[In the following review, Bruner discusses Condé's depiction of power in Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem.]

All of Maryse Condé's major fiction is rooted in a study of power. Her protagonists—fictional, legendary, or historical—appear to emerge almost haphazardly as heroes, martyrs, saints, or sacrificial victims. In tracing their lives, Condé shows the formative influence of their fervors upon a mass of characters. Somehow some very human individuals seem singled out for eminence or persecution. In her two-volume epic Ségou, for example, she portrays three generations of a Bambara royal dynasty at the time the march of Islam pushed aside the traditional animist empire of Ségou. The many family members in the novels undergo psychological, cultural, and geographic uprooting as they experience cultural change. Power is traced mainly through the male protagonists, a natural consequence of historical accuracy.

In Condé's latest novel, Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem, she introduces an interesting variant of her power theme. The actual historical Tituba was a West Indian slave who confessed to witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1692. Records of her part in this Salem power struggle are full and well documented. However, her history before and after the trials is conjectural only. Several legends conflict as to her death or her disappearance from Salem following the trials. In a brilliant re-creation Condé shows Tituba's early life in Barbados. Conceived on a slave ship in a public rape of a black slave by a white sailor, Tituba is forever an outcast from both black and white worlds. As a little girl she escapes servitude by running away when her mother is hanged for resisting and knifing her white owner. The girl is sheltered by an old herbalist in a remote area of the island, where she learns the healing arts, communication with the dead, and the exhilaration of freedom. Her passion for a métis slave, John Indian, drives her back to plantation life in slave quarters. However, her rebellious spirit outrages the owner, who sells the couple to the Reverend Samuel Parris, a Puritan minister on his way to Boston and, later, to Salem village. Condé convincingly draws together the traits of Tituba's personality to explain her use of the healing arts for the Parris children, her "false" confession after they betray her as a witch, her visitations with the spirits of the executed witches, et cetera.

Condé goes beyond the historical record in her new novel. Her Tituba becomes a martyr to Barbadian independence. Condé's own Guadeloupe has had its female martyrs in independence struggles; Simone Schwarz-Bart, also from Guadeloupe, has commemorated an ancestral female martyr in La mulâtresse solitude. As a critic, Condé has often commented on the social, literary, and political power of West Indian women. In Ségou she presented many linkages between Africans, West Indians, and Brazilians of the black diaspora. In Tituba she again links the Americans to Africa in the history of power struggles. Tituba, witch or saint, rebel or martyr, did exert actual power over Salem village in one of the few ways women activists of her time were able to influence their culture.