Set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé's
Windward Heights is a retelling of the Emily Brontë classic
Wuthering Heights. The title of the novel alone might tell you that something formulaic is afoot--and the book does for the most part mirror the wretched and doomed story of Heathcliff and Cathy. But Condé's plan is actually ingenious. She goes beyond Brontë, using shades of human color as a metaphor to illustrate subtle variations on evil, misery, and racism.
Heathcliff's counterpart in this story is Razyé, a cold, brutal, and relentless dark-skinned man of questionable origins. We meet him just before his return to the home of his youth--and to his Cathy, who has married a wealthy white creole: "He was dressed all in black in the French fashion, from his tightly-laced leather boots to his felt hat sewn with a large hem stitch. His skin too was black, that shiny black they call Ashanti, and his hair hung in curls like those of an Indian half-caste, the Bata-Zindien. Nobody could hold the gaze of his languishing eyes, where churned who knows what pain and solitude."
Razyé always destroys what he loves, and as we expect, Cathy soon dies. He avenges her death by punishing everyone near him--his wife, his many children, the entire island of Guadeloupe. Society itself is devoured by his aggression and hatred. This is Razyé's essence, and Condé uses him to make her point: the agony of not belonging, of hating oneself because of one's race, is toxic. Though the translation from the French could be more sophisticated, the skill with which Condé has adapted Brontë's masterpiece shines through. --Teri Kieffer
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.
Condé performed a similar tour de force in Windward Heights (originally titled La Migration des Coeurs), her rewriting of Wuthering Heights. She has described her purpose as the wish to show, not the differences between Caribbean women and English women, but what they have in common because they share the same desires. That comment simplifies her project, for she clearly found in Bronte's novel the ideal vehicle for a recasting of all her thematic preoccupations. The result is a multi-vocal, multigenerational saga, set in a colonial society where race replaces the function of class. It also becomes a powerful allegory of black and white, male and female, good and evil. Razyé, her Heathcliff character, is black; Aymeric de Linsseuil, her Edgar Linton, is white; Cathy a mulatto, is torn between the ferocious Razyé and the effete Aymeric. As in the original novel, the daughter's story reprises the mother's, with Condé's version, complicated by incest, providing an astute reading of Bronte's text.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
--Ce texte provient de la
Paperback
édition.
