and decided to follow him to Strasbourg, France in 1994. She divorced two years later. After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, she taught there, then taught at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg and the Higher Institute of Pedagogy in Karlsruhe, Germany. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège in 2017.
“The Belly of the Atlantic” published by Carrière
This novel depicts the dreams of emigration of young Senegalese people. It has an autobiographical dimension, the locations (Niodior, Strasbourg) and the narrator's life coinciding with what we know of the author's life. Fatou fille highlights the interest of young Africans in considering France as a paradise.
In Strasbourg, the narrator must telephone her half-brother Madické to inform him of the progress of the Italian national team's football matches, which he cannot follow on television on the island of Niodor, off the coast of Senegal. Like boys his age, he too plans to come to France to become a famous and wealthy footballer, identifying with a few brilliant Senegalese players playing in French clubs. The book is a constant back-and-forth between Senegal and France, where the narrator describes without compromise the situation faced by immigrants who quickly become illegal immigrants, faced with racism and threats of expulsion. But she is also lucid about her home village, where illiteracy, the situation of women, the power of marabouts, the tendency to demand everything from those who have expatriated themselves, are evoked without embellishment. Similarly
that the fundamental inequality between the French who can go on tourism (even sexual) in Senegal without a visa is highlighted, and the Senegalese for whom obtaining a visa for France is a path strewn with obstacles, including financial ones.