Maryse Condé (1937–2024)

Livro premiado de uma das mais importantes escritoras negras da atualidade.

Tituba, mulher negra, nascida em Barbados, no século XVII, renasce, três séculos depois. Torna-se outra vez real, pelas mãos da premiada escritora Maryse Condé, vencedora do New Academy Prize 2018 (Prêmio Nobel Alternativo).

No início do livro, Maryse Condé anota: "Tituba e eu vivemos uma estreita intimidade durante um ano. Foi no correr de nossas intermináveis conversas que ela me disse essas coisas que ainda show more não havia confiado a ninguém." Da mesma forma, quem lê Tituba poderá ouvi-la falar, do invisível, desestabilizando estruturas cristalizadas, mediando novas concepções de identidades e culturas e protegendo as pessoas insurgentes.

Aqui, essa personagem fascinante, é retirada do silêncio a que a historiografia lhe destinou. Filha de uma mulher negra escravizada, viveu cedo o terror de ver a mãe assassinada por se defender do estupro de um homem branco e de saber que o pai se matou por causa do mesmo homem branco. Cresceu sob os cuidados de uma mulher que tinha o poder da cura e que a iniciou nos mistérios. Adulta, apaixonou-se por John Indien e abdicou, por ele, da própria liberdade.

Uma das primeiras mulheres julgadas por praticar bruxaria nos tribunais de Salem, em 1692, Tituba fora escravizada e levada para a Nova Inglaterra pelo pastor Samuel Parris, que a denunciou. Mesmo protegida pelos espíritos, não pôde escapar das mentiras e acusações da histeria puritana daquela época.

A história de Tituba é a história das mulheres da diáspora e do povo negro. É também a história de todas as pessoas que seguem a própria verdade, em vez de professar a fé do colonizador. É a história dos e das dissidentes e dos seres de alma livre. Por isso é uma história bela e complexa, cujo final, a despeito dos infortúnios, é sempre benfazejo, pois é a história dos que resistem.

"Para saber de Tituba, a bruxa negra de Salem, é preciso acompanhar quem sabe lidar com a alquimia das palavras. Maryse Condé tem as fórmulas, as poções mágicas da escrita." - Conceição Evaristo show less

Maryse Condé’s short childhood memoir describes growing up in a middle-class Black family in Guadeloupe in the 1940s, and follows her experience up to her early years as a student at the Sorbonne. She was the youngest child in a large family: her father was a former civil servant who had become a banker, her mother a teacher, and both of them considered themselves more French than the French. Young Maryse was strictly prohibited from speaking Creole, and only allowed to associate with show more children “of her own sort” — she talks about her shock at realising on trips to Paris that white people looked down on them and regarded their ability to speak good French as though it was some sort of circus skill they had learnt.

This is a charming account of childhood and the oddities of growing up in a privileged niche protected from the realities of your own culture. You don’t have to read it politically to enjoy it, but of course it is a very political book. show less

Rosélie, a Guadeloupe native, has lived all over the world -- Tokyo, Washington DC, N’Dossou (appears to be a made-up city in Western Africa), and has now settled, somewhat, in Cape Town, South Africa. She used to live there with her husband, paint, and be generally passive. Now, after her husband’s murder at an ATM, her painting days seem over. Rosélie’s housekeeper-slash-friend has encouraged her to start a career as a medium and a healer, and in mentally tugging at the show more circumstances of her husband’s death, she is forced to actually go out and do something.

That’s a setup for one kind of book. And Histoire de la femme cannibale kinda unfolds that way: the prodding at a loved one’s dead leads to a reassessment and a way to deal with depression. In addition, though, there are more sub-genres.

