Conversations with Maryse Conde.

Meehan, Kevin

Francoise Pfaff, ed. Conversations with Maryse Conde. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 194 pp. $35.00 cloth/$15.00 paper.

Improbable as it may seem, given Maryse Conde's international stature as a creative writer and provocative intellectual, no book-length work of criticism focusing on her career has yet been published. For this reason alone, Conversations with Maryse Conde fills an important gap in the study of Caribbean and contemporary world literatures. Compiled and edited by Francoise Pfaff, this volume is an updated version of the 1993 publication Entretiens avec Maryse Conde, which featured seven lengthy interviews--all conducted by Pfaff between 1982 and 1992. Pfaff's award-winning translation provides English-language readers with easy access to the earlier material and includes an additional 1994 interview. There is also a revised bibliography detailing secondary criticism, along with a comprehensive list of Conde's publications through 1995.

In the preface and introduction, Pfaff offers a useful biographical sketch of Conde and points out the signal characteristics of Conde's writing: "She is a prolific, provocative, and often ironic writer who excels in exploring the conditions of exile, alienation, broken family bonds, and racial matters. She develops richly textured plots with story lines that constantly shift in space and time and avoid, at all costs, folkloric and stereotypical renditions of Africa and the Caribbean." The interviews follow a chronological order for the most part, tracing the life and work of Conde from her childhood in a black middle-class family in Guadeloupe to her current position at Columbia University. Within this historical framework, individual interviews focus on the diverse genres represented in Conde's oeuvre, including novels, short stories, plays, children's literature, and literary criticism. The conversations also return to several important themes, such as the theory and practice of writing; Conde's nomadic e xistence in the West Indies, Europe, Africa, and the Americas; possibilities for political engagement in a period of disillusionment; and African diasporan culture and politics.

Many of Conde's statements will have an immediate impact on the study of Caribbean literature. Children's literature, for instance, is an important, though neglected aspect of Conde's work and Caribbean writing generally. Students of this genre are likely to appreciate the discussion of Conde's books Haiti cherie and Hugo le terrible, and the short story "Victor et les barricades."

Discussing the impact of the creolite movement, Conde celebrates the extent to which Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and others have "allowed all West Indian writers to re-evaluate their relationship to the French language." At the same time, Conde argues that "Creolite should not be transformed into a cultural terrorism within which writers are confined.... To each his or her own Creolite, that is to say, to each his or her own relationship with oral materials and the oral tradition, to each his or her own way of expressing it in written literature." Conde has a lot to say about how written literature interacts with oraliture in her own work and that of other Caribbean writers. Perhaps the most illuminating of these comments concerns her use of the Abomey myth of royal family origins in the 1992 novel Les derniers rois mages. The character Djere, captured in the Atlantic slave trade and transported to Guadeloupe, commits his memory of royal lineage to paper, and these fragmentary passage s are embedded in the novel as "Djere's Notebooks." In response to Pfaff's question about the use of African tales--"Are you becoming a griot?"--Conde insists that we read her engagement with orality as "a concern at the level of writing" (emphasis added).

Conde is the author of several critical works on the renowned Martinican writer Aime Cesaire, and she makes numerous references to Cesaire and Negritude. While claiming that "Negritude as a movement is no longer relevant," Conde maintains that Cesaire's work is the "foundation of militant and committed literature, the kind of literature that speaks about the masses." She asserts, moreover, that Cesaire, more than any writer of African descent, deserves to win the Nobel Prize: "At a time when the involvement of Blacks in literature is being recognized, Cesaire should have been the first crowned."

Those interested in the reception of Caribbean writing globally will enjoy her comments differentiating among critical responses in France, Holland, and the United States. While the Dutch merit praise for their "rather nuanced critiques," French readers persist in regarding Conde and West Indian writing generally as exotic. As for the U.S., Conde is happy that North American readers accept best-selling authors (such as herself) as legitimate, and she credits African American critics with making nuanced interpretation of black writing possible in this country. "African-American writers," she says, "have trained U.S. critics not to treat books written by Blacks as special items to be judged differently."

As Conde's biographical and artistic trajectories have moved from Africa into the Americas during the past fifteen years, her withering sense of irony has focused more and more frequently on African diasporan relations in this hemisphere. Her remarks on African American history, culture, and writing are guaranteed to spark strong reactions, both positive and negative (though it is worth prefacing this caveat lector with a reminder that Conde has never been one to avoid controversy). On the one hand, there is abundant evidence of Conde's professed commitment to what critic VeVe Clark has called "diasporan literacy." Recent novels are loaded with references to political figures and artists. At the same time, Conde does not hesitate to criticize African American culture when and where she feels critique is warranted. For instance, after commenting on which African American writers are her favorites (James Baldwin and Ishmael Reed) and which she favors less (Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison), Conde offers up wha t readers may perceive to be a slighting reference to Toni Morrison: "This may appear a bit critical, but I find her very 'politically correct.' In my opinion, she doesn't disturb anybody. She paints her community, the African-American community, with the tested colors of magical realism." Perhaps the most inflammatory statements come in the following exchange:

Pfaff: In Les derniers rois mages the narrator states, "African king or not, Djere's daddy had behaved like all the other Black men in the world. He had not taken care of his child." Won't this type of biting raillery create enemies for you, like Heremakhonon, when it was published?

Conde: I believe it is commonplace to say that these fathers tend to abandon or neglect their children. In our societies, illegitimacy is routine. What I say there is not iconoclastic at all.

The exchange above also offers what might be the best place to conclude, with a comment on Francoise Pfaff's important role as interviewer. Like Conde, Pfaff is an intellectual with a Caribbean and European background, as well as interest and expertise in Francophone West African culture. At the same time, Pfaff has been a member of the Romance Languages faculty at Howard University for many years. Arguably, then, she is someone uniquely positioned to see comments such as the ones quoted above from both Conde's perspective and that of someone grounded in African American history and culture. At the very least, Pfaff is adept at remaining in dialogue with Conde and pushing to the heart of difficult issues, whatever the focus might be. In light of Conde's caustic wit, and her ability to truncate discussion with a brilliant aphorism, this is a great skill indeed. The result is something all readers can appreciate. Maryse Conde is an eloquent witness to her time, and whether we are hearing her talk about meetings with important figures such as Malcolm X and Amilcar Cabral, discussing her writing regimen, or commenting on more personal matters, we are fortunate to have this testimony.