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Maryse Condé: Filling in the Gaps of “Herstory”

Bonnie Thomas

in Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Maryse Condé’s autofictional narratives engage with questions of history and memory, particularly the notion that self-knowledge achieved by filling in the ... More

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Maryse Condé’s autofictional narratives engage with questions of history and memory, particularly the notion that self-knowledge achieved by filling in the gaps of her personal history is a means to create connections and reconcile with the past. The term herstory is more appropriate in this context given Condé’s attention to understanding her female lineage and her roles as mother, lover and writer. The discussion centers on: Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer: contes vrais de mon enfance [Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood], Victoire, les saveurs et les mots [Victoire: My Mother’s Mother] and La Vie sans fards. These three narratives have been chosen for their illuminating demonstration of the continuous interchange that exists between the personal and the historical as well as Condé’s emphasis on the importance of connecting histories within one’s own family and with her literary forebears.Less

Playing the Field/Performing ‘the Personal’ in Maryse Condé's Interviews

Eva Sansavior

in Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form

One of the distinguishing, and also critically overlooked, features of Guadeloupian female author, Maryse Condé's work has been the significant number of interviews she has given in various media in ... More

One of the distinguishing, and also critically overlooked, features of Guadeloupian female author, Maryse Condé's work has been the significant number of interviews she has given in various media in both the United States and France. This chapter discusses Maryse Condé's interviews. It considers the mobile sets of representations that she makes of the Guadeloupian, French, and North American fields of reception, drawing out the relationships between literature and criticism, the author, her fiction, and her readers that are constructed in the interviews.Less

Withering Heights: Maryse Condeé and the Postcolonial Middlebrow

in Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature

This chapter explores the foundational bias (nomos) of postcolonial studies and its anxiously undertheorized relation to the empirical question of popularity and the ideological stakes that question ... More

This chapter explores the foundational bias (nomos) of postcolonial studies and its anxiously undertheorized relation to the empirical question of popularity and the ideological stakes that question raises. It elaborates, in a specifically francophone context, upon the opposition between the postcolonial and the popular, smoking out the bias toward great, or at least not bad, writing in postcolonial studies by briefly examining the case of popular novelist, Tony Delsham. It then discusses Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé by way of expanding upon the distinction between the low-, the middle-, and the highbrow, and arguing for its unacknowledged importance to academic readers of postcolonial texts. The chapter concludes with some general considerations regarding what, if anything, cultural studies, with its concerted focus on the ‘popular’, can contribute to our understanding of postcolonial studies and indeed, to that field's self-understanding.Less

From Mikhail Bakhtin to Maryse Condé The Problems of Literary Polyphony

Kathryn Lachman

in Borrowed Forms: The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction

Critics have classified African and Caribbean novels as “polyphonic” with little consideration of what precisely this entails. This chapter puts forth a more precise definition of polyphony by ... More

Critics have classified African and Caribbean novels as “polyphonic” with little consideration of what precisely this entails. This chapter puts forth a more precise definition of polyphony by reading Maryse Condé's canonical novel, Traversée de la mangrove [Crossing the Mangrove], against leading theorists of literary polyphony, Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera. Because it takes the form of a ritual wake and features multiple narrators, critics have widely hailed Condé's novel as an exemplary instance of polyphonic writing. On closer examination, however, the novel challenges a common misperception about literary polyphony, namely the idea that a written text can approximate oral culture and give voice to disenfranchised subjects. This reading attends to the distinct levels of narration at work in Condé's novel to show how the text creates a false impression of intimacy and community, while maintaining an aesthetic of opacity. The chapter assesses the aesthetic strategies and ethical priorities of Condé's writing against those of other major Caribbean writers: Césaire, Glissant, and Chamoiseau. It argues that the uncritical use of the term “polyphony” in relation to Condé's fiction (and that of other authors from the Global South) has obscured our understanding of ethics and representation, and muted the social critique present in many of these texts.Less

‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle’: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé

Nick Nesbit

in Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Surveys the critical writings of Maryse Condé, from her early analyses of Césaire's cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to later essays on Créolité, Antillean women writers, and Antillean oral ... More

Surveys the critical writings of Maryse Condé, from her early analyses of Césaire's cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to later essays on Créolité, Antillean women writers, and Antillean oral literature. Focuses on her critique of Antillean alienation and women's writing.Less

Maryse Condé: Post-Postcolonial?

Typhaine Leservot

in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World

Born in 1937 in Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé was sent by her parents to pursue her studies in France at the age of sixteen. She earned her BA in English and Classical Literatures from the Sorbonne in ... More

Born in 1937 in Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé was sent by her parents to pursue her studies in France at the age of sixteen. She earned her BA in English and Classical Literatures from the Sorbonne in Paris, married African actor Mamadou Condé in 1959, and moved to Africa a year later. Condé came back to France in 1973, completed her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1975, and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. Her oeuvre spans almost forty years and includes novels, short stories, critical essays, and plays. In 1993, Condé became the first Francophone Caribbean writer to receive the Puterbaugh Prize. Her work can be characterised as a sustained and insightful exploration of Caribbean identity and, in particular, négritude, antillanité, and créolité. The quest to define Caribbean identity is a common feature of twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Condé's fiction and essays now occupy a central place in Francophone postcolonial studies and contribute to postcolonial theory and postcolonial thought by consistently criticising its dogmatic approach to race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and history.Less

