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.
Naturally, this harsh portrayal angered the Guadeloupeans, and Conde was hurt by their reaction. The Guadeloupeans were not her only hostile critics, and Africans objected to her picture of political corruption in Africa. 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,
By 1997 Condé had lived in the United States just over a decade; she had taught in many universities, and finally settled at Columbia as tenured professor of French Caribbean literature and Chair of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. From the beginning, she had maintained a home in Guadaloupe, dividing her time between the two places. The accumulated experiences of these years were once again woven together, this time to produce Desirada, her twelfth and arguably her strongest novel to date.
At its core is an event recalling Jamaica Kincaid's remark that the abandonment of children is one of the legacies of colonialism and conquest. The circumstances of Marie-Noelle's birth and abandonment (her mother has been impregnated by a white rapist) propel her on a search that spans three countries. She leaves Guadeloupe to join her mother in France, and eventually settles in the United States, which she describes as a place where "the defeated, the dispossessed, without country or religion [can] slip anonymously into its vast shadowy corners." From there, she returns to Desirada (the title, besides suggesting desirability, is an actual Caribbean island) to solve the riddle of her paternity and the reason behind her maternal rejection.
In the United States, Marie-Noelle flourishes as the protégé of a flamboyant black academic. Condé's portrait of the mentor is sharply satirical, but also sympathetic. Anthea is an Ivy League graduate, who wrote her dissertation on Jane Austen, a mistake she corrects, in a later stage of enlightenment, by specializing in nineteenth century female slave narratives.
Her two objectives are to raise her adopted African daughter to be a model of black perfection and, through her work, to rehabilitate her race. She is a formidable character, but Marie-Noelle detects a fragile vulnerability under the aggressive exterior, and she is reminded by this blend of strength and weakness of her own rejecting mother. With Andrea's help, Marie-Noelle earns a Ph.D, becomes a writer, and teacher of French literature. She teaches Guadeloupean authors, and renames her classes 'Francophone', a gesture that allows her students to construct a mythology that suits everyone.
The book jacket describes Desiderata as Condé's "most autobiographical novel." Condé herself often acknowledges the autobiographical element in her works. She describes the multi-generational A Tree of Life, as the story of her own family "with the distortion of fiction." She claims Segu as her own history by dedicating it to "my Bambara ancestress." Her recent Tales of From the Heart: True Stories of my Childhood, dedicated to her mother, is her first unmediated autobiography.
The autobiographical impulse is consistent with the highly personal, subjective nature of her work. When questioned about making a political choice between writing in French and writing in Creole, she responds, "I don't know if I write in French, I don't know if I write in Creole [but] I know I write in Maryse Conde." "Identity is subjective and no one has the right to challenge you on that." "I myself decide who I am."
Although she is a strong advocate for Caribbean literature, she denies any didactic purpose in her own writing, noting that it would be too facile to say she writes to educate her people. She concedes only that if she makes the world understandable to herself, then perhaps she will help others to understand it better.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
