Crafting memory: literary (Re-)creation in Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards

ABSTRACT

Throughout her illustrious creative and scholarly career, which spanned over five decades, French-Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1934-2024) earned a reputation as an iconoclast, a rebel disdainful of conventions and averse to simplistic formulas. A habitual provocateur, Condé reveled in her role as a rule-breaker, who challenged Negritude’s masculinist discursive norms, and ushered in a paradigm shift in the prevailing vision of Africa as central to Caribbean cultural formation. This study examines the place of African diasporic literary traditions in La vie sans fards (2012). A confessional tale delivered in a taut, propulsive narrative brimming with equal amounts of tragic intensity and dramatic energy, the memoir traces Condé’s eventful life in Africa in the turbulent decade of the sixties. I am especially interested in Condé’s evocation of a vast array of African diasporic writers as inspirational in her own artistic development, and as crucial to the awakening of her diasporic vision. It is my contention that Condé’s bold, radical departure from her earlier reactions vis-à-vis the African literary landscape demands attention. Considering the author’s proclaimed goal to unravel the absolute, complete truth, this essay situates Condé’s reminiscences within the broader context of a veritable boom in life writing and its study.

RÉSUMÉ

Tout au long de son illustre carrière créative et universitaire, l’écrivaine franco-guadeloupéenne Maryse Condé (1934-2024) s’est forgé une réputation d’iconoclaste, de rebelle, dédaigneuse des conventions et opposée aux formules simplistes. Provocatrice habituel, Condé s’est réjouie de son rôle de briseuse de règles, inaugurant ainsi un changement de paradigme dans la vision prédominante de l’Afrique comme élément central de la formation culturelle caribéenne. Cette étude examine la place des traditions littéraires diasporiques africaines dans La vie sans fards (2012). Conte confessionnel livré dans un récit tendu débordant d’intensité tragique et d’une énergie dramatique, le mémoire retrace la vie tumultueuse de Condé en Afrique dans la décennie turbulente des années soixante. Je suis particulièrement intéressée par l’évocation par Condé d’un vaste éventail d’écrivains de la diaspora africaine comme sources d’inspiration et comme étant essentiels à son propre développement artistique, ainsi qu’à l’éveil de sa vision diasporique. L’écart radical entre cette vision de Condé et ses réactions antérieures à l’égard du paysage littéraire africain mérite sans aucun doute attention. Considérant l’objectif proclamé de l’auteur de communiquer la vérité absolue, cet essai situe les réminiscences de Condé dans le contexte plus large d’un véritable boom de l’écriture de la vie et de son étude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Glover writes: ‘Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé has been called many names: “inconvenient nomad,” “postcolonial renegade,” “recalcitrant daughter” and “iconoclast,” to mention just a few’ (2021, 39). See also ‘La réputation de Maryse Condé n’est plus à faire. La mythologie est établie. Diva à sa manière, autoritaire, emmerdeuse, désagréable, chialeuse, caractérielle on ne peut plus […] Son portrait, à quelques variantes près, souvent pas trop flatteur, fait le tour des cercles littéraires’ (Saint-Éloi 2012, n.p.). Nick Nesbitt likewise contends that ‘anyone who has heard her [Condé] speak or read her works of literary criticism knows she is not one to hold her tongue’ (2003, 393).

2. Condé’s three other self portraits include Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer, contes vrais de mon enfance (1999), Victoire, des saveurs et des mots (2006) and Mets et merveilles (2015).

3. For more on the list of these ‘personnages illustres’, see Olga Hel-Bongo (2014, 162).

4. See Arlette Smith’s (1988) discussion of the triangular itinerary where the Caribbean, France and Africa follow the sequence of events in the narrative account of Veronica’s trials and tribulations in Heremakhonon. A similar trajectory defines Une Saison a Rihata.

5. For more on this, see Darline Alexis (2014).

6. Condé has narrated her grandmother’s life as a cook in Victoire, des saveurs et des mots and her own culinary journeys in Mets et merveilles.

7. The symbolic charge of this sequence of events is well captured by Hel-Bongo, who writes: ‘Condé se trouve un père symbolique en Césaire à côté duquel elle se positionne comme écrivain dans le champ littéraire, avant d’élire l’Afrique de Mamadou Condé comme père symbolique pour elle et ses enfants’ (2014, 159).

8. Set amongst the Bandas of Ubangi-Chari, in the present-day Central African Republic, the novel details the cruel and oppressive French colonial rule, which quickly shatters local values and fragments underlying structures of identity. Awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Batouala nonetheless cost Maran his post in the colonial administration as the narrative, and especially the novel’s preface, was deemed a fierce and pointed criticism of the French colonial enterprise.

