“A false sister. A false foreigner”: space, sexuality, and identity in Condé’s Heremakhonon

Abstract

Migratory journeys beget questions of the self. How does time spent in transit, intermeshed in varying cultures, affect one’s identity? Moreover, how does it contribute to a character’s understanding of home, that deceptively simple term pointing to so much more than just one’s residence? Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon explores the effect spatial positioning has on identity through protagonist Veronica Mercier. The text, originally written in French, explores Veronica’s triangular migration as a cultural, linguistic, and sexual journey in addition to merely geographical. Counterintuitive to expectations of migration, Veronica’s journey is a privileged return, despite the presence of political chaos that often prompts forcible displacement. This paper will unpack the notion of home to explore the manner in which Veronica discovers that home and the associated power of ancestral roots are within, despite presumptions about home as place.

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Catherine Ward completed her undergraduate studies at Duke University, and this piece comes from a chapter within her English senior distinction project, which, taken with the other chapters, is titled “Repositioning Home: Performing and Reconstructing Identity in the Migration Narrative.” Following her time at Duke University, Catherine matriculated to the University of Cambridge for an MPhil in Education (Globalisation and International Development) before beginning law school.

Notes

1 In the novel, Heremakhonon is the home of Ibrahima Sory, a corrupt African political figure in an unnamed West African country.

2 For a deep analysis of irony in Heremakhonon, consider Laurie Corbin’s, “Irony and Exile in Hérémakhonon and Mission terminée.”

3 The quest motif is found commonly in Condé’s oeuvre. For more on this topic, consider Wangari Wa Nyatetu-Waigwa’s, “From Liminality to a Home of Her Own? The Quest Motif in Maryse Condé’s Fiction.”

4 Born in Martinique, Glissant was shaped by his experience as a colonized subject whose African ancestors were taken to the Caribbean and lived lives largely undocumented. His early writings build upon Martinician lack of recorded history and marginalization in the Francophone world.

5 Veronica would have followed the influx of young men and women from the French departments (depártements) of Guadeloupe and Martinique traversing to France in the 1950s and 1960s (Chamberlain 245).

6 Between the sixteenth and nineteenth century, European triangular trade brought enslaved West Africans to the Caribbean to work predominantly on sugar plantations and in domestic settings (Angeles, UNESCO).

7 This connection is noted through her sexual engagement with Sory.

8 Donadey points out that Sory supported colonizers in the past, and his ancestors likely could have sold Africans as slaves, positioning him as dominant over Veronica, whose ancestors were those sold (85).

9 Explorer Henry M. Stanley famously used this term in his 1878 book, Through the Dark Continent. 

10 Referencing Haitian revolutionary hero, only monarch of the Kingdom of Haiti, and lead character in Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe

11 Rogers Asempasah and Moussa Traore discuss the manner in which Veronica’s identity crisis reflects the mistrust between Francophone Caribbeans and Francophone Africans, as Francophone Caribbeans commonly aligned with French colonial policy (44).

12 For controversy regarding the Capécia figure, consider A. James Arnold’s articles, “Mayotte Capécia: De la parabole biblique à Je suis Martiniquaise,” and “Frantz Fanon, Lafcadio Hearn et la supercherie de ‘Mayotte Capécia’.”

13 It is important to recognize the privilege men typically hold over women in Condé’s novels, though being careful not to overlook or marginalize the oppression that men of minority background face in their quotidian lived experiences. In particular, one remembers the following recognition in Condé’s 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem: “Life is too kind to men, whatever their color.” 

14 This is the trope Patricia Hill Collins famously refers to as “Jezebel” (Collins 56).

15 Mae Gwendolyn Henderson argues that to be a black woman is already to “occupy three different collective identities (as Black, as a woman, and as a Black woman)” (“Transnational Black Feminisms” 338).