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Caribbean Matters: Celebrating Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé [1]

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Date: 2023-03-30  

This author’s calendar entry from Petri Liukkonen and Ari Pesonen has both a biography which details her beginnings and a Condé bibliography.

Maryse Condé was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, a small French/Creole-speaking Caribbean island. She was the youngest of eight children. Condé's mother was a schoolteacher, and her father ran a small savings and loan company, called Caisse Coopérative des Prêts, which he had founded with his friends. Since childhood Condé was an avid reader, but her mother, who was a deeply religious person, disapproved of her spending time imagining and writing stories of her own; they were for her "a load of lies". ('Giving Voice to Guadeloupe' by Maryse Condé, The York Review of Books, February 6, 2019) When Condé was eight, she wrote a one-act play dedicated to her mother. Both of her parents died before she became known as a writer. Condé never knew her maternal grandmother, an illiterate mulatto born on the island of Marie-Galante, but reconstructed her life in Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006, Victoire: My Mother's Mother), a family story about mothers and daughters. Condé left Guadeloupe at the age of sixteen, when she was sent by her parents to Paris. She was educated at Lycée Fénéleon and Sorbonne, majoring in English. "Being so far from my parents had a very sad side to it", she later recalled, "but I think that's when I discovered lots of things like the cinema, art, museums, and exhibitions." (Conversations with Maryse Condé, by Maryse Condé and Françoise Pfaff, 1996, p. 2) During her time as a student, she joined the Communist Youth. In 1958, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor; officially they divorced in 1981.

Caribbean Elections (ce) continues her biography:

Condé's African years were restless. "I know now just how badly prepared I was to encounter Africa", Condé acknowledged later, "I had a very romantic vision, and I just wasn't prepared, either politically or socially." (World Authors 1980-1985, ed. Vineta Colby, 1991) Condé lived in Ghana and Senegal during the turbulent moments of history of these countries. She met such political figures as Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of Ghana, António Agostinho Neto, a famous Angolan nationalist leader, Amilcar Cabral, a Guinea-Bissaunian guerrilla and politician, and attended gatherings that included Malcolm X and Ernesto "Che" Guevara as speakers. This wandering period also was fruitful for her creative development. She has argued that too much familiarity with a place does not allow an author to write about it more truthfully but only to 'mythify' it. While in Senegal, she also met Richard Philcox, an Englishman who taught at the high school where she worked and who later became her husband. Settling eventually with her family in London, she worked for the BBC as a program producer for two years (1968-70), and then taught at Jussieau (1970-72) and Nanterre (1972-80). In 1975 Condé received her Ph.D. Her dissertation in comparative literature dealt with black stereotypes in Caribbean literature. Between the years 1980 and 1985, Condé was a course director at Sorbonne. Scholarly fellowships and invitations to teach brought her then to the United States. In the 1970s she wrote several plays, which were performed in Paris and in the West Indies. Her first novel, Hérémakhonon (1976), went practically unnoticed in France, but interested French teachers in the United States, who invited her to lecture on Francophone literature. "I spoke very poor English at the time, which turned out to be not very important because the students were mainly concerned with suntans and surfing." (Conversations with Maryse Condé, by Maryse Condé and Françoise Pfaff, 1996) The story told of a young Black West Indian woman, Veronica, who is educated in Paris and searches her roots in Africa. In Paris she had a white lover, and in Africa she becomes the mistress of the Minister of Defense, who turns out to be thoroughly corrupt. The theme continued in the novel Une saison à Rihata (1981, A Season in Rihata), where Condé's African and Caribbean characters are lost in a corrupt country. Also in this work the protagonist is a Guadeloupian woman. However, Condé had denied that Veronica was an autobiographical character.

Much to my delight, this month, writer Anderson Tepper, who is co-chair of the International Committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival and curator of international literature at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, wrote a feature on Condé for The New York Times:

Throughout her four-decade literary career, the Guadeloupean writer has explored a global vision of the Black diaspora, and placed Caribbean life at the center. In 2018, Condé received the New Academy Prize, which was given the year that no Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded (owing to a scandal within the committee). Since then, she has been feted around the world: at the Aké Festival in Nigeria in 2020, which included a video tribute by 24 female African writers, and during a two-day celebration at the Mucem museum in Marseille in November. She was included in the 2022 Royal Society of Literature International Writers program, along with authors such as Tsitsi Dangarembga and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and in January, a high school in Paris was named for her. What took so long? “The Alternative Nobel afforded Condé much overdue recognition,” said Louise Yelin, a retired professor of literature who has known Condé since the late 1980s. “But why not the actual Nobel Prize in Literature?” This month, Condé will publish The Gospel According to the New World, her third book to be released in the United States in her 80s, all published by World Editions and translated by her husband and longtime translator, Richard Philcox. (Condé, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder that makes it difficult to speak and see, dictated her last two books to Philcox.)

In his conclusion, Tepper points to a serious flaw in both American readers and publishers.

While Condé’s perspective may be somewhat rare in French letters, Francophone readers take seriously her literary importance. She has a smaller readership in the United States, which Malaika Adero, her editor at Atria Books in the 2000s, attributes to the tastes of American readers and publishers. “Americans are often sadly uninterested in things they regard as foreign,” Adero said. “I was disappointed — and embarrassed even — by our own company sales representatives who stated in field reports that the titles weren’t selling well because ‘people aren’t interested in these Jamaican novels.’”

In 2020 the Ake Arts & Book Festival in Nigeria produced this documentary tribute to Condé, Maryse Condé: A Wondrous Life, which includes an interview with her and discussions of her life and work.

x YouTube Video

For those of you who have not read Condé, I hope you have enjoyed this introduction. Those of you who have, please share your thoughts in the comments section below, and join me for the weekly Caribbean news roundup.

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