9. In her memoir, Condé affirms that she went to Africa in 1959 within the context of ‘la Coopération [qui] commençait à balbutier’ (2012, 35). Four years later, she tells Françoise Pfaff that she was in fact recruited ‘par le gouvernement ivoirien pour enseigner à Bingerville’ and only became a ‘coopérante’ years later, when she went to teach in Kaolack in Senegal (Pfaff 2016, 42).

10. Sent to Paris to study philosophy, Kane’s protagonist Samba Diallo, a fervent adherent of Koranic ideals, will find himself confronted with a dilemma where every solution has trade-offs.

11. Commenting on the ways Condé inserts herself in various literary genealogies, Bonnie Thomas (2017) underscores the significance of the African literary and cultural heritage in creating a space where Condé ‘eventually gains a voice’: ‘It is through the years spent in different countries from the African continent that she discovers the rich traditions of Francophone literature and feeds her passion for books’ (47).

12. In 1984, Condé acknowledged a penchant for ‘la littérature américaine, surtout les romancières noires américaines: Paule Marshall, Alice Walker’ (Shungu 1984, 67). In her 1989 interview with VèVè A. Clark, she expressed admiration for Paule Marshall and Louise Merriwether (Clark and Daheny 1989, 110). She went on to explain: ‘J’admire beaucoup Paule Marshall et en particulier, son premier roman Browngirl, Brownstones. Toni Morrison dans ses premiers romans […] Qui encore? Gloria Naylor. […] Parmi les auteurs noirs hommes, je ne connais guère les auteurs contemporains. Je me suis arrêtée à l’époque de Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin et Ishmael Reed à ses débuts’ (Clark and Daheny 1989, 118). Naturally, Condé knows in 2012 that Toomer, Larsen, Hughes—not Marshall, Merriwether and Naylor—are the highbrow literary references.

13. In La vie, Condé (2012, 68) recounts obtaining a Guinean passport (as the spouse of a Guinean national) in exchange for her French passport upon arrival in Guinea, as well as the moment her Guinean passport is confiscated in Ghana. In a 1987 article, Condé’s version of this same story is altogether glossier, alleging that on her first flight to Africa she had ripped her French passport apart while an African American, who happened to be on the same flight, had torn apart her American passport as they both let out a shout of celebration: ‘Voilà, nous en avons fini avec le pouvoir colonial! Maintenant c’est l’époque africaine’ (1987, 12).

14. One of Condé’s most widely quoted declarations on the place of Africa in the lived reality of a Caribbean person is to be found in a 1984 interview in which Condé asserts with characteristic clarity: ‘La quête d’identité d’un Antillais peut très bien se résoudre sans passer, surtout physiquement, par l’Afrique, ou si l’on veut, le passage en Afrique prouve simplement qu’elle n’est pas essentielle dans l’identité antillaise’ (Jacquey and Hugon 1984, 72). In a 2017 interview, Condé retracts that assertion, maintaining: ‘Ça ne veut rien dire! On est d’abord africain, que l’on naisse ou que l’on grandisse ailleurs’ (Dansoko Touré 2017, n.p.).

15. In her 1989 interview with Clark, Condé refers to her ‘réactions négatives en ce qui concernait bon nombre d’auteurs d’Afrique occidentale’ and goes on to back up her comments, stating that she has nothing to recant or for which to apologise (Clark and Daheny 1989, 116).

16. Shortlisted for the Booker award in 1979, the novel has elicited lively and heated critical debate in its negative and pessimistic depiction of postcolonial African independences.

17. In their Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010) affirm that the explosion of life writing as a genre has necessitated a framework for reading the numerous forms encompassed in it, as well as its implications.

18. French activist Samira Bellil’s Dans l’enfer des tournantes (2002) comes to mind here. A raw, painfully intimate memoir centred on her experiences growing up in les banlieues, the memoir received widespread critical acclaim.

19. It is an element of no small significance that the English title of La vie is a nod to Countee Cullen’s most famous poem, ‘Heritage’, which originally appeared in The Survey in March 1925. The opening—and a recurring—question throughout the poem is ‘what is Africa to me?’ For more, see Augustine H. Asaah (2021).

20. Placing his life story and experiences at the centre of his presidential bid, Obama used the craft of self-writing as a means of public self-presentation, in a gesture that has now become an established practice for bringing ‘marginalised’ voices to the centre.

21. Odile Hamot (2022) has provided crucial insights into Condé’s life writings as a site where the boundary between truth and fiction, facts and fantasy collapse.