Author was ‘grande dame’ of Caribbean literature
NEW YORK — Maryse Condé, an acclaimed French-language novelist from Guadeloupe who in novels, stories, plays and memoirs imagined and redefined the personal and historical past from 17th-century New England to contemporary Europe, died Monday at age 90.
Condé, winner in 2018 of an “alternate” Nobel Prize, died at a hospital in Apt, outside Marseille, France. Her longtime editor, Laurant Laffont, said she had suffered from a neurological illness that impaired her vision to the point of having to dictate her final novel, “The Gospel According to the New World.”
She lived in Luberon in recent years and was known as the “grande dame” of Caribbean literature.
Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and other critics of colonialism, she was a world traveler who probed the conflicts between and within Western culture, African culture and Caribbean culture, and the tensions between the desire for liberation and what the author would call “the trap of terrorism and simplistic radicalisation.”
With her husband, Richard Philcox, often serving as her English-language translator, Condé wrote dozens of books, ranging from historical explorations such as “Segu,” her bestknown novel, to the autobiographical stories in “Tales From the Heart” to fresh takes on Western literature. She reworked “Wuthering Heights” into “Windward Heights” and paired a West Indian slave with Hester Prynne of “The Scarlet Letter” in “I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.”
The mother of four children (with first husband, Mamadou Condé), she was nearly 40 when she published her first novel and almost 50 when “Segu” made her an international name. “Segu,” released in French in 1984 and in the United States three years later, was set in an 18th-century African kingdom and followed the fates of a royal adviser and his family as their community is upended by the rise of Islam and the expansion of the slave trading industry.
She continued the story in “The Children of Segu” but rejected additional volumes, explaining to one interviewer that her spirit “had journeyed to another world.” Over the following decades, her fictional settings included Salem, Massachusetts, (“I, Tituba”), Jamaica (“Nanna-ya”), and Paris and Guadeloupe for “The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ilana.”
Condé received numerous awards over the second half of her life, among them the Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, the U.s.-based Hurston & Wright Legacy Award and the New Academy Prize for literature, an informal honor presented in 2018 in place of the Nobel, which was sidelined for the year amid allegations of sexual harassment by prize committee members.
In the mid-1990s, Condé joined the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of French and Francophone literature.
She also taught at the University of Virginia and UCLA, among other schools before retiring in 2005, around the same time French President Jacques Chirac named her head of the French Committee for the Memory of Slavery.
Born Maryse Boucolon on Feb. 11, 1934, at Pointeà-pitre, Guadeloupe, she was one of six children (two others died) raised in a relatively prosperous and educated family. Condé was a writer from early on, creating a one-act play at age 10 about her mother, reporting for local newspapers in high school and publishing book reviews for a student magazine in college, the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.