Maryse Condé
Author who confronted colonialism in such stirring novels as Segu and Windward Heights
MARYSE CONDÉ, who has died aged 90, was a Guadeloupe-born novelist who wrote with subtlety and a touch of surrealism about the effects of colonialism on the African diaspora, and came to be regarded as the leading Caribbean woman writer of her era; in Britain she caused a minor stir in 1998 with her novel Windward Heights, which, sacrilegiously in the view of some, transposed the story of Wuthering Heights to Guadeloupe.
This homage to the book that changed her life – “it showed the power of literature: that you can be an English author but reach close to the heart of a Caribbean child” – saw Heathcliff renamed Rayze (Creole for “heath”) and endowed with dreadlocks, while Cathy became a beauty with skin the “colour of hot syrup”, who “wiggles her bonda and dances the gwo-ka every evening”.
Maryse Condé had left Guadeloupe in her late teens to be educated in Paris. Although she longed to be a writer, the shock of encountering widespread racism there left her with a sense of inferiority, and she was in her 40s before she could persuade herself to put pen to paper.
Recognition came slowly, partly because her independence of mind often led her writing to go against the grain of what her natural political allies might approve of. In her later years, however, she was regularly cited as a likely candidate to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2018 she received the one-off New Academy Prize, awarded while the Nobel was in abeyance, for “describing the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming”.
The keystone of her work was the group of original, arresting novels she produced in the mid-1980s. Segu (1984) and The Children of Segu (1985), which chronicled the depredations wrought in Africa by white colonialism and Islamic expansion in the 19th century, displayed her understanding of the continent’s history and politics as well as her feeling for its folklore and spirit.
They were followed by I, Tituba (1986), in which Maryse Condé, after discovering that a black slavewoman was among those accused of witchcraft and tortured in Salem in 1692, imagined her life story. She was keenly aware of the irony that if Tituba had not fallen victim to the misogynistic hysteria of that period, her existence would have gone entirely unrecorded by history.
Rather than guessing at what her life would have been like, however, Maryse Condé produced something of a romp, which included scenes in which Tituba is schooled in feminism in prison by the fictional Hester Prynne, heroine of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Maryse Condé continued to produce highly acclaimed books into her final years. Her last novel, The Gospel According to the New World, was a mischievous, picaresque tale of a mixed-race Christ figure’s travels in the contemporary world; it allowed her to explore her conflicted views on faith, forged in the caustic arguments between her atheist father and her devout Catholic mother that she had witnessed as a small girl.
The novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, a remarkable achievement given that she had lost her sight and had had to dictate the book to her husband or friends.
She was born Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon (she later changed the spelling of her first name) in Pointe-à-pitre, Guadeloupe, on February 11 1934. Her parents – Auguste Boucolon and his wife Jeanne, née Quidal – were among Guadeloupe’s first black schoolteachers; Auguste later founded a bank.
Maryse’s mother, self-conscious about her origins as the daughter of a washerwoman, forbade her eight children from playing outdoors, to prevent their exposure to Creole street culture.
When she was 10 Maryse performed a poem at her mother’s birthday party, dissecting her mercurial character. “She looked up at me, her eyes brimming with tears, to my amazement… ‘So that’s how you see me?’ At that very moment I felt a surge of power that I have attempted to relive, book after book.”
At 19 she went to Paris to study at the Lycée Fénélon. Her Gallicised parents had always revered France as the motherland; however, one of Maryse’s fellow students was the daughter of the historian and Communist Jean Bruhat, who taught her to take a different view – “to look at the world through the eyes of a colonised person and [see] how Guadeloupe had been created by France for the benefit of slavery.”
She had an affair with the Haitian journalist and activist Jean Dominique; she gave birth to a son, but Dominique abandoned her, and, her mother having died, her father “lost interest” in her. In 1958 she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor – largely, she later admitted, out of necessity.
They moved to the Ivory Coast but the marriage foundered. Maryse Condé spent several years working as a teacher in Guinea, Senegal and Ghana, and mixed with activists and intellectuals such as Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Maya Angelou.
In the late 1960s she had to leave Ghana after being accused of political subversion and spent time in London as a producer for the BBC’S French Service. She then became a lecturer in Paris and took her PHD at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 1976 she published her first novel, Heremakhonon (Maninka for “Waiting for happiness”), which drew on her experiences in Ghana. The book made hay not only with the former British colonialists but also with African efforts at self-governance, and sold badly.
Her second novel, A Season in Rihata (1981), fared little better, but with the Segu books – the first was described in the New York Times Book Review as “the most significant historical novel about black Africa published in many a year” – she enjoyed an international critical success, and in 1989 moved to the US, where she was Professor of French at, successively, the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Maryland and Columbia University in New York. Latterly she lived in Provence, and chaired the French Committee for the Memory of Slavery.
Altogether Maryse Condé wrote 18 novels, as well as several plays and collections of essays, and two well-received memoirs, Tales from the Heart (2001) and What Is Africa to Me? (2012). She continued to write in French rather than Creole, despite complaints that this was an act of subjugation to her former coloniser. “I write neither in French nor in Creole,” she declared. “I write in Maryse Condé.”
Formidable in person, with a professorial manner, she did not mellow, and refused to conform to political pieties even in her last books. In The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana (2017) she satirised the attitudes of those who make excuses for black slave-owners (“of course the Arab sultans also practised slavery … but their slavery was not dehumanising”). She also found little evidence of civilisation in either the developed or the developing world: “each is as savage and implacable as the other.”
After her divorce Maryse Condé married, in 1982, the British translator Richard Philcox, who rendered most of her books into English. In addition to her son, she had three daughters with her first husband.
Maryse Condé, born February 11 1934, died April 2 2024