Maryse Condé was writing stories before she was 12. Yet she did not make her debut until she was 37. But then she had lived through the first years of independence in West Africa, had four children and earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Born into a black bourgeois family in Guadeloupe, and having studied in France, she was ideally placed to profile colonialism and decolonization in all their contradictions, which she did with verve.
Condé, the youngest child of eight, was born eleven years younger than her youngest brother. “I wrote very well, had a sense of humor, but because I was so spoiled, I was not a nice child.” Father Auguste Boucolon had founded a bank that would eventually become part of the Banque Française Commerciale and was awarded a Légion d’honneur, which his daughter would also receive in 2014; mother Jeanne Quidal, daughter of a single mother, was the first black headmistress of her own school.
Racist family
“Our family looked down on people who did not succeed in life,” Condé said. “We also learned that outside of our community we were viewed as Negroes and that we had to participate in the upliftment of our race.” When she married Guinean actor Mamadou Condé in France in 1959, her family was shocked. “In a sense they were racist: they were proudly black, but they looked down on Africans.”
The child of French civil servants, Condé had moved to France at the age of sixteen to obtain her baccalauréat. She experienced racism at the lycée and noticed that students from the Caribbean knew more about France than about their own region and culture. But they were not entirely focused on France either. In Condé’s mother’s office, photos from Ebony magazine hung on the wall; not white French people, but black American middle-class people were the role models. The American civil rights movement was followed with interest. As a teenager, Condé enjoyed reading Mauriac, “but I was influenced more by black and white American writers like Faulkner – that dry way of exploring the human spirit.” She studied English literature until her marriage.
In 1986 in Guadeloupe. — © Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Condé soon realized that her husband was not the militant character he had played in the premiere of Jean Genet’s Les nègres. The relationship quickly deteriorated and she went to teach in Ivory Coast. In France she was not as closely involved as her Marxist circle of friends in the debate about African autonomy. But when she returned to Guinea during summer vacations, she became aware of the lawlessness and violence in the country and became politically active. During the 1961 teachers’ strike, friends of Condé ended up in prison or deported to the Soviet Union if they did not have a Guinean passport. In 1964 she left for politically more stable Ghana, but when Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah fled to Guinea in 1966, Condé was arrested herself with her Guinean passport.
Not accepted
In the following years she worked as a cultural journalist for BBC Africa and for the national planning agency in Senegal, where she met the American Richard Philcox. He would become her second husband and her permanent translator. In 1970 they moved to Paris, where Condé worked for the magazine Présence africaine and went back to study.
In 1976 she published her debut novel Heremakhonon, a first version of which she had written in Ghana. The book was close to her heart, because it was critically maligned and barely sold. “That hardened me for later.” The main character, a Caribbean academic in West Africa, is clearly Condé himself; the character of the haughty ‘marabout mandingue’ her father. She often used autobiographical elements in her work, such as in The False Life (La vie scélérate) (1987). “My parents achieved some success, but were not accepted in a world where only the color of their skin mattered. We kids looked down on their middle class values. That is the false life: every time you achieve something, you realize how much more you will never achieve.”
At her home in Gordes, southern France, in October 2021. — © AFP
Furthermore, Condé often started from facts from history or current events, such as in Tituba, the black witch of Salem (Moi Tituba, sorcière) (1986): a slave with that name actually appears in the reports of the Salem witch trials. 1692. In the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, she was struck by the fact that the young policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe and the IS fighter Amedy Coulibaly are both children of the diaspora; In The Unlikely and Sad Fate of Ivan and Ivana (Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et d’Ivana) from 2017, she makes them twins who make very different choices.
No supporters
Condé early on had a larger fan base in American universities than in France or Africa, and would also develop an academic network there more quickly. From 1985 she taught at Columbia University and UCLA, among others. In the meantime, she had found commercial success with Ségou, a two-part historical novel about the fall of the kingdom of Bambara in contemporary Mali, published in Dutch as Ségou: de earthen walls (1984) and Ségou: de crumbled earth (1985). When Heremakonon was reissued in 1989, it was much better received than in 1976. It had also been proven in the meantime that the Sekou Touré regime had had opponents liquidated, as she describes in the book.
Condé was always as critical of friends as of enemies, so she usually had to do without supporters. When she returned to Guadeloupe in 1986, she noted that education had become less Eurocentric than when she was a child, but that schoolchildren were still taught that slaves were happier on the plantations than in “violent” Africa. The fact that she wrote in French and not in Creole did not please the administrators at the time, who advocated a ‘creolization’ of education and administration. Nevertheless, she became actively involved in the founding of a new theater in Petit Bourg, for which she also wrote plays again after years.
She was equally critical of the Négritude movement of black French intellectuals, which gained popularity from the 1930s onwards. ‘He convinced many Caribbean people and black Africans that Africa was a home for all blacks. That’s not it. And the ideas that drove progress came from the diaspora, from people like WEB DuBois and Marcus Garvey, not from Africa.”
After her retirement, she moved back to Paris in 2007. In 2013 she and Philcox moved to Gordes in the Vaucluse. When the Nobel Prize for Literature was not awarded in 2018 due to a MeToo scandal at the Swedish Academy, which provides the jury, Condé was awarded the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’ from the Swedish Association of Librarians.
Due to Condé’s idiosyncratic and unique voice, there was a great call for this distinction to be converted into an official prize, but the Swedish Academy did not respond. Condé had Parkinson’s and dictated her last books, including Mets et merveilles – about why cooking is like writing.
2024-04-02 08:55:41
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