Highlights: The great lady of West Indian letters, Maryse Condé, passed away on the night of April 1 to 2 at the age of 90. She died following a long hereditary degenerative illness, known as “Bouclon disease” The author of Ségou, a Romanesque epic in two volumes which made him known in the 1980s, died in hospital. She won the Alternative Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018 for her novel Le Fabulous and sad fate of Ivan and Ivana.

The great lady of West Indian letters, Maryse Condé, passed away on the night of April 1 to 2 at the age of 90, following a long hereditary degenerative illness, known as “Bouclon disease…

Disappearance

Death of Maryse Condé: story of an “unvarnished life” between three continents

The great lady of West Indian letters, Maryse Condé, passed away on the night of April 1 to 2 at the age of 90, following a long hereditary degenerative illness, known as “Bouclon disease”, like the novelist named her after her father. Originally from Guadeloupe, born Maryse Liliane Appoline Boucolon, the deceased ecivaine was the author of around thirty titles, including novels, essays and titles for young people.

Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean novelist and essayist. Claire Garate

By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

With Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant, Guadeloupean Maryse Condé has long embodied the power and creativity of the Caribbean Francophonie. An outstanding novelist, she succeeded in putting into fiction the revolt and oceanic thinking of her two elders. The author of Ségou, a Romanesque epic in two volumes which made him known in the 1980s, died in hospital. Since 2013, she has retired there with her husband Richard Philcox, after having stayed for a time in the Marais where she settled upon her return from the United States where she lived and taught for nearly three decades. Founder of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University, she contributed to making French-speaking literature known to Americans.

Richard Philcox, married for a second time, had shared the writer's life since 1969. The man who had become over time the privileged interlocutor of journalists who wanted to meet Maryse Condé, was clearly much more than a husband: he was also the official translator of her novels for the English version, her secretary and perhaps even her nurse in the last years of the life of the novelist confined to her wheelchair due to illness. The couple met in Senegal. It was in Africa that Maryse Condé began her professional career as a teacher and writer. One day the story of their couple will have to be told, even if the novelist has always refused to bear the name of this tenderly loved husband, preferring to keep that of her first husband, father of her three daughters and grandfather of her five little ones. -children.

Winner of numerous prizes (Prix de l'Académie française, Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, Prix Marguerite Yourcenar, Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, Prix Tropiques), Maryse Condé won the Alternative Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018 for her novel Le Fabulous and sad fate of Ivan and Ivana (2017). Organized in a more democratic way than the classic Nobel, with a popular jury of 32,000 people around the world called to vote to determine the winner, the alternative Nobel contributed to the international influence of the work of Maryse Condé, by attracting attention of the general public to the unique and rich writing of the Guadeloupean novelist.

It is a work composed of around twenty novels, collections of short stories and essays on literature, language and the causes that the author defended through his novels but also throughout a life rich in fights and creations. The condition of Caribbean women, slavery, the complex relationships between Africa and its diaspora are some of the themes that Maryse Condé has continually explored through her prolific work, from her very first novel Hérémakhonon, published in 1976.

A Guadeloupean youth

Maryse Condé's life has not been a long, quiet river. The writer recounted the breaking lines in her autobiographical stories, depicting the path she had to forge between the dictates of her family, the circumstances of life and her own obsessions. She was born into a bourgeois black family from Guadeloupe. His parents belonged to the first generation of blacks who, thanks to French egalitarian republicanism, had been able to escape the misery and poverty that were the lot of the children and grandchildren of former slaves.

The mother of the deceased author was one of the first black teachers on the island and her father, a ward of the nation, was a banker, a “self-made man”. They called themselves “Great Negroes” and instilled in their eight children the ambition to realize their dreams and the love of great culture. The youngest in the family, Maryse grew up among turbulent siblings rich in intellectual potential. One of his sisters studied medicine, his older brother became the first aggregator of Guadeloupe. How can we be surprised that already at the age of 10, little Maryse had read all the French classics? “

At 12, I knew everything about Victor Hugo…

”

The structuring, or rather destructuring, episode of this era revolves around a birthday present. For her 12th birthday, the young girl received from a friend of her mother the great novel by the British writer Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. The next day, after spending the whole night devouring this classic of world literature, she rushed to thank her mother's friend for her gift.

Maryse Condé says: "

I told her: 'One day, I too will write books. I will be as famous and I will write books as beautiful as those of Emily Brontë.' outraged astonishment: "But you're crazy! People like us don't write!" For her, writing was the business of white people, of men, possibly that of white women who live in big countries like England, the United States or France. This remark completely destroyed me.

The literary path being thus barred to her, at least for the moment, the teenager will devote herself to teaching. A serious student, she left her native island at the age of 16 and arrived alone in Paris, to continue her studies at the prestigious Lycée Fénelon, dreaming of entering the École Normale Supérieure. She also followed a History course at the Sorbonne. But her dream of a successful career in teaching quickly collapses when she finds herself pregnant, abandoned by her Haitian lover and rejected by her family. She was left to take care of her son alone.

Alongside this sentimental and material drift, the young woman was experiencing an intellectual revolution. At the origin of this revolution, his discovery of the volume with a red and gold cover entitled Discourse on colonialism by Aimé Césaire, published by Présence Africaine. This reading will open her eyes and reveal her to herself for what she was: she discovered that she was “black”. “My parents never having spoken to me about slavery, I believed that black people grew in the West Indies like guava trees grow on guava trees and the fragrant flowers of ylang-ylang on the trees of the same name. It was from reading Césaire that I understood that the presence of black people on the American continent was not self-evident and that it was the result of a historical process,” she liked to say. This capital discovery, coupled with a spirit of revolt in relation to her family, is undoubtedly not unrelated to the decision that the future novelist took at the age of 22 to go and live in Africa.

