The Hindu (Thiruvananthapuram)
Discovering Maryse Condé
The author on how travelling makes him feel and why he desires solitude The Caribbean author produced rich works chroncling colonisation, but was not as widely read as her contemporaries
The ItalianAmerican André Aciman had been a wellknown and widely respected writer since the 90s, when he published his memoir Out of Egypt and a string of popular short stories in magazines like The New Yorker. But his fame exploded with the release of his debut novel Call Me By Your Name in 2007, making him an international sensation. The book went on to be adapted into an Oscarwinning film of the same name, starring Timothée Chalamet, who was soon catapulted to global heartthrob status.
In 2019, Aciman wrote a sequel to the book — Find Me — and most recently, he has published a novella called The Gentleman from Peru.
The book follows three college students who find themselves stuck off Italy’s Amalfi coast, with a mysterious and taciturn stranger. It is a part of the world that Aciman has written about previously as well, in a 2023 travel essay set in the small town of Orvieto, close to Rome.
The essay is a great example of Aciman’s strengths, like his gift for fusing the mythic and the mundane in a singular turn of phrase. For instance, he describes an Orvieto carpenter thus: “The carpenter who seems to be a direct descendant of medieval guild members stands outside his shop with a lit cigarette, which he clearly doesn’t want to put out and which gives him the thoughtful, meditative air of an Italian Einstein still working on the theory of relativity.”
Seeing and imagining
During a recent video interview, the 73yearold Aciman spoke about what the idea of travel means to him. “That particular piece about Orvieto, it was never intended as a ‘discovery’ essay. Orvieto is a lovely town, but I am not interested in it at all. I am interested in how the town makes me feel. I leave it to other people to describe a new sight, its history, what it means, and so on,” Aciman said. “What I am interested in is what I see, what I imagine. And it took me a long time to realise this. Sometimes, what I see and what I imagine are not the same thing. They’re not necessarily congruent with each other.”
Themes of migration and displacement are common in Aciman’s fiction. Characters, especially young men, are often found adrift in strange lands, seeking their ‘rightful’ place in the world, both geographically and metaphorically speaking. They seek
Guadeloupe? Where’s that? We never read any writer from Guadeloupe in our literature classes. There were Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid and of course V.S. Naipaul from the Caribbeans. And Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, David Diop, Leopold Senghor, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (all men) from Africa. I am not trying to suggest that their writing is any less important or homogenous. They also opened new worlds to us when we first encountered their writings in a sophomore classroom. We discovered new people, places, identities, cultures, conflict, and a language of creative expression. All that is fine, yet there was no Maryse Condé.
I discovered Condé much later in my adult life through an independent Kolkata publisher, Seagull
Books, which had published three of her titles: What is Africa to me?, Of Morsels and Marvels, and The Journey of a Caribbean Writer — each different from the other. I stumbled upon What is Africa to Me? by accident. Or it was curiosity perhaps to pick up a title by an unknown writer (to me) and decipher Africa through the journey of another individual, a nonEurocentric account of the place and its people.
From France (Paris) to Guinea to Ghana to Senegal, I travelled to several parts of Africa through Condé’s account. The book also unravels a writer trying to understand or discern her ideological self through experiences in life such as her encounters with Che Guevara and Malcolm X, amongst others, and her disagreements with the Negritude Movement.
Of Morsels and Marvels is a culinary memoir of sorts and
The Journey of a Caribbean Writer is a compilation of her writings and speeches where she reflects on the use of French (coloniser’s language) for literary purposes, and other themes such as race, gender, migration, and globalisation. And then last year, she was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for The Gospel According to the New World. There were a few articles that appeared in the Indian press where she was cursorily mentioned alongside the other writers who were part of the shortlist. All of Condé’s books mentioned here, written in French, were translated into
English by meaningful, human connections but at the same time, are too wrapped up in their own little solipsistic mindspace. In the Orvieto essay, Aciman touches upon this phenomenon by calling it “the big paradox that defines my life” — a fear of loneliness that coexists with a love of being left alone. “I think that this feeling of desiring solitude while also being quite afraid of loneliness, this is something a lot of people struggle with. During my childhood, my father kept telling me to ‘enjoy myself ’ but I did not know how, at least not in the accepted or conventional sense of the phrase. We are told, we are almost indoctrinated straight from childhood, to ‘seek out the world’, to seek, seek, seek. But what about when we want to have a cup of coffee in the morning, alone?”
Longing and belonging
Aciman famously wrote Call Me By Your Name in a matter of 34 months, which was unlike him. “I had nothing to do and I wanted to get this novel off my chest. It was written very, very fast and it was almost like a vacation for me, writingwise.”
His usual method, he said, is much slower, much more deliberate. During the interview, he joked that his agent gets bored of him writing
“the same story over and over again”.
Aciman has lived in New York for over two decades now, the longest he has ever stayed in one place. And according to him, the city is ideal for someone like him, someone who revels in diversity, someone “who doesn’t belong anywhere” as he put it. “I would be quite bored and uncomfortable if New York contained people of one ethnicity or one religion. Had that been the case, I would certainly not have belonged there and I’d have been cast out.” These days, he said, he is working on “three different essays” as well as a new book of nonfiction, a memoir which will be released in October. “It is a memoir about a year I spent in Italy as a very young man, 1617 years of age. Now, I never turn down an invite to spend time in Italy, not least because I am no longer an Italian citizen. I lost my citizenship, which is so typical of my life.”
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of nonfiction. her partner, longtime collaborator and eminent translator, Richard Philcox.
But what does the absence from popular discourse of writers like Condé tell us about our literary spaces and cultures? It can certainly be argued that it is humanly impossible to read all writers from a specific place or culture and such an approach can be merely tokenistic. After all, how many Indian writers have we really read? And university syllabi are often guided by different concerns. But there is also a world and literature beyond the classroom. When I say reading, I don’t want to imply reading in academic spaces alone.
Why are some writers discussed or read more than others? Why are some not discussed at all? Are we too smug and comfortable in what we know? Or is it because Condé wrote in French and not English? But world (largely European)
Watch | Interview with André Aciman on magazine.thehindu.com literature in translation has been a mainstay of our reading culture. Or is it because she makes us uncomfortable with her politics and sharp critique? That her work is hard to classify or fit into a box? Or is it gender and colour? There are many questions. No plausible answers in sight.
What if we could read Condé alongside Naipaul? What if we knew that both are available and accessible in the classroom and beyond? Or were we waiting for the Noble Prize to create another celebrity writer like prizes often do? When writers depart, we hasten to write obituaries adorned with glib talk. The same will happen to Condé too. And maybe some of us will look for her work now. After her death.
The writer teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune.