The writer Maryse Condé died on April 2, and I note, with regret, that the Quebec media have not paid enough attention to this great writer of Guadeloupean origin whose work nevertheless shines throughout the world. .
She was honored in 2018 with the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature, and we also owe her our recognition for her political struggles, including that of having chaired the Committee for the Memory of Slavery in 2004.
Born in 1934 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she said she came from the urban bourgeoisie of this corner of the Antilles. However, she was aware very early on of the unique identity conferred on her by her birth in the Caribbean, to black parents, descendants of African slaves.
By her own admission, it was in France, where she continued her studies at the age of 19, that she grasped the full complexity of her colonial situation as a Black woman in the West Indies. She then opened up to West Indian literature, including that of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, her Martinican neighbors who nourished her independence spirit.
In the 1960s, she was at the forefront of the spectacular surge of African independence, alongside her husband, Mamadou Condé, as well as Sékou Touré in Guinea and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the latter two being actors in at the forefront of African independence, with whom she has close relations.
On her return from Africa, she wrote Segou, a flagship work, which recounts the fall of the Bambara Empire of Mali, a novel in two volumes which earned him international recognition. It was through this work that I myself entered the world of Condé, and that I was able to measure all its richness.
During my readings of Condé, I feel a sort of disenchantment with negritude. The one who had read Notebook of a return to the native country de Césaire, who had been so inspired by it, revealed to us, through her journey, that this “return” was impossible, that the Afro-descendants of the West Indies were… West Indians, that is to say, that they They were more Africans, strictly speaking. It develops the idea of a composite identity. An African identity which was built in a new environment, which has been transformed, and which is still being transformed.
I am not a specialist in Maryse Condé, but her writing allowed me to better appreciate Caribbean literature and its wonderful singularity. This great writer invites us to consider that everything is built through contact with others. Condé has never stopped claiming her singularity, even in her language which borrows as much from Creole as from French and English, another language that she has worked with for a long time while teaching comparative literature in major American universities.
When she claimed to write in the language of Maryse Condé, it was not misplaced pride, but a way of expressing and celebrating our unique way of being in the world. I believe that the authors of Creolity (or Antillanity according to Glissant’s term) have a lot to bring to us, French-speaking Quebecers, trapped in the American English-speaking vise.
It is in the relationship with others that we build ourselves, and that we can survive in our singularity. And our way of being in the world is not constructed exclusively with words. In his novel Victory, flavors and wordsshe pays homage to her grandmother whom she did not know, but whose reputation as a great cook inspired her to create a fascinating portrait, where cooked dishes have as much value as words to construct the traits of an identity cultural.
In this novel that I just removed from my library, I discovered, moved, a photo that I had placed there, of my Guadeloupean grandmother cleaning fish on a garden table garnished with herbs and spices : “Without speaking, head bowed, absorbed in front of his potajé, like a writer in front of his computer” (Maryse Condé, Victory, flavors and wordsMercure de France, 2006, back cover).