Maryse Condé


Maryse Condé is a French novelist, critic, and playwright. Condé is best known for her novel Ségou.
Her novels explore the African diaspora that resulted from slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Her novels written in French, have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. She has won various awards, such as the Grand prix littéraire de la Femme, Prix de L’Académie francaise,Prix Carbet de la Carraibe and the New Academy Prize in Literature for her works.

Early life

Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. In an interview entitled "I Have Made Peace With My Island" Maryse Condé recounts aspects of her early life. Condé describes her parents as among the first black instructors in Guadeloupe. Condé's mother, Jeanne Quidal directed her own school for girls. Condé's father, Auguste Boucolon previously an educator, founded the small bank "Le Caisse Coopérative des prêts" which was later renamed as "La Banque Antillaise."
Condé's father, Auguste Boucolon had two sons from his first marriage, Serge and Albert. Condé's three sisters are named Ena, Jeanne and Gillette. Her four brothers are named Auguste, Jean, René, and Guy. Condé's birth 11 years after Guy, made her the youngest of the eight children. Condé was born while her mother was 43, and her father was 63. Condé's describes herself as "the spoiled child", which she attributes to her parents older age, and the age-gap between her and her siblings.
Condé began writing at an early age. Before the age of 12 she had written a one-act, one-person play. The play was written as a gift for her mother Jeanne Quidal's birthday.
After having graduated from high school, she attended Lycée Fénelon from 1953 to 1955. Condé was expelled after two years of attendance. Condé instead furthered her studies at the Université de Paris III in Paris. During her attendance, she along with other West Indians, established the Luis-Carlos Prestes club.

Life

In 1959, Condé attended a rehearsal of Les Négres/ The Blacks by Jean Genêt, where she would meet the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé. In August 1959 she married Mamadou Condé. They eventually had four children together. By November 1959 the couple's relationship became strained, and Condé moved to the Ivory Coast, where she would teach for a year.
During Condé's returns for the holidays she became politically conscious through a group of Marxist friends. Condé's marxist friends would influence her to move to Ghana.
Between the years 1960 and 1972 she taught in Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal.
In 1973 she returned to Paris, and taught Francophone literature at Paris VII, X, and. In 1975, she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris in comparative literature, examining black stereotypes in Caribbean literature.
In 1981, she and Condé divorced, having long been separated. The following year she married Richard Philcox, the English-language translator of most of her novels.
She did not publish her first novel, Hérémakhonon until she was nearly 40 because " didn't have confidence in and did not dare present writing to the outside world." However, Condé would not reach her current prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer until the publication of her third novel, Ségou.
Following the success of Ségou, in 1985 Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the US. She became a professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbia University in New York City in 1995.
Condé has taught at various universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. She retired from teaching in 2005.

Literary significance

Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in ; the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Ségou ; and the 20th-century building of the Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in The Tree of Life. Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean.
Her first novel Hérémakhonon, was published in 1976. It was so controversial that it was pulled from the shelves after six months because of its criticism over the success of African socialism. While the story closely parallels Condé's own life during her first stay in Guinea, and is written as a first-person narrative, she stresses that it is not an autobiography. The book is the story, as she described it, of an "'anti-moi', an ambiguous persona whose search for identity and origins is characterized by a rebellious form of sexual libertinage".
She has kept considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist and political concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: "I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important."
Condé's later writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as 2001's Tales From the Heart: True Stories From My Childhood and 2006's Victoire, a fictional biography of her maternal grandmother in which she explores themes of motherhood, femininity, race relations, and the family dynamic in the postcolonial Caribbean. 2004's Who Slashed Celanire's Throat shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
However, her 2008 novel Windward Heights, is a reworking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which she had first read at the age of 14. Condé had long wanted to create a work around it, as an act of "homage." Her novel is set in Guadeloupe, and race and culture are featured as issues that divide people. Reflecting on how she drew from her Caribbean background in writing this book, she said:
"To be part of so many worlds—part of the African world because of the African slaves, part of the European world because of the European education—is a kind of double entendre. You can use that in your own way and give sentences another meaning. I was so pleased when I was doing that work, because it was a game, a kind of perverse but joyful game."

Among her plays are:
Maryse Condé's literary archive are held at .

Honours

For her works Conde's has been awarded :
In 2001, she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. In 2018, Condé became the first recipient of the New Academy Prize in Literature.

Selected bibliography