A Spanish reader, a medium-sized one, what have you read about the years of decolonization in Africa ? From memory comes the memory of some novel of VS Naipaul rather sordid; Ngugi wa Thiong'o's memoir, a chronicle about Algeria written by some French independence supporter who, in the end, returned home horrified; something about Mobutu Sese Seko and his delusions ... Not much else, right?

What do all these books have in common? Pessimism , the journey from idealism to defeat, the discovery of new forms of corruption, violence and ineptitude. Life without makeup , the second part of Maryse Condé's memoirs (edited by Impedimenta) also functions as a political chronicle of those years and offers a new version of that disenchantment.

"My book is not just a personal story, it also tells a certain vision of the African independence processes," Condé tells La Esfera . «Sékou Touré [the father of the independence of Guinea] voted no in the referendum for the departmentalization organized by France and that triggered a great enthusiasm that quickly stayed in nothing. It turned out to be a dictator who didn't care in the least about his people. But my book is also a critique of decolonization. Of course, participate in that pessimism ».

Do we need to introduce Condé? Guadalupe's writer (1937) has published work in Spanish since 1988, but her books went under the radar until Condé became a favorite of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2019, Heart that laughs, heart that cries , the first part of his memoirs (also in Impedimenta), put it on the map for Spanish readers of the 21st century.

What kind of life do these memories tell? One that does not resemble any other we have seen written so far but, at the same time, is close and moving. Condé was born in Guadeloupe, French overseas territory, in a family of "super blacks" that is how he dubbed the native upper class, who worked for the colonial state and imitated the customs of the whites of the island. A Renault in the garage, a trip to France in summer, a little house on the beach ...

The first part of the memories explained that way of life and its conflicts. Maryse (not yet called Condé) discovered that her father was indifferent to her and that her loving mother was actually a complex personality , absorbing and not quite positive . In addition, he began to intuit the hypocrisy that sustained his family's privileges and, ashamed, made the decision to run as far away as possible.

That's where life begins without makeup, the second part of the memories. Maryse studied in Paris. Her life was erratic : she became pregnant once after another with different lovers; She tried to get intimate with her older sisters who also lived in France but they eluded her. He married men he did not love and when he found one that pleased her, he entered a loop of melancholy and mutism. I went out at night but didn't dance because I had been educated not to do the things that blacks were supposed to do . He ran out of money. He was fragile and poor but he conveyed to the world haughtiness.

In the end, he went to Africa following a rather unpresentable lover because he didn't know what to do with his life. «My friend Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian novelist, thought that the problem came from myself. I think he was right. At that time I was too idealistic and saw things totally white or black, without considering the possibility of nuances, ”explains Condé.

His life continued to fall: Senegal, Ivory Coast and, finally, Guinea , the only revolutionary country in Africa at that time, refuge for the decolonizing leaders of the continent. Condé was inserted in that new upper class.

The author says that Conakry, the capital, was the most soulless city in the region , but that she had something that made her fall in love with her contradictions. The tyrant Touré toured the city in a convertible Mercedes and his subjects cheered . Friends advised him to dress the African woman and stop speaking French. His mother-in-law mortified her.

But, in the midst of that chaos, life began to imply a meaning. «This book was intended to break down certain myths and tell the truth about myself. Half jokingly, I said that I was inspired by The confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau ».

We had started with politics. What Condé tells, in summary, is that distrust between ethnic groups poisoned the construction of the new African republics . Now, the author remembers the essay Black skin, black masks of Frantz Fanon. «His philosophy surpassed the approaches of the Blackness as conceived by Aimé Césaire. For Fanon, the black world does not really exist: it happens that Westerners define it by giving it completely false implications.

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