Maryse Condé

French novelist and playwright

• Born: February 11, 1934
• Place of Birth: Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe
• Died: April 2, 2024
• Place of Death: Apt, France

Biography

Maryse Condé was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, on February 11, 1934, the youngest of eight children born to Auguste Boucolon and Jeanne Quidal. She moved to Paris at age sixteen to study, after which she spent eight years teaching in Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal. After spending two years (1968–70) in London working for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), she returned to Paris to continue her studies. Fascinated by the political upheavals in the emerging independent countries of Africa, Condé focused her attention on them and on the effects such transitions have on the lives of common citizens. She was extraordinarily well versed in African history and knew its folklore intimately.

Condé, then Maryse Boucolon, married Mamadou Condé in 1958 and had three children with him. A year after they divorced in 1981, she married Richard Philcox, the translator of most of her novels. With him, she translated Eric Williams’s From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (1970) into French.

During the years she spent in Africa, many African nations, long possessions of European countries, gained their independence. Many demagogues, motivated largely by visions of personal gain, grasped power, often to the considerable detriment of their people.

When Condé left Africa, she went first to London to serve in the French Services of the BBC, then returned to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, completing her doctorate in Caribbean literature in 1975. Aside from lecture trips and occasional writer-in-residence stints in the United States and the West Indies, she remained in Paris until 1989, when she took a position as professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, she moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1995 to Columbia University, where she also became the chairperson of the French and Francophone Institute in 1997. She has also taught at California Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, and Harvard University.

It was in Paris that Condé wrote her first novel, Hérémakhonon (1976; trans. 1982), which deals with a problem that she would return to in much of her writing—namely, where people cast their lots in transitional politics when their way of life comes into conflict with the dislocations that inevitably occur when their countries succumb to European and American cultural influences. The novel’s protagonist, Veronica, bears a strong resemblance to Condé, in that she too is a Paris-educated woman from Guadeloupe who moves to West Africa. Veronica reflects on her life in the West Indies and in Paris. She takes as her lover Ibrahim Sory, who is engaged in an ideological struggle with Saliou, an associate of Veronica's at the institute where she teaches. Saliou, a revolutionary, is a figurehead for the new dictator, Mwalimwana. Although Veronica never fully understands the struggle between Sory and Saliou, she is drawn into it through her association with each. Her stay in Hérémakhonon ends abruptly because of political pressures. In this novel, as in her play Dieu nous l’a donné (God has given, 1972), Condé wrote of a brewing political revolt and expressed her conviction that single leaders cannot create revolutions; a revolution can come about only when a whole populace wills it.

In her next novel, Une saison à Rihata (1981; A Season in Rihata, 1988), Condé wrote of an African country rent by internal political strife, focusing on a large, socially and politically complex family in a West African country. Told largely through the eyes of one prominent male member of this family, with salient insights from other members, the novel deals with questions of integrity and morality and with the inroads that political transitions make upon personal codes of ethics.

In Segóu (2 vols., 1984–85), published in English as two separate novels (Segu, 1987, and The Children of Segu, 1989), Condé wrote historically about the Bamana Empire (also called the Segu Empire), the West African kingdom that rose in the wake of the collapse of the Mali Empire, from 1797 to 1860. The novels cover a trying period in the lives of the royal family, whose way of life is being eroded by encroaching European colonization, as well as by a slave trade that threatens the security of the populace. Christianity and Islam are fast replacing the animistic religions indigenous to the region. In these two novels Condé demonstrated her comprehensive grasp of African history, culture, and folklore.

Moi, Tituba, sorcière—noire de Salem (1986; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1992) deals with an African problem—slavery—but is not set in Africa. Rather, Tituba, a historical figure, is born on a slave ship bound for Barbados. As an adult, she is sold with her husband, John Indian, to a Puritan minister, John Parris, who takes them to Salem, Massachusetts. He eventually sells Tituba to Benjamin Cohen, a Jew, who ultimately sets her free. Rather than returning to Barbados, Tituba joins a band of rebels and is eventually convicted of witchcraft, for which she is hanged.

