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3 Scapegoating the Mulattos: Maryse Condé's La Migration des coeurs
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3 Scapegoating the Mulattos Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs In one of her autobiographical stories, the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé recounts a strange meeting she had with a little white girl in the 1950s whose name was Anne-Marie de Surville and who addressed her in Creole. Anne-Marie invited Maryse to play with her, but at the same time she warned her that they had to be careful because her mother would not approve. Maryse decided to take her chances and soon discovered Anne-Marie’s violent nature: “She would pull my hair,” she recounts, “she would pull up my dress to smack me. . . . She would climb on my back and she would kick my sides. . . . She would slap me. She would insult me.”1 Eventually, Maryse protested and asked Anne-Marie not to beat her anymore. Anne-Marie’s reply consisted of a sneer and a violent push accompanied by the following words: “I must beat you because you are a negress.”2 On the way back the puzzled Maryse asked her mother for an explanation, but both her parents refused to reply and became visibly embarrassed. Rather uncannily, after this short but crucial encounter, the little Maryse never saw Anne-Marie again. Nowadays , her disappearance from the playground makes Condé wonder if she had not undergone a supernatural experience: “Since so much deeprooted hatred, so many old fears never properly exorcized are buried in the ground of our island, I wonder if Anne-Marie and myself were not, in our allegedly playful impersonations, the miniature incarnations of a mistress and her suffering slave.”3 One could do worse than suggest that if Anne-Marie was a supernatural symbolic apparition, then she must have been the specter of North Atlantic modernity. Born in Guadeloupe in 1937, Maryse Boucoulon moved to Paris in 1953 to continue her education. By the late fifties she had established many contacts with the African community, and in 1959 she married the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé and soon moved to Africa, first to the Ivory coast, 54 Scapegoating the Mulattos then Guinea, and then, after her 1964 divorce, to Ghana and Senegal. In Senegal she met Richard Philcox, her current husband and her translator into English. In 1970 she returned to Paris to finish her studies (she completed a dissertation on the definition of the Negro in the Negritude movement) and begin to write her first novel, Hérémakhonon, published in 1976. After moving back to Guadeloupe for three years, she worked for many North American universities (among them Berkeley, Maryland, Virginia, and Columbia). She is the author of many fictional and nonfictional works and one of the most prominent voices of Guadeloupe and of the Caribbean as a whole. Condé’s historical novel La Migration des coeurs (1995), I will argue, is her attempt to exorcize the ruthless Anne-Marie de Surville through a clever use of intertextuality geared toward the celebration of the diversified and rich spectrum of Caribbean culture. The most obvious intertextual reference to be found in La Migration des coeurs is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (as Windward Heights, the English title of La Migration des coeurs, openly recognizes).4 Condé rewrites (“cannibalizes ”) and transposes Brontë’s novel into a Caribbean universe, adapting and transforming it as if it were a musical variation on a previous theme. Written by a female author, with its Gothic excesses, its foregrounding of orality and Yorkshire speech, its two narrators of different gender and class, its sex-crossing aspiration, and its relentless confrontation of opposed and opposing forces, Wuthering Heights constitutes a very powerful intertextual sharpening stone to undercut both Western rationality and North Atlantic homogenizing modernity. Rather characteristically, however, Condé plays with the expectations of her readers. For example , prima facie, one would perhaps be tempted to presume that Condé would capitalize on the presence of ghosts and vampires in Brontë’s text to introduce a plethora of revenants, zombies, and soukougnans and to indulge in the representation of voodoo and Santería.5 Yet if some of these supernatural elements make an appearance in the text, it is fair to say that the generally eerie atmosphere that has made Brontë’s novel famous is actually downplayed and sometimes mocked by Condé. Condé’s ambivalent approach to the occult is also anticipated in one of the epigraphs to Windward Heights, a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir’s La Cérémonie des adieux: “Death has separated us/My death...