Detour through Africa

In 1959, it was in the arms of the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé whom the future novelist had married in Paris, whom she landed in Ivory Coast where she worked for the French Cooperation, before settling in Guinea. These are the Sékou Touré years. Behind the slogans of equality and scientific Marxism, a totalitarian and predatory regime was organized which appropriated the country's wealth, while the majority of the population lived in abject poverty. In Ghana, where she lived for a time, the same story was repeated under the aegis of Nkrumah's fanciful administration. This will be overthrown by a coup d'état and replaced by a military regime, barely less fanciful and authoritarian than the previous one.

In her memoir, La Vie sans fards, Maryse Condé recounted in great detail her twelve years of suffering and hardships in an Africa immersed in its own misfortunes. The Africans had no use for the quest for the origins of a West Indian woman who wore neither loincloths nor boubous and stubbornly refused to speak the country's languages. This stay in Africa was also an opportunity for the young Guadeloupean to discover the gap that separated her from the Africans. While by settling on the Black Continent, she thought she would see the bonds broken by slavery spontaneously establish themselves, her presence only aroused incomprehension and rejection. This painful observation led the future novelist to question the validity of the theories of negritude and to distance herself from her romantic vision of Africa. “

Color is an epiphenomenon

,” Maryse Condé liked to repeat, echoing the words of Frantz Fanon, who had a major influence on her thinking.

By the novelist's own admission, it is in this dialectic of identity that the origins of her writing are found. She came late, on her return to France in the early 1970s, after her divorce from her first husband, Mamadou Condé. She drew inspiration from her first books, notably for Hérémakhonon, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of her life in Guinea under Sékou Touré. This first book will be followed by a historical novel in two volumes, Ségou (1984-1985), which opened the doors to notoriety for Maryse Condé.

For the academic Lilyan Kesteloot who has worked extensively on writers from Africa and the West Indies, the preliminary information effort that the writing of this enormous fresco on the ancient empire of Mali required helped the Guadeloupean to acquire the keys that he had missed so much during his African exile. “

This detour through History – and the recreation of this History through the novel – therefore allowed him,” wrote Kesteloot, “to put into perspective both the tragedy of the ancestral past and the frustrations of personal contact. In the vain search for an adoptive mother Africa, she substitutes the real knowledge of a collective History that she assumes; and this fact frees her at the same time. She can finally love, yes, love, Africa. And leave her.

After Ségou, everything is happening as if Maryse Condé had finished paying her intellectual debt to Africa. The novelist's imagination now leaves the shores of the black continent to invest the West Indies and America. This is a new stage in his writing. She then attempts to map West Indian identity in its here and now. It depicts social tensions through the sagas of great Caribbean families (La Vie scélérate), evokes anti-imperial resistance (Me, Tituba, witch and La Migration des cœurs), broadens the West Indian experience by bringing in that of a diaspora constantly confronted with the other and called to redefine itself (Desirada, Mixed Country).

Maryse Condé's characters are often fragile, plural, heterogeneous women like the author herself. Marginalized, they tirelessly try, through the vicissitudes of life and the world, to take charge of their destiny and assert their freedom. Their names are Tituba, Rosélie, Célanire or even Victoire, the maternal grandmother to whom the novelist dedicated one of her most moving books, halfway between biography and fiction, Victoire, flavors and words . “

My grandmother was an outstanding cook, servant to the Békés, illiterate, but determined to give her daughter the tools of education so that she could fight on equal terms in the arena of life. I didn't know her. And since I lost my mother very early, writing this book allowed me to know them both and to know myself through them. It was a wonderful experience, because I finally had the impression of being part of a family, and, beyond that, of a history, that of Guadeloupe and the Antilles.

A story made of domination and suffering that Guadeloupean Maryse Condé knew well. As president of the Committee for the Memory of Slavery, created by President Jacques Chirac, she was responsible for healing the bruised soul of her people by centuries of slavery. His tools for repairing the ills of the soul were called “memory” and “education”. Learn the past to understand it. Remember it so you never forget it. It is based on the conclusions of its detailed report on the teaching of this traumatic past in schools that the French government set May 10 as the day of commemoration of slavery, which had already been established as a crime. against humanity by the so-called Taubira law of 2001.

For the novelist, this repair also involved politics. Maryse Condé had been tempted for a time to influence the political life of her island by campaigning within the Guadeloupean independence movement. She even ran for office as a candidate for the Popular Union for the Liberation of Guadeloupe. She had not been elected, her party had been swept away, but the cause remains. “

For me,

” she affirmed with great intellectual constancy, “

the independence of my country is a dream that I will not give up.

Without adhering to all the dictates of the separatists, particularly those concerning language. “

We are told that Creole is our mother tongue, and French the language of colonization, which must be rejected. It's too simplistic. For me, French is no longer a colonial language because I have cannibalized it, reinterpreted it with my history, my ethnicity, my experience. Besides, I write neither in French nor in Creole, but in Maryse Condé!

► Maryse Condé in a few titles:

Hérémakhonon, Paris, UGE, 1976

Ségou, the earthen walls, followed by Ségou, the earth in pieces, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1984-1985

Me, Tituba, black witch of Salem, Paris, Mercure de France, 1986

Victory, flavors and words, Paris, Mercure de France, 2006

La Vie sans fards, Paris, Editions JC Lattès, 2012

The fabulous and sad destiny of Ivan and Ivana, Paris, Editions JC. Lattès, 2017

Death of Maryse Condé: story of an “unvarnished life” between three continents

Death of Maryse Condé: story of an “unvarnished life” between three continents

A Guadeloupean youth

Detour through Africa

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest