The Voicing of Desire: The Quest for History in Heremakhonon and The Women of Tijucopapo

What is . . . important for me as a writer is that the language one writes in must be forced open, subjected to a certain violence, made strange, so that it becomes the writer’s own singular language [une langue à lui].

Maryse Condé, “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues”

Am I talking? Or do I think I’m talking?

Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon

Is it possible that you can’t hear me?

Marilene Felinto, The Women of Tijucopapo

Carole Boyce Davies states in her introduction to Black Women, Writing and Identity that “Black women’s writing . . . should be read as a series of boundary crossings and not as a fixed, geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing” (4). The image of texts as boundary crossings is useful when trying to understand the commonalities and differences of women’s lives across the world in that boundaries can sometimes be fluid yet still mark important distinctions in identity. Two works—Heremakhonon by Maryse Condé, a Guadeloupean writer known for her novels, plays, and essays, and The Women of Tijucopapo, by Marilene Felinto, a Brazilian writer who has published both as a journalist and a writer of fiction—have interesting similarities yet important distinctions in their representations of women’s experience of the power structures that support gender, race, and class differences in the Antilles and Brazil.

Condé is an internationally known writer who grew up in a bourgeois black family in Guadeloupe, leaving her home for France in the 1950s and living for many years away from Guadeloupe in France, various African countries, and the United States. In recent decades she has re-established herself in Guadeloupe but has also taught at universities in the United States. Felinto was born in the northeast of Brazil in a lower-income family who moved to São Paulo when she was still young and has lived in Brazil her entire life.

The two texts that I am comparing were published within several years of each other, Heremakhonon in 1976 and The Women of Tijucopapo in 1982. However, the main characters are quite different: Veronica in Heremakhonon is an educated Guadeloupean who has been living in Paris for some years and has decided to take a teaching position in Africa essentially to “return to her roots” or, as she says, to find her ancestors; Risia in The Women of Tijucopapo is a lower-class mestiza¹ whose family moved from a small village in the northeast of Brazil to São Paulo and throughout the text is walking back to her home region.

There are some significant resemblances between the two texts: both make use of a first-person narrative. Risia seemingly speaks to herself but occasionally addresses her mother or other people who are important to her, and Veronica’s voice is an interior monologue that might be addressed to a person with whom she is interacting, yet it is not generally clear whether she is speaking aloud or thinking her responses to comments addressed to her. Related to the attention to the narrative voice is a focus on the language used: although The Women of Tijucopapo is written in Portuguese, Risia repeatedly states that she will write this monologue as a letter to her mother in English; Condé’s text is in French with her main character highly aware of her ambivalent relationship to France, her own cultures and heritages (French, Antillean, African), and the ways that her language must reflect these various legacies. Another important commonality is the theme of “return”—for Risia, a return to her homeland, for Veronica, a “return” to Africa, and the ways that these voyages succeed or do not succeed. This quest is linked to the imagery of the mother that is interwoven with these characters’ attempts to relocate their identities and the ways in which these searches require a resituating of the self in history. Further, each character’s thoughts and actions related to her sexual desires have been categorized by some literary critics as unsuited to the representations of women that have been looked for since the political...