Maryse Condé was born on the French/Creole-speaking Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. She was the last of eight children, and the mythical stories of her birth induced a strong sense that she "had not been desired." She grew up proud of being black, and especially of being French, but aloof from Creole culture. It was a shock, therefore, when she went to school in France in 1953, to discover that her colour created an immense gulf between herself and the French. This move from one country to another, accompanied by a profound sense of alienation, became a recurring pattern throughout her life. Yet these migrations, painful as they were, provided the powerful impetus for her writing.
In the 1960s she moved to Africa, where she remained for twelve years. She returned to Europe in the 1970s. Although she had uprooted herself physically from Africa, in a sense she never left, for it remained her important literary territory. The plays, critical essays, and novels she wrote during these years are characterized by the struggle to understand her African experience and heritage.
Her first novels, Heremakhonon and a Season in Rihata reflect her journeys from Guadeloupe to France, to Africa. Veronica, the protagonist of Heremakhonon, like Condé herself, comes from a middle-class family in Guadeloupe, is educated in France, and moves to a newly liberated West African country. To the question, "Why are you here?" which she is constantly asked, she replies that she is a new breed of tourist "searching out herself, not landscapes." Veronica's disaffected memories of her Guadeloupean family weave back and forth throughout her observations of her present surroundings. She mocks the black bourgeoisie's emulation of white society, and particularly her father's illusions of freedom.
"HE, of course was free. Free no longer to walk on the bare soles of his feet. Free to stick his neck in a white bow tie. Free to welcome his Sunday guests with a pompous "Eloise, you're DIVINE!" Divine niggers! Can you dig it! His freedom was an iron weight encircling his feet and ours."
Naturally, this harsh portrayal angered the Guadeloupeans, and Conde was hurt by their reaction. The Guadeloupeans were not her only hostile critics. Africans objected to her picture of political corruption in Africa; Marxists resented her denunciation of African socialism; feminist critics objected to Veronica's seeking liberation through men. (Actually Veronica's lovers, like Morag Gunn's British, Scots, and aboriginal lovers in The Diviners, function as metaphors in her search for her identity). Around this time, Condé's own criticisms of African writers, such as Grace Ogot, whom she found insufficiently emancipated, brought angry responses. She was accused of being "blinded by European codes of behaviour," and of overlooking the specificity of Western feminism.
She continued to draw fire when she turned from writing about present-day Africa to its past. Her ambitious historical novels, Segu and The Children of Segu, are set in the West African kingdom of Segou (now Mali) between 1791 and 1860, and focus on a royal family destroyed by European colonization, the slave trade, Islam, and Christianity. The novels established her position among notable contemporary writers, but angered Africans and Africanists so that she resolved at the time never to write about Africa again. In tracing the legacy of slavery as it played out over subsequent generations she discovered the strong appeal of the multigenerational chronicle and used the form of the family saga (The Fosyte Saga was an early influence) in several later novels.
In 1986 she migrated once again, leaving Europe for the United States to teach at a series of American universities. As before, this leap provided a powerful creative impetus, pushing her in a new literary direction. She began to use more complex narrative strategies, criss-crossing literary boundaries in a movement that paralleled her crossing of continental and geographical borders. These standard postmodern techniques served her well, allowing her naturally subversive and exuberant wit to come fully into play.
The immediate result was the novel I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, written during her year as a Fulbright lecturer at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In France, it was awarded the Le Grand Prix Literaire de la Femme, the first of her prestigious awards. Using an extended monologue, she gave voice to Tituba, a victim of the Salem witch trials, cursorily referred to in the records as "a slave originating from the West Indies and probably practicing 'hoodoo'." Conde's intertextual practice, far more complex than Jean Rhys's in Wide Sargasso Sea, takes the form of a vigorous parodic engagement with certain key American texts.
Condé spoke disparagingly of Arthur Miller's treatment of the same subject matter in The Crucible, saying that Miller, as a white male, would not pay attention to a black woman. But, like Miller, she intended her work as a commentary on contemporary America. "I wanted to imply," she said, "that in terms of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy and racism, little has changed since the days of the Puritans." Also, learning that Jews were not allowed to settle in the colony of Massachusetts, she links discrimination against Jews and blacks, by giving Tituba a Jewish lover.
From one of her favourite novels, The Scarlet Letter, she imports the character of Hester Prynne, making her a jail-mate of Tituba and a modern feminist. Perhaps remembering the criticisms of Heremakhonon, she has Hester telling Tituba she likes men too well to be a feminist, and adding "life is too kind to men, whatever their colour."
The vagueness of the historical record (which she attributes to "the intentional or unintentional racism of the historians") allows Condé to construct her own ending to Tituba's story. She dies in a slave uprising in Barbados, her last words invoking the 1930s song about lynching, immortalized by Billie Holiday: "All around me strange trees were bristling with strange fruit."
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
The author of the highly recommended intergenerational saga Tree of Life (Fiction Forecasts, June 29) moves from her native Guadeloupe to colonial New England in this potent novel. Revising the legend of a slave woman accused of practicing witchcraft and imprisoned in Salem, Mass., in 1692, Conde freely imagines Tituba's childhood and old age, endows her with what Davis calls a contemporary social consciousness, and allows her to narrate the tale. Her pointedly political story indicts the Puritans' racism and hypocrisy and their contemporary manifestations. Conceived when an English sailor rapes an Ashanti captive on the slave ship Christ the King , Tituba grows up in Barbados but follows her beloved, John Indian, into servitude in America when he is sold to minister Samuel Parris. Charged with witchcraft when she heals Parris's wife and daughters, she shares a jail cell with Hester Prynne, who helps her plan her testimony before the Salem judges. Eventually reprieved, Tituba is bought by a Jew, himself persecuted, who frees her and gives her passage to Barbados. At once playful and searing, Conde's work critiques ostensibly white, male versions of history and literature by appropriating them.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