We also get parts of the stories of Rosélie’s clients, who come to her for her gift of healing, and her friends and lovers. These mostly are immigrants from other African nations, or Afrikaners. And this being Post-apartheid South Africa, people’s racial, ethnic, and linguistic allegiance make up a large part of people’s identity, almost as basic as what gender they are. These clients’ and friends’ stories deal, of course, with trying to fit into a society that is sometimes virulently prejudiced against them. This applies to Rosélie herself as well, who is from kinda everywhere, who has no local people, and who is Parisian-French-speaking: she doesn’t fit in any of the boxes South African identity wants to tick. She’s no longer considered properly black, either: her twenty-year marriage to a white Anglo-Irish professor has seen to that. And so this book tells another kind of story: that of immigrant narratives, and life in South Africa, and the way racial identities rub up against each other.

All this adds up to a pretty solid example of what I would call political fiction: where the characters take a step back, and the real meat of the novel is discussing the real world through an in-universe window. From that point of view, Rosélie is kind of an interesting litfic character: she is passive to a fault. Not the kind of passive where she permits the people close to her -- family, lovers -- to fill her with their passions. She just ambles along, is vaguely annoyed at being dragged to yet another event by an enthused partner, but not worked up enough to object. She’s never cared much for other people’s interests, is apathetically a-political, and refuses to spend the mental effort to engage in discussions about the things that seem to animate people so much: race, inequality, globalization, the future of the African continent, the legacy of post-apartheid South Africa. She loves certain people very deeply, but prefers a one-on-one existence, as opposed to a one-to-many that is real life. As a black woman, she’s been largely invisible most of her life, un-catered to, of minimal importance in most people’s lives, and so, once left to her own devices, she largely lounges around the house in a state of permanent indifference and does nothing -- she might as well be properly invisible.

As the narrative thread moves from observations and interactions into extended flashbacks about people’s backgrounds and Rosélie’s African-American activist friends in New York, the prose moves the reader pleasingly from one sequence to the next, a languid pace that keeps on offering up discussions about race relations, identity negotiations, globalization, and the chaos that all that is in South Africa. At times that felt less convincing: Most of the places were Rosélie has lived feature extensively (except Tokyo, for some reason), and this a-chronological tour of her life reminded me sometimes of secondary-world fantasies where the plot has the protagonists visit all the areas on the map. But it is remarkable how many times that felt entirely natural: Condé, in selecting this particular character flaw, this character biography, these narrative devices, has built a novel that quite naturally and quite confidently ventures out into the territory of political discourse.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, and you want to read it: it’s been translated into English as well. show less

Traversée de la mangrove borrows the classic literary conceit of the "mysterious stranger": an outsider arrives in a small, closed community and inadvertently releases all the tensions that have been smouldering in the place. In this case, it's a village called Rivière au Sel, hidden in dense forests on the slopes of Guadeloupe's volcano, La Grande Soufrière, and the story opens with the unexplained death of Francis Sancher, who had come to live in the village a few years earlier, no-one show more being quite sure where from. During an overnight wake, a succession of local people reflect on Sancher and the way he has affected their lives, and in the process tell us a great deal about how life in the village works, and how it is affected by class, gender and ethnicity.

Of course, Condé doesn't leave this literary convention in its standard form: she makes it clear that we are in the 1980s, and the village, remote as it is, does not exist in isolation. Everyone there has connections to the outside that define their lives in some way. They have come from somewhere else, they have been away to work or study and returned, they have close family in metropolitan France or abroad, they do business with the outside world, they have brought in a partner from elsewhere, etc. There is no such thing as an isolated village, and possibly there never was.

The portraits of the villagers don't in the end tell us a great deal about Sancher: we get a lot of snippets about him, but they don't add up to a simple closed narrative about him. It is the villagers themselves who turn out to be at the centre, and Condé has a lot of fun telling us about them in a whole series of different styles, sometimes funny, sometimes very moving, but always packed with fascinating detail. Towards the end, we get a chapter about the local intellectual, a young man (inevitably!) called Lucien, in which Condé neatly demolishes most of our preconceptions about "the Caribbean novel" and manages to poke fun at quite a few well-known figures, including herself. show less