Maryse Condé

Franklin Nelson

‘I have said on several occasions that identities are plural, that they are the fruit of the influences to which we have been subjected. Nowadays, our worlds intermingle and diversify.’ 

Maryse Condé’s verdict in an interview with Amina magazine on the nature of identity – less about the certainty of being than the importance of becoming – chimes both with her own life and her œuvre. Condé, who has died at the age of 90, might have been born and raised on one of the smallest Caribbean islands, French-speaking Guadeloupe, of which she was very fond. But she was also at home in the world. She lived in several countries in West Africa, taught in the United States, and spent her final years in France. 

As she criss-crossed the globe, so in her writing Condé traversed continents, genres and centuries. Indeed, her own story as a writer began with a tale that was brought from the outside into her childhood surroundings. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), given to her by a friend of her mother, showed Condé that ‘you can be an English author but reach close to the heart of a Caribbean child’, she told the Guardian four years ago. ‘It was the first time in my life that a book became close to my heart.’

Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon was born in 1934 in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe’s economic hub then as now, the youngest of eight children born to two of the French department’s vanishingly few black school teachers. Her parents, Condé recalled, ‘were convinced France was the best place in the world.’ Accordingly, Jeanne and Auguste placed curbs on who their daughter could socialise with and forbade her from attending carnival and other festivals. This, Condé reflected, kept at a distance subjects ‘they didn’t want to confront’, although Joseph Zobel’s depiction in the novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950), translated into English as Black Shack Alley in 1980 by Keith Q. Warner, of poverty and marginalisation in nearby Martinique ‘opened [her] eyes’. 

Sent to Paris at sixteen to finish her studies, Condé arrived expecting to find tolerance and fairness. Instead, she met with racial prejudice. Not long afterwards, she enjoyed a kind of awakening. A school friend’s father, a professor of history at the Sorbonne and a Communist party member, ‘taught me how to look at the world through the eyes of a colonised person’, Condé said, ‘and how Guadeloupe had been created by France for the benefit of slavery.’

After reading English at the Sorbonne, Condé lived in West Africa – Guinea, Ghana and Mali – with her first husband. There, she taught French and mixed with political figures including Malcolm X and Che Guevara. She credited her sojourn with enabling her to ‘see, with my own eyes, the world in which I live … I Maryse Condé, Black, female and Caribbean.’ At the same time, she was a clear-eyed critic of the shortcomings of post-independence political projects. In her autobiography La Vie sans fards (2012), translated by her second husband Richard Philcox as What Is Africa to Me? (2017), Condé described how the separation in Ghana between locals and African-Americans fleeing Jim Crow rendered Négritude, a movement whose Caribbean and African founders espoused black fraternity, as ‘nothing but a wonderful dream.’ 

Condé later returned to the Sorbonne to study for a doctorate. Her focus was black stereotypes in Caribbean literature, which she began to undermine in  her debut novel Hérémakhonon (1976), published when she was in her forties. Taking the word from the Maninka language for ‘waiting for happiness’ as its title, Hérémakhonon tracks its Guadeloupe-born protagonist Veronica Mercier as she attempts to go ‘back to’ Africa and find herself. It sold poorly, as did a second novel, Une saison à Rihata (1981), but Condé was not deterred. ‘My compulsive desire to work … did not die down,’ she observed in a 2021 blog. ‘I would discover the world and maintain original and enriching relationships.’ International success came in the mid-1980s with Ségou: les murailles de terre (1984) and its sequel Ségou: la terre en miettes (1985) – two bold, grand books inspired by the Bambara kingdom, whose royal family contends with the impact of slavery, Islam, Christianity and colonisation. Translated into English as a single work, Segu (1987) was described by The New York Times as ‘the most significant historical novel about black Africa published in many a year’. Her success led Condé to take up professorships at the universities of Maryland and Virginia and the University of California, Berkeley before she settled at Columbia University. 

A glance at her bibliography – La migration des coeurs (1998), translated into English as Windward Heights (1995), The Journey of a Caribbean Writer (2014), Traversée de la mangrove (1989), translated as Crossing the Mangrove (1995), and En attendant la montée des eaux (2010), translated as Waiting for the Waters to Rise (2021), to take but four of its constituents – points to the importance of movement to Condé. Within the pages of her books, the emphasis on activity and plurality is taken further. The narrative voice in Crossing the Mangrove and Waiting for the Waters to Rise passes from one character to the next, forming a collage. Windward Heights transposes Emily Brontë’s story of desire and violence to the Caribbean, ‘writing back’ to the British literary canon. Above all, her novels are marked out by a readiness to meld Guadeloupean Creole and standard French and a polite but firm refusal to use one or the other: ‘I write neither in French nor in Creole … I write in Maryse Condé,’ she declared. 

For Romuald Fonkoua, Professor of French literature at the Sorbonne and a friend, it was not only Condé’s prolific output but also her refusal to be shut within an ideology that made her the standout Guadeloupean writer of the past century. She wrote ‘to give the world a glimpse of the faces of history that have until now not been shown, of landscapes that have been overlooked’, he said.      

Condé’s profile was boosted in 2018 when the New Academy named her its literature laureate as the Nobel committee battled scandal. The jury praised her description of ‘the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming’, and noted how in her work ‘gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations.’ Condé dedicated the award to her homeland, noting that Guadeloupe is typically ‘only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes.’ 

‘In my world, writing was seen as a white male occupation,’ Condé once said of her childhood. ‘No black woman had the audacity to disobey that rule.’ Her rich, expansive œuvre is testimony to the power of moving away from the norm, of being intellectually restless. Asked how she defined her literary style, Maryse Condé declined to answer, saying that fell to readers. Her message was and is that we can and should go our own ways. 

Photo by Medef, courtesy of Wikicommons