Condé's novels explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986); the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Ségou (1984–1985); and the 20th-century building of the Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in Tree of Life (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean.[5] As Louise Hardwick observes, "Cosmopolitan in nature, Condé’s literature tackles the complexities of a globalised world in an unmistakably frank voice. She rejected attempts to pigeonhole her style, or labels describing her as a French or Creole writer,"[27] and she was often quoted as stating: "I write in Maryse Condé."[28][29]
Her first novel, Hérémakhonon (in the Malinke language, the title means "waiting for happiness"),[30] was published in 1976.[6] It was so controversial that it was pulled from the shelves after six months because of its criticism over the success of African socialism.[31] While the story closely parallels Condé's own life during her first stay in Guinea, and is written as a first-person narrative, she stressed that it is not an autobiography.[32] The book is the story, as she described it, of an "'anti-moi', an ambiguous persona whose search for identity and origins is characterized by a rebellious form of sexual libertinage".[32]
Condé kept considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Négritude and Creolité, and often focused on topics with strong feminist and political concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé admitted: "I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important."[5]
Her 1995 novel Windward Heights is a reworking of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), which Condé had first read at the age of 14. She had long wanted to create a work of her own around it, as an act of "homage". Condé's novel is set in Guadeloupe, and race and culture are featured as issues that divide people.[5] Reflecting on how she drew from her Caribbean background in writing this book, she said:
"To be part of so many worlds—part of the African world because of the African slaves, part of the European world because of the European education—is a kind of double entendre. You can use that in your own way and give sentences another meaning. I was so pleased when I was doing that work, because it was a game, a kind of perverse but joyful game."[5]
Condé's later writings include the autobiographical Tales From the Heart: True Stories From My Childhood (1999), a collection of essays about her childhood,[33] and Victoire (2006), a fictional biography of her maternal grandmother during a period when the black population of Guadeloupe asserted their rights to education and political power.[34]
Who Slashed Celanire's Throat (2000) was inspired by a true story and uses a blend of magical realism and fantasy in a novel about a woman who wants to uncover the truth of her past and avenge her childhood mutilation.[35]
The 2017 translation by Richard Philcox of Condé's What Is Africa to Me? Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography was described by Noo Saro-Wiwa in a review for The Times Literary Supplement as "refreshingly frank ... an entertaining and occasionally humorous account of the twelve years the author spent in Africa during the late 1950s and 60s. ... and by the book's end the author concedes that she still doesn't know what Africa means to her – a brave admission in a world that hankers for defined narrative arcs."[36]
In 2018, Condé was awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature, established as a one-off alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature (for which she was often considered a favourite but which was not awarded that year, as a consequence of a sexual abuse scandal among the award committee),[37] with the jury praising Condé as a "grand storyteller whose authorship belongs to world literature, describing the ravages of colonialism and the postcolonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming."[38]
In 2022, she was honoured as one of 12 Royal Society of Literature International Writers, alongside Anne Carson, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Cornelia Funke, Mary Gaitskill, Faïza Guène, Saidiya Hartman, Kim Hyesoon, Yōko Ogawa, Raja Shehadeh, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Samar Yazbek.[39][40]
Condé's 2023 novel, The Gospel According to the New World, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and, at the age of 86, she was the oldest writer ever to be longlisted for the prize.[41] The creation of the novel was by means of dictation to her husband and translator Richard Philcox, as she had a degenerative neurological disorder that made it difficult to speak and see.[42] Together, they were the first wife-and-husband author-translator team to be longlisted, and subsequently shortlisted,[43] for the award.[41][44][45]
Archives
Maryse Condé's literary archives (Maryse Condé papers, 1979–2012) are held at Columbia University Libraries.[46]