Vie Scélérate (1987; Tree of Life, 1992) moves between Harlem, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and France in a multigenerational tale of one family’s rise from poverty to wealth. Condé utilized a plot formula that had become stale through overuse by the writers of popular potboilers; however, she illustrated that in the right hands, this rags-to-riches story can encompass a wide range of social and cultural commentary. Traversée de la Mangrove (1989; Crossing the Mangrove, 1995) begins with the wake of the enigmatic Francis Sancher, who has left a mark on everyone with whom he interacted in Guadeloupe. The figure of Sancher serves as a focal point for the numerous attendees at his wake to recount their lives and concerns in mourning or celebrating his life.

Like Tree of Life, Derniers Rois Mages (1992; The Last of the African Kings, 1997) depicts history through the fortunes of a family. It begins with an African king, Behanzin, who opposes French colonization of his land and is exiled to Martinique. Condé traced the fates of his offspring as they spread out through the Caribbean and the United States, offering a microcosm of the African diaspora. La Migration des Coeurs (1995; Windward Heights, 1998), a historical novel, recasts the story of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Guadeloupe, adding a layer of complexity in her exploration of race and color in addition to social class and obsession.

Desirada (1997; trans. 2000), which won the Prix Carbet de la Caraibe in 1998, is another story of alienation. The central figure is Marie-Noelle, a girl raised in Guadeloupe until she is summoned to France at the age of ten by her birth mother. Her mother is cold and indifferent to her, and Marie-Noelle tries to discover the truth of her birth and the identity of her father. She is offered radically differing stories by her mother and grandmother, and ultimately, she realizes that she will never be quite sure of who she is, and never quite at home in any of the places—Guadeloupe, France, or the United States—where she lives.

In the twenty-first century, Condé continued to write novels, children's books, plays, and essays, though she retired from teaching in 2005. These works include Histoire de la Femme Cannibale (2003), or The Story of the Cannibal Woman, and Victoire, Tes Saveurs et les Mots (2006), or Victorie: My Mother’s Mother, two works of fiction. In 2007, she released a play, Comme Deux Frères, or Like Two Brothers. In 2018, she was awarded The New Academy Prize in Literature, and in 2021, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, a lucrative literary award. Additionally, her novel L'Évangile du Nouveau Monde (2021), or The Gospel According to the New World, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. On April 2, 2024, Condé died at the age of ninety at a hospital in southern France.

The range of Condé’s writing is impressive. She published plays, short stories, literary criticism, juvenile literature, and plays. She edited anthologies and published a notable translation. She created works that were consistently historically accurate and stylistically deft.

Bibliography

Adesanmi, Pius. “Anti-Manichean Aesthetics: The Economy of Space in Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove and Calixthe Beyala’s Loukoum.” English in Africa, vol. 29, no.1, 2002, pp. 73–83.

Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. U of Missouri P, 2001.

Bernstein, Lisa. “Demythifying the Witch’s Identity as Social Critique in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.” Social Identities, vol. 3, no. 1, 1997, pp. 77–90, doi.org/10.1080/13504639752177. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Condé, Maryse. "Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé." Interview by Emily Apter. Public Culture, vol. 13, no. 1, 2001, pp. 89–96. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 30 June 2016.

Frederick, Patricia. “In Search of a Mère-Patrie: The Forgotten Mother in the Works of Djura and Maryse Condé.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2001, pp. 116–123, doi.org/10.1386/ijfs.4.2.116. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Kemedijo, Cilas. “The Curse of Writing: Genealogical Strata of Disillusion; Orality, Islam-Writing, and Identities in the State of Becoming in Maryse Condé’s Ségou.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 4, 1996, pp. 124–143.

Perret, Delphine, and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds. Maryse Condé. Spec. issue of Callaloo, vol. 18, no. 3, 1995, Project MUSE. doi.org/10.1353/cal.1995.0091. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Risen, Clay. "Maryse Condé, ‘Grande Dame’ of Francophone Literature, Dies at 90." The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/maryse-conde-dead.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. Oxford UP, 2001.

Tepper, Anderson. “Maryse Condé, at Home in the World.” The New York Times, 6 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/books/maryse-conde-books.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Wolff, Rebecca. "Maryse Condé by Rebecca Wolff." BOMB, Summer 1999, bombmagazine.org/articles/maryse-cond%C3%A9/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.