Indian Connections: Martine Le Coz

Lina Vincent Sunish

Martine Le Coz is a writer and artist living in Amboise, France. An ardent admirer of Indian spiritual philosophies, she speaks to Lina Vincent Sunish about her engagement with tantra and its meaning within her life and art.

Martine Le Coz is a French writer and artist born in 1955. Her meeting with the philosopher Lévinas and Aimé Césaire, the black Rebel, structured her mind persisting in calling the notion of Fraternity into question – “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is the French devise. She obtained in 2001 the famous literary Prix Renaudot with “Céleste” (written to attest “the equality of the skins”, an ancient revolutionary expression) but her husband died at that time, leaving her with two children. In 2003, she followed the March for Peace in Auschwitz with Emile Shoufani among Christians, Muslims and Jews. She then went to Burundy, Africa, met the dethroned Queen and related the plot leading to the murder of her son, late Ntare V, in a novel “The Scarlet Queen”: the journalist Sinduhinje, threatened to death, had entrusted her with his investigation to make the whole matter published. A few years later, she met the pandit André Padoux. Long an admirer of the traditional women’s art of Mithila, Bihar, she could, at last, come over to India to make these womens’ portraits…