Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text ( PLAS Cuadernos Series no. 8) (review)

Feasting on Words presents a succulent array of hors d'oeuvres on an unappetizing platter. Its provocative subtitle, Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, & the Caribbean Text, announces an original perspective on one of the most prolific female writers of the West Indies. The contributors to the volume, all professors at U.S. universities, successfully theorize "cannibalism" as an indigenous Caribbean literary praxis of anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal political resistance that can be illustrated in novels and interviews by Maryse Condé.

Easing our digestion into this cannibal text, Kwame Anthony Appiah provides a few interesting morsels of biographical detail in a short retrospective on the author entitled "Introducing Maryse Condé." He reminds us that Maryse Condé is a Professor Emerita of French at Columbia University, whose novels have reached U.S. audiences through English translations by her husband, Richard Philcox. Maryse Condé was born and brought up in Guadeloupe and then Paris during the 1950s. Her family's bourgeois identification with France collided with the militant African Diaspora politics of the decades following WWII. Appiah directs the reader to Condé's Le cœur à rire et à pleurer for some insight into the writer's awareness of this double consciousness in her early years. The text narrates how, as a child, Condé held Antillean literature to be exotic and surrealistic. Like many Afro-American intellectuals of her generation, Condé sought to resolve the colonial conflict of her background by spending time in Africa, first with her Guinean husband, and then in other parts of the continent before returning to Paris in the 1970s. It is during this period that Condé begins writing her novels. Hérémakhonon and Une Saison à Rihata both have female protagonists who, like Condé, travel from the West Indies to Africa in search of origins that remain elusive and disappointing. Her third novel, Ségou continues with the idealization of Africa, but the extended passages on Brazil signal Condé's shift to the Western Hemisphere in subsequent novels. The novel that follows Ségou was written and set in the United States: Moi, Tituba uses fiction to fill in the gaps on the historical account of a Black Barbadian woman caught up in the Salem witch trials. Condé accomplishes her literary "retour au pays natal" in Traversée de la mangrove and La Migration des coeurs, set in various Caribbean islands. Appropriately, Appiah sees Condé's personal and literary journeys as constituting a relentless quest for different points of view on her West Indian upbringing.

In light of Feasting on Words' thematic achievement, it is disappointing to note that the volume's structural and material construction falls short. The three pieces at the beginning of the volume—the editors' preface, an interview with Condé, and the Introduction of Condé—provide too long an opening act for the essays that follow. The essays themselves are strewn throughout in a haphazard fashion. In the interest of continuity, Lydie Moudileno's essay on Condé's rhetorical strategies in interviews would have been better placed immediately after Condé's interview, instead of sixth among ten essays. Moreover, the work could have profited by creating different sections for the various essays. Six of these essays deal with Condé's latest novel, Histoire de la femme cannibale, while the remaining four study other works by the writer. The editors fail to provide different sections for these essays, arranging them without a clearly stated or observable plan. The volume ends with a very useful bibliography and some biographical notes on the contributors, but what the volume needs at this point is an afterword that would counterbalance the bulky prefatory matter. Using Appiah's brief précis on Maryse Condé as a postlude, instead of as an introduction, would have lent the volume a much-needed measure of equilibrium and a graceful note of finality.

Condé's...