Katoucha Niane

Katoucha Niane (23 October 1960 – 2 February 2008) was a Guinean model, activist and author. Nicknamed "The Peul Princess" (in reference to her ethnic Fula background), she worked, and later wrote, under the single name "Katoucha". She was known as the muse of Yves Saint Laurent during the 1980s.

Quotes

• One day, my mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie, an unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote In My Flesh
• I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished
• Let's draw attention to the religious, medical, psychological and social realities of this ancestral practice
  • Supermodel Katoucha found dead in river Seine,01 March 2008,Andy McSmith
• I was inflicted – with no anaesthetic, of course – this very private and irreversible mutilation in the name of ancestral custom
• I was dragged away by the old hag in a plane whose doors closed behind me like those of a safe: or a tomb. After my mutilation, this kidnapping was for me a second death
• As I had grown into a young woman she says, I could no longer bear the authority of the very one who did not protect me. I had only one desire: to go away, from my mother, my family, my country
• As I am reaching the halfway mark in my life she says, I am full of projects and hope to bring them to fruition in my land of birth. Africa is looking forward... but for the time being, serenely, I cherish the pleasure to be back home, looking at the silvery sea like Ulysses after his long, eventful journey home
  • Dans ma chair,16 July 2010,Book review by Jean-Marie Violet https://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/revieweng_katoucha10.html