SOURCE: "The Cosmopolitan Condé, or Unscrambling the Worlds," in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 4, Autumn, 1993, pp. 763-68.

[In the following essay, Wylie discusses the "universality" and "cosmopolitanism" of Condé's recurrent themes, including gender, nationality, and generational differences.]

Maryse Condé is a transcendental person and restless, but unlike many wanderers, she does not dissipate herself butterflying about. Instead, she is able to marshal her forces to draw upon the many places and episodes of her own Odyssey to forge a new unity by showing symbolist correspondances between the parts of the scrambled postmodern landscape. We know from published biographical information that she has lived in Guadeloupe, France, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, Jamaica, and Manhattan. Extrapolation from her works indicates that she has probably also spent some time in Mali, Barbados, Panama, South Carolina, Haiti, and Dahomey. She sees no contradiction between being Antillean and a wanderer. She has stated [in her "Notes d'un retour au pays natal"]: "Etre Antillais, finalement, je ne sais toujours pas très bien ce que ca veut dire!… Est-ce qu'un écrivain ne pourrait pas être constamment errant, constamment à la recherche d'autres hommes?" She shares many of the attributes of the traditional literary figures of the knight errant, the troubadour, and perhaps the Wandering Jew.

Early readers realized that the relation between the Antilles and Africa was an important concern, as Hérémakhonon (1976; Eng. Heremakhonon) and Une saison à Rihata (1981; Eng. A Season in Rihata) showed the problems her protagonists from the West Indies had in adapting to life in Africa. Ségou (1984; Eng. Segu and Children of Segu) sent her African characters to Jamaica and Brazil in the New World, but when she tackled the United States in Moi, Tituba, sorcière … Noire de Salem (1986; Eng. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), a new dimension was added. Two of her most recent works have gone beyond Tituba in exploring the connections between the Caribbean and the U.S., by analyzing this relation throughout a prolonged period of time and by adding more places into the equation.

Is it fair to say that most of the universal classics of literature explore one place in depth, and that the concentration derived from unity of place is a major technique to increase literary density? (Of course there is The Odyssey, but even that explores the mythic Mediterranean of the Greeks.) The psychology of assimilation and culture shock seems to be a modern theme, one that has perhaps been most thoroughly explored by Francophone writers, especially in the Negritude tradition by such writers as Fanon, Césaire, Senghor, Camara Laye, Mongo Béti, and Sembène.

We may have arrived, however, at a new phase of transcultural and intercultural exploration with the works of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, which seem to transcend the colonizer/colonized dichotomy to take a global approach to the problem. Jonathan Ngate has compared Condé to Naipaul in his article "Maryse Condé and Africa: The Making of a Recalcitrant Daughter." After noting Condé's "toughmindedness" and "her clear sense of history," he attacks her hostility toward Negritude and her preference for Naipaul, citing her statement that "Naipaul … est un esprit très contestataire, très négatif, très nihiliste." He focuses on the importance of negativity, ambiguity, and irony for both writers. Both may be seen as relishing the role of devil's advocate and a refusal to acquiesce in accepting the slogans and simple theories that characterize the early politicizations of intercultural conflict. Naipaul, Rushdie, and Condé insist upon taking their analysis a step or two deeper, to go beyond simple dualities like black/white, male/female, or First World/Third World to examine the swarming multiplicity of realities, situations, positions in the vast panoply of the social world, where many nations, many cultures, many religions, many personality types clash and try to harmonize. Their works tend to stretch out and grow longer in the effort to synthesize all the nuances of the truth in all its over-whelming variegation. For them it is impossible to separate the political from the literary. For instance, in La vie scélérate (1987; Eng. Tree of Life) Condé furnishes many examples of the harm caused by a too-rapid understanding of a problem, the central one being the death of the second Albert Louis, "killed" by his own father for fathering a half-breed child. We might state that these writers see their political contribution as purely a literary analysis, except that even this is too simplistic, it seems, now that apparently Maryse Condé has consented to run for office on an "independence" ticket.

Condé's transcendental cosmopolitanism may have its roots in a certain ambiguity of class, in that, like Rimbaud and Zola, she experienced a major shift in the family fortune when she was quite young (although in the opposite direction). Like Arthur and Emile, she might be said to have experienced both working-class and bourgeois cultures and be unable to see reality through one or the other. Her interview in Callaloo with Vèvè A. Clark brought to light much fascinating information, including the fact that her father's change of profession from teacher to banker made the family rich. Condé also talked about her own family politics and her special situation as an "enfant gâté." This seems of interest given the attention she lavishes on family politics in her novels. She also admits in the interview to "un penchant pour la controverse" and to being "douée pour la caricature." Of course this early understanding of the great complexity of human reality was enriched by her study in France and her marriage in Africa, where her daughters were born.

It seems Condé might accept the view that everything is political in her awareness of the political aspect of family life, culture, economics, religion, and the relations between the sexes. Her works insist on the complexities of the interrelations among all these domains. One reason she may have waited so long to write about her own island while examining Africa is that she may have felt unable to cope with all the ramifications known from in-depth experience and may have preferred to describe the more distanced material of Africa, which she could handle with more objectivity, though the tantalizingly bizarre character of Véronica (in Hérémakhonon)—which she labeled as a sort of "anti-moi"—impinges on Caribbean culture.

The first two international surprises in Condé's works were the difficulties experienced in Africa by her Caribbean heroines in Hérémakhonon and Une saison à Rihata and the opening out of the African world of Ségou to the Anglophone world of the Gold Coast and Jamaica. Many had insisted on the unity of Africa before, but not many writers had involved their characters in both Francophone and Anglophone worlds. When the focus shifted back home to the Caribbean, readers were surprised by the emphasis on the U.S. Perhaps we should have been less surprised, since clearly the Caribbean has been an "American lake" in the twentieth century, and neocolonial lines of force leading to the U.S. have supplanted the old colonial ties to a large extent.

Condé is a writer who reminds one of Voltaire, in several ways. 1) She prefers to study cultures, generations, and worlds rather than limit her focus to one individual. Her big works are all genealogical studies of generations and family histories, showing how an individual reflects an evolutionary pattern deriving from family and culture in history. 2) She keeps her distance from her inventions, her characters, and is not averse to subjugating them to shocking and sadistic treatment, to using them like marionettes so that by pulling strings she can dramatize certain abstract points. Some have characterized her works as soap operas. 3) She may be seen as something of a social philosopher, concerned with certain abstract social patterns that can only be understood across a large expanse of time and space. 4) She seems to like to conduct rather outrageous social experiments. Where Voltaire can see what might happen if a Saturnian came to Earth, Condé can try out what would happen if an African king visited his kinsmen in the New World (Les derniers rois mages [The Last Magi; 1992]).

All of Condé's works seem to manifest the openmindedness of the empirical scientist conducting an experiment, but the earlier works displayed more reliance on preconceived ideas and theories. There is not much theory describing the social results of late-twentieth-century immigration to the United States and/or the impact on French and Creole speakers arriving here. Francophone writers have not by and large, related to the States; Léon Damas is the note-worthy exception. So it is a rather original experiment for Condé to bring herself here to explore the intercultural territory, and even more original to send her characters on their way to America. Condé seems to be defining herself increasingly through the active dialogue in American literary journals like Callaloo and through her interactions with her "network of loyal friends in the U.S.," mostly literary scholars. What might be some of the factors in this choice?

One surely is the desire to strike out into new literary territory and to avoid repeating what others have done. Francophone African literature is full of interesting stories of Africans' and West Indians' adventures in France. Another seems to be a desire to break out of established limits of the Francophone world, to become a "universal" or world writer. Another might be to look for those dramatic encounters of a little-expected kind based on bringing vastly different beings together. New surprises, new colors, new permutations are produced. One last explanation might be the necessity to bring back into play historical facts lost for many years in the archives Condé loves to frequent. La vie scélérate and Les derniers rois mages both seem sustained meditations on just how relevant is history. Are we determined or obsessed by history? One example is the Panama Canal. The building of the canal can be seen as a dead fact. It also seems to have provided a certain inspiration for the writing of La vie scélérate. The political relevance of the information Condé puts before us (the use of Third World workers to build the canal and their dying like flies in the effort) to the America of today and its involvement in Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, et cetera—this relevance seems obvious. The racism of America in the 1920s and the lynchings deserve reconsideration in the 1990s, thinks our author. (It is the gratuitous "lynching" of his friend Jacob in the San Francisco bar that sends patriarch Albert back to Guadeloupe to found his dynasty.) Marshall McLuhan said that electronic communications had woven the world together into a tribal village, and Condé wants to get to the central switchboard.

Perhaps it is too early to come up with generalizations about the postmodern, postindustrial, postcolonial relations between the Third World and the United States, but certain items may be noted in Condé's literary experiments. We must be patient, however, because, like André Gide, Condé is more concerned with asking the right question than providing an answer, especially when one considers the rapid proliferation of social and literary theory in the late days of the twentieth century, when we are so aware of the multiplicity of variables to take into account: race, class, and sex, of course, but also identity, language, culture, religion, family, roles and professions, and even sexual persuasions. [In a review of Moi, Tituba, Sorciere … Noire de Salem], Charlotte Bruner has noted that all of "Condé's major fiction is rooted in a study of power," and Condé herself has stated in an interview that the Carribbean islands are always affected by American policy and that "c'est à cause de l'Amérique que plusieurs îles ont des problèmes." In the interview she calls upon Americans to familiarize themselves with the culturally rich island peoples to their south. Writers are more aware than those who gain their information about the world from TV news and journalism that power is not merely military and economic but has its foundation in ideas and beliefs, in symbols and myths. Condé is aware of the power of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and America's dominance in the area of international photojournalism. Two minor works give us clues to her own attitudes, which tend to be hidden behind those of her characters in the major novels.

One strange link between her island and the U.S. was Hurricane Hugo of 1989, which left such an impact on Condé that she made a children's book, Hugo le terrible, from it. The storm may also have led her to choose South Carolina as the setting for Les derniers rois mages. Characters in Hugo debate the nature and desirability of going to the States. America's "marvelous" democracy, skyscrapers, and technology are opposed to its oppressed minorities and homelessness in the debate of "les opinions les plus contradictoires sur ce pays." The most telling detail, however, is an aspect of the plot dealing with how information from the Third World is gathered and disseminated to the world. At the outset of the story photographers arrive to cover the hurricane, admitting that they play the role of "voyeurs." The most interesting subplot involves an adolescent boy who takes advantage of the chaos and steals a camera in order to take pictures to send to France. He ends up selling them, however, for a thousand francs to an American photographer who has flown in from New York. In germinal form many of the U.S./Third World connections are demonstrated here: the redirection of Third World energies and attitudes by American economic and journalistic power; the selective nature of the American regard directed toward the Third World, which looks only for sensation and disaster there; the imposition of this American vision on the people of the Third World themselves; and the perverse nature of the whole process. (The native photographer has access to realities the international outsider does not and does not hesitate to intrude into the misery of his neighbors.)

Condé's view of the nature of this informational struggle is further revealed in another minor and surprising work, a seemingly official tourist-promotion book, Guadeloupe, with beautiful photographs by Jean de Boisberranger, wherein Condé seems to have decided to collaborate in a suspect genre in order to redirect its message and slant. Instead of fighting tourism, her attitude seems to be to use the genre to educate and inform the tourist of the social realities as seen by the permanent resident, while also furnishing the tour information needed. She elevates journalism to the status of literature. Or it might be better to say she sees journalism as an important form of popular literature, with an important power that must be redirected.

Condé begins her text by listing a number of "idées reçues à balayer" and leads the reader through a social and cultural description of the island, eventually plunging right into the critical politics of the struggle for independence, a very controversial and divisive matter for both Martinique and Guadeloupe. She concedes that only 3 percent have voted for independence candidates, but sees the option as much more important than that figure would indicate. She speaks directly to the tourist-reader in a friendly tone of equality, with the implication that the cooperative collaboration of rich and poor from the First and Third Worlds be in everyone's mutual interest. Her last words describe the sadness of "Les Saintes" islanders (part of Guadeloupe) because of the "hemorrhaging" of their population as young people leave for the imperial centers.

Micheline Rice-Maximin and I invited Maryse Condé to speak in San Antonio and Austin in April of 1986. The French Department lounge at University of Texas in Austin was packed when she addressed us on the women writers of her island. She told us she was resigning her professional position at the University of Paris and was going to live in Guadeloupe and write for Guadeloupe. Some of us were therefore surprised thereafter when we learned she was teaching at Berkeley, but she has indeed made an effort to write specifically for Guadeloupe. Françoise Lionnet interprets Traversée de la mangrove (Crossing the Mangrove; 1989) as the major effort to express literarily this "return to her native land," which was also a return to writing about the present. Another example is more specific: An tan revolisyon, a play financed and published by the Conseil Régional (of Guadeloupe). Contrasting this work with the cosmopolitan novels is revealing.

Although the title is in Creole, the text is in French, but with a note that Creole may be used "partout où voudra, sauf pour le conteur." The title seems to mean "Longtemps révolution" (Longtime Revolution). Although it would be difficult to evaluate the success of this play showing the French Revolution from the Guadeloupean standpoint, it seems likely that it was received favorably in Guadeloupe. The book form seems less successful. The typesetting and printing are disappointing, and distribution was undoubtedly quite limited. Condé must have enjoyed working with the local people to produce the play, but any clearheaded person, especially one interested in power, could derive obvious conclusions about the objective, material facts of the natures of these two kinds of literature (i. e., writing for a local audience versus publishing with international publishing houses texts designed for transnational consumption). Condé seems to be very lucid about her own talents and work and must consider addressing the issue of the loss of Third World youth (the ones on whom the play is least likely to have made an impact) in the international arena more important than the development of a purely local literature. In directly addressing the problem of immigration (and other international connections) in her cosmopolitan writings, she undoubtedly feels she can have a greater political impact in both the local and international arenas.

Just as we are drowned in information amid the din of radio and TV and the deluge of paper, we are overwhelmed by historical detail. The question is to find that which is relevant and meaningful and to apply it correctly to our lives. I believe literature is the tool we use to carry out this operation. Marshall McLuhan says one of the roles of the writer is to warn us of the perils of the future by interpreting the past. Les derniers rois mages surprises by adding a new element, antithetical to the earlier conception of history in Condé's works. The protagonist comes to view himself as having been victimized by history and its cultivation, and he rebels. We might say that the novel takes up historiography as a theme. It seems that Condé is refining her understanding of the importance and nature of history.

We are all obviously victims of history, predestined to inherit a biological form, predispositions, a family, an ethnic, religious, and national culture, a language, and an economic situation. There is little we can do to modify them when we are children, during our formative years. To rebel against this history is foolish. But Spéro, the protagonist of Les derniers rois mages, becomes critical of the tendency to focus on knowing the past to the extent of becoming fixated on it, which weakens the ability to live in the present, to see the freedom and freshness of the existential moment. There are many qualities in Spéro that make him different from his ancestors and from his wife Debbie, from those who tend to make of the past a fetish. He is an artist, whose eye seeks the essence of the object precisely in the way in which the existing object transcends its determinants, who prefers the light touch of water-color and its power to capture transitory, ephemeral qualities and who loves to paint the old buildings of Charleston and children's faces, even though the houses were those of the slaveholders and represent historically a system based on slavery and oppression. Debbie, in her insistence upon imposing a political interpretation, a priori, on his art, has ruined its spontaneity, so that the resultant oil paintings are mere illustrations of historical points.

Debbie is the antagonist and antithesis to her husband Spéro. In this bad marriage, doomed by her bad faith from the start, she represents all that is wrong about history, or a certain use of it. She married the uneducated Guadeloupean because he was the descendant of an African king. Unlike most African Americans in the United States, he could trace his genealogy. In fact, his father had made this history into a cult and ritual based upon the "Cahiers" (notebooks) written by his father in an effort to fixate the fragmentary remembrances of his father, the African king in exile in Martinique. The image of these West Indian princes of Africa is a source of derision and alienation, related to the males' dependence on women in this lineage and their inability to affirm their male existence. While repeating the pattern, Spéro comes closest to breaking out of the rut. Ironically, his daughter does, to a certain extent, by finally going back to Dahomey, now Bénin. Unfortunately, we never find out how she does there and if this return is a true break or more of the same.

Debbie is a historian, one who has seemingly lost control of her materials and is now drowning in the flotsam of oral history, endlessly tape-recording the senile reminiscences of an egoistic elder and enmeshing those around her in her oppressive web. She compulsively imposes a moralistic reading on the story of her ancestors and on the history of her race.

That is my reading of this problematic story, which I realize may be seen as one-sided. One of the virtues of Condé's storytelling technique is that she (like Rushdie) tells such good stories that they resemble those drawn directly from life: they have all the ambiguity, realism, resistance to interpretation of lived experience. Would Condé go so far as to agree with the husband in this couple? With the philandering male, the unproductive, undisciplined father who hates Mickey Mouse and wonders if he might have been tempted to sexually abuse his own daughter? The novel ends with his attempted suicide as he judges himself quite severely, but his judgment, as judge, seems the most clear and perceptive of all the characters (he is Guadeloupean, after all). His mind has the dialectical play of the author's. He knows a higher form of history, one not marked by a revisionist interpretation that falsifies the story by imposing a "logical" reading. He understands history as a nonlinear, multifarious, ambiguous, contradictory entity, often displeasing to the theorist.

The story of the African king, partly told in the "Cahiers," reads like a cruel joke (although we must remember the framing of this story within a story). This king is descended from the panther whose "enormous scarlet erection seemed like a barbarous flower" to the African maiden destined to become his wife and mother of the dynasty. We learn that the funerals of these kings involved the death of scores of wives and hundreds if not thousands of slaves. Condé's satiric re-creation of the African kingdom is mocking; the last king, Spéro's great-grandfather, is shown to have been happiest wandering in the woods after the loss of his power and property to the French. It seems clear Condé does not like African kings.

In the public lecture given just before the opening of the Puterbaugh Conference at the University of Oklahoma on 25 March 1993, Maryse Condé talked about how we are haunted by history. The use of ghosts has become more forceful as it has evolved from Ségou to Tituba, from La vie scélérate to Les derniers rois mages. In Tituba and La vie scélérate the ghosts are literal and seem used mainly for melodramatic impact as a kind of narrative shorthand. In Les derniers rois mages they are metaphorically woven into the narrative framework. The last king and his son and grandson all lose themselves in schizophrenic mythomania in which they become their ancestor(s). Spéro, while disidentifying with his predecessors, is haunted by crabs swarming over and attacking his body in a repeated nightmare associated with his self-critique and loss of nerve, which recapitulates the story of the third "Cahier" entitled "Totem and Taboo" that describes the role of the "genies" or spirits of the animals, which both protect and punish. Spéro comes to see his alienation from Debbie as derived from "all the cadavers between them."

The postmodern writer needs ghosts and sorcery and all the magic of "marvelous realism" to cope with the complexities of our late-twentieth-century reality. Condé, for whom "Africa is no longer in Africa" and "America is no longer America," for whom the essence of present-day Guadeloupe is impossible to know, uses ironic reversals (e. g., the daughter of the actual African prince in La vie scélérate, abandoned by father and mother, is brought up by a simple Breton [white] wet nurse) and feedback loops (back and forth across the Atlantic, from Africa to America in Ségou and Les derniers rois mages, from the U.S. to Guadeloupe in La vie scélérate) to short-circuit history and get right to essential meanings. The presence of a significant outsider in a foreign culture (Spéro in South Carolina, Albert Louis in San Francisco, Tituba in Salem) quickly throws certain values into relief. They may be seen as living ghosts and further explain the cosmopolitan tendency in Condé.

Condé's two recent epic novels show a synthesis that goes beyond the first-level history of Tituba and Ségou, which deal only with the relatively distant past. They both attempt to integrate the past with the present by tracing all connections right through to the present. The result, however, is another paradox: the past seems clearer, more interesting, more meaningful, and of course more literary. Perhaps it is endemic to the genre that the ancestors always emerge as the Titans; perhaps that is history, but Albert Louis looms above all the others in La vie scélérate, even over the narrator, whose life might be seen as equally interesting. Perhaps we tend to devalue our own time as banal and prosaic.

Still, Condé's ambitious insistence upon seeking the links between the generations, and between the ethnic groups, must be seen as a quest for the meaningful factors of our time. We must learn how to make the ghosts work for us rather than being haunted by them. At one point in Les derniers rois mages Spéro wonders about the significance of being black and concludes, "Pourtant, cela a-t-il encore une signification?" Both La vie scélérate and Les derniers rois mages analyze the evolution of racial identity in the complexities of time and space and effect a kind of demystification of identity. Condé seems to be groping beyond identity to look for the universal meaning, the touchstone values that may have been lost sight of or even that may remain to be defined. Africa, America, and Guadeloupe have changed; they are no longer themselves in the sense that their old myths are no longer functional in defining the geographic or social realities. Spéro and Claude "Coco" Elaïse Louis, the storyteller of La vie scélérate, are lost souls, unable to assert an identity comparable to those of their ancestors of the Titan generation, but they may be better guides for us in our days of whimper, when everything, indeed, does fall apart. Nothing is to be gained by inventing a new myth of Africa or positing a new identity for Guadeloupe apart from the global reality. We must now look at all the scrambled pieces and try to assemble a new image of totality and harmony capable of reflecting the complex interactions of a multicultural and multifarious entity.