‘Mon callalou’: Maryse Condé writing herself as female cook

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes two works by Maryse Condé, Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (2006) and Mets et merveilles (2015), spotlighting the figure of the female cook. It proposes a rereading of Victoire, the fictionalized biography of Condé’s grandmother, in light of the more recent autobiographical work Mets et merveilles in which Condé refers to her penchant for cooking as a crime of ‘lèse-majesté’ against her profession as a writer. Victoire stands out in Condé’s fiction for its emphasis on cooking and food. In Mets et merveilles Condé uses the theme of cooking as a tactic to encourage readers to return to Victoire in order to cement her legacy as an author, enabled by her established practice of rusing with her readers and supported by the recent growth of academic food studies as a scholarly discipline. Rereading Victoire in light of Mets et merveilles presents Maryse Condé as a writer-cook anchored in Guadeloupe, post-nomadic, proud of her cooking but still proudly intellectual, creating a space for Caribbean food writing and for her unique culinary mixtures.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article analyse deux textes de Maryse Condé, Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (2006) et Mets et merveilles (2015), mettant en valeur la figure de la femme qui cuisine. On propose une relecture de Victoire, biographie romancée de la grand-mère de Condé, à l’égard de son autobiographie plus récente Mets et merveilles où Condé appelle son intérêt à faire la cuisine un crime de ‘lèse-majesté’ contre sa profession d’écrivaine. Victoire se distingue parmi les oeuvres de fiction de Condé pour l’importance accordée à l’alimentation. Dans Mets et merveilles Condé se sert du thème de la cuisine comme stratagème pour encourager ses lecteurs à relire Victoire afin de consolider son statut d’auteur, méthode facilité par sa pratique bien connue de ruser avec ses lecteurs et soutenu par la croissance de ‘food studies’ comme discipline académique. Relire Victoire à côté de Mets et merveilles présente Maryse Condé comme écrivaine-cuisinière ancrée en Guadeloupe, post-nomade, fière de sa cuisine et toujours fière d’être savante, qui crée un espace pour l’existence des écrits gastronomiques sur la Guadeloupe et ses propres mélanges culinaires.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of this special issue for their immensely insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft and to the anonymous reviewers whose suggested revisions helped to shape the final version in important ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In a collection marginally about food in Condé, Vera Broichhagen, Lachman, and Simek (2006) examine cannibalism as a literary theme principally in Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003).

2. The label ‘nomad’ has been applied frequently to Condé and to her literary heroines, most deliberately in Cottenet-Hage and Moudileno (2002) (‘Maryse est une errante, une nomade’ (9)). See also Schwerdtner (2005) on Desirada, Mosher (2010) on Heremakhonon, and Ortega (2014) on Tituba.

3. After the chiktaye and callaloo came fricassée of turtle, ‘riz indien’, a gratin of couscouche (a type of yam), salad of hearts of palm, and chodo (similar to eggnog) with gâteau fouetté (Condé 2006, 124).

4. In a feature article celebrating the publication of her 2017 novel Le Fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana, Condé confides that ‘les plats antillais, les accras ou le colombo, je ne sais pas faire’ but her recipe for chicken with honey and shrimp ‘c’est dé-li-cieux’ (sic) (Leménager 2017, 82).

5. Cappellini (2011, p. 222) locates and cites the relevant passages: ‘l’identité est comme un vêtement qu’il faut enfiler bon gré, mal gré’ (Le Coeur à rire 1999, 102–103) and ‘Chaque matin, j’enfilai ces vêtements avec l’impression de revêtir une identité’ (En attendant la montée des eaux, 2010, 121). Nicole Simek (2016) uses hunger as a framework to interrogate Histoire de la femme cannibale, Victoire and La vie sans fards (2012).

6. The family cook Adélia was ‘noire presque bleue’ (2015, 20) while Condé’s grandmother Victoire had skin of ‘une blancheur australienne’ (2006, 15); her skin was ‘too white’ and her eyes ‘too light’ (2006, 31).

7. In the West Indies, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago where it is the national dish, callaloo designates both a plant and a dish of cooked greens. Linguistic evidence and culinary practice suggests that callaloo originated in Brazil and arrived in Angola by way of Portuguese colonizers, making it ‘essentially an African dish’ (Hamilton and Hamilton 2007, 338).

8. Duquet notes that in La Vie sans fards, driving (not cooking, as in Victoire) liberates her (‘je me libérais par la conduite’, (Condé 2012, 203)) and ‘lui fait pousser des ailes’ (Duquet 2019, 267). In Mets et merveilles the trope of cooking/writing as freedom is more successful given the common theme of cooking in Victoire and Mets et merveilles.