Maryse Condé and the Space of Literature by Eva Sansavior (review)

This valuable contribution to francophone studies adds to the growing list of critical work on Maryse Condé. Analysing Condé’s relationship with literature and politics in five major works, Eva Sansavior addresses the author’s concern about achieving literary freedom, and maintains that Condé relies heavily on Sartrean engagement. Sansavior proposes to read Condé’s work through the lens of a ‘diverse range of French theoretical positions in parallel with works by major Francophone Caribbean theorists’ (p. 8). The Introduction offers a biographical sketch of Condé and her various geographical and literary crossings as an immigrant writer. It further examines the disjunction in Condé’s work and her identity, establishing that this disjunction is occasioned by her ‘ambivalent positions on gender’ (p. 3). Sansavior emphasizes the importance of ‘defining the idea of the literary itself’ (p. 7); however, given the slippage and interchangeable use of terms in her text, it is unfortunate that she does not unpack the equally critical definition of ‘politics’. Despite Sansavior’s positioning of Condé’s work in a masculinist space as the site of ‘interchange between “metropolitan French” and francophone Caribbean theorization of politics and literature’ (p. 8), Condé nevertheless engages a female–centred ideology, invoking the ‘Bambara myth of origin’ (p. 14) to resist marginalization. Although Sansavior makes use of the theory of ‘literary cannibalism’ to this end, further contextualization would have crystallized Condé’s engagement of literary freedom, exercised not only in Moi Tituba, but also in La Migration des cœurs, a text possibly better suited for analysis. Sansavior’s examination of some of Condé’s often overlooked interviews is novel, a refreshing detour from the extensive criticism of her fictional work. Accounting for the dismal readership of Condé’s work in Guadeloupe, Sansavior ascertains that the ‘process of explaining her text to local readers is […] linked to a broader […] function of “Diaspora literacy”’ (p. 25). Even so, Sansavior fails to credit Ve´ve` Clark with this literary innovation. Although Sansavior stresses the collective female agency in Moi Tituba, sorcière … noire de Salem, she later distinguishes this collectivity as inhibiting, intimating that the conflation of the authorial voice and the character’s voice complicates the assigning of political agency. Drawing on real and imagined experiences, Sansavior brilliantly depicts the intersectional relationship between self, community, and writing in Condé’s autobiography, ascertaining that Condé employs autobiography as a subversive genre. The attainment of female agency is mediated by the male voice or presence in En attendant le bonheur. Sansavior argues that Aimé Césaire’s Cahier serves as a ‘precursor to Veronica’s project to recover her authentic black identity’ (p. 