Born in Guadeloupe on September 3, 1948, student of the filmmaker Chris Marker, who became a documentary filmmaker and journalist, Christiane Succab-Goldman, widow of Pierre Goldman, speaks here for the first time, after more than forty years of silence and an infrangible mystery, about their common history, brief, passionate, tragic.
Their marriage took place in Fresnes on August 17, 1976, shortly before Pierre Goldman, who had just been acquitted of a murder charge, was released. Christiane was at the end of her pregnancy when her husband was assassinated by a commando in Paris on September 20, 1979. Six days later their son, Manuel Goldman, was born. The film by Cédric Kahn, The Goldman Trialreleased on September 27, will undoubtedly have served as a spark for this explosive confession, mixing the intimate and the collective.
Pierre Goldman, who named you K., described your meeting with great modesty in his book “Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France” (Seuil, 1975). How did it go from your point of view?
My parents, teachers in Guadeloupe, are in Paris for a school year. It’s 1965, I’m 17 years old. My older sister is at the Sorbonne, she is friends with Roland Girard, himself Pierre Goldman’s best friend. So I hear a lot about it and I’m curious. I finally meet him at the Le Champo café, where students are meeting to fight against the fascists in Assas. I imagined him laughing, but he wasn’t. I do not like him. Then I return to Guadeloupe. I returned to Paris in October 1969, where I enrolled in a Spanish degree at Censier.
I met him again during an evening at the home of a friend of my Guadeloupean friends in mainland France. I’m 21, he’s 25. We have a common passion for Cuba that I discovered in Ania Francos’ book The Cuban Festival [Julliard 1962]. He comes back. I wanted to become literate in Cuba, to be a reporter like Ania, to make the revolution. Something very deep is happening between us. I am his interlocutor, not a girl who is being made to dance. He takes me to the first metro, I return to the university campus in Fontenay-aux-Roses [Hauts-de-Seine]I know he’s going to call me.
At the same time, this is the moment when Pierre Goldman embarks on the path of banditry…
I know absolutely nothing about it! What I know is that our love story, which will not last more than a month, is dazzling, secret also during this period of Black Panther, it is the meeting of a black woman and a white man, and it is anything but obvious at the time.
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