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 married the Guinean actor, Mamadou Condé, had four children, and taught in Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal. She has described this period, during which she moved restlessly from one country to another "to avoid the arrest of dissidents," as the most difficult of her life. She had gone to Africa believing that a common origin and history ensured solidarity between people. Instead, she learned that neither colour nor race constituted a common bond. She could not even communicate with her Guinean husband. She concluded that the important factor was culture, and that the culture of the mother continent was totally different from that of the black diaspora.
She returned to Europe in the 1970s, working first as a program producer for the BBC in London, and then teaching in various colleges in France, and eventually taking the position of course director at the Sorbonne where she had earned a doctorate. 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.
The fact is that Condé's stubborn independence of mind makes her impervious to current pieties on language, feminism, negritude, and identity politics. Like Philip Roth, whom she cites as an influence, her satire angers a wide variety of constituents.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