Gouverneurs de la … Mangrove: Architextual Authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove

Jason Herbeck

in Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de ... More

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (1989). Consideration of the somewhat heated discussion of Caribbean authenticity prompted by Patrick Chamoiseau’s public reading of Condé’s novel, in evidencing the authors’ stark differences of opinion on the matter, also serves to further inform the fundamentally identitarian dilemmas surrounding the construction of French-Caribbean expression. Subsequent close textual analysis of Traversée de la Mangrove on two distinct architextual and architectural levels illustrates how issues of authenticity are divulged and addressed in the text. Additional consideration of the novel’s architextual properties—in particular with respect to Haitian Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944)—leads, in conclusion, to an examination of the architectural significance of the house that Condé’s main character inhabits and in which he undertakes the (metatextual) project of writing a novel entitled Traversée de la Mangrove.Less

Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove

Celia Britton

in Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

Condé's ironic realism, her deflation of stereotypes, operates not only in the themes of her novels but also on the stylistic level of paragraphs and sentences. By breaking the rules of conventional ... More

Condé's ironic realism, her deflation of stereotypes, operates not only in the themes of her novels but also on the stylistic level of paragraphs and sentences. By breaking the rules of conventional literary style, her ‘skidding’ and ‘looping’ sentences undermine the stereotypical hierarchies of importance that structure our understanding of social reality. This chapter analyses her style in terms of Barthes’ structuralist theory of literary meaning as an integrated, coherent hierarchy of levels, and his later concept of the codes that structure the realist text and thus reinforce the ideology that underpins it. For Barthes, only anti-realist literature can overturn the codes and subvert the ideology; but Condé's writing achieves the same result in a novel that remains entirely realist and thus impacts on our experience of the real world.Less

Paradoxical Encounters: The Essay as a Space of Globalization in Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales’ and Maryse Condé’s ‘O Brave New World’

Eva Sansavior

in Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

This chapter examines the cultural history of globalization by focusing on the genre of the essay as a site of paradoxical trans-historical and transcultural encounters. Reading against the grain of ... More

This chapter examines the cultural history of globalization by focusing on the genre of the essay as a site of paradoxical trans-historical and transcultural encounters. Reading against the grain of traditional disciplinary divisions, it considers the emergence of globalization from the sixteenth century to the present day in the rhetorical strategies of two essays: Michel de Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales’ and Maryse Condé’s ‘O Brave New World’. It analyses the staging of the various literal and metaphorical encounters in both essays and compares the uses made of ideas of ‘cultural tradition’ and ‘Utopia’. It explains how the essay can be employed as a privileged site for rethinking the cultural and structural relations that have historically defined the phenomenon of globalization.Less

The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant and Condé

Celia Britton

in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

This chapter examines William Faulkner's theme of ancestral crime and his influence on two Caribbean novels: Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siécle (1964) and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove ... More

This chapter examines William Faulkner's theme of ancestral crime and his influence on two Caribbean novels: Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siécle (1964) and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove (1989). Glissant sees Faulkner's novels as showing the impossibility of founding a pure lineage. In Le Quatrième Siécle, Glissant reworks Faulkner's interest with ancestral crime or the ‘original sin’ that has to do with the foundation of a lineage. Condé's allusions to Faulknerian themes differ from Glissant's in the sense that she is not at all interested in the idea of founding a lineage: the hidden crimes in her case are not original but are ancestral.Less

Cannibal Love: Ideologies of Power, Gender, and the Erotics of Eating

Njeri Githire

in Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of cannibalism and sexual appetites in Maryse Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (hereinafter referred to as Story, reflecting the 2007 English ... More

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of cannibalism and sexual appetites in Maryse Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (hereinafter referred to as Story, reflecting the 2007 English translation) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004). It argues that while the ideologically fraught figure of the cannibal has long offered a fertile ground on which to construct a counter-hegemonic aesthetic of Caribbean discourses, few if any writers explore the equation between two major constructs—the sexual and alimentary transgressions—that define the cannibal. Story and Small Island evidence that (post)imperial panics have consistently framed a range of (post)colonial conflicts in the vocabulary of alimentary and sexual deviance as a ploy to mask these very same appetites in the (neo)imperial venture. In Small Island, cannibalism is a hidden theme that lurks beneath the surface of seemingly mundane and insignificant moments of encounter. In Story, Condé deconstructs the presumed benevolence of France toward Guadeloupe through an astute critique of the dominant imagery of France as mother who nurtures and sustains her children.Less

Introduction

Njeri Githire

in Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the preeminence of alimentary-related tropes—particularly cannibalism—and their political significance in ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the preeminence of alimentary-related tropes—particularly cannibalism—and their political significance in the works of select Caribbean and Indian Ocean women writers. These women include Monique Agénor of the Reunion Island; Lindsey Collen, a Mauritian writer of South African background; Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe; Edwidge Danticat, an American writer whose Haitian roots inspire most of her works; Andrea Levy, an English writer of Jamaican descent; Marie-Thérèse Humbert of Mauritius; and Gisèle Pineau, a French writer of Guadeloupean parentage. These writers were chosen based on the significance they have given to metaphors of (non)eating and incorporation to express social, cultural, economic, and political processes through which relations of power are drawn and perpetuated.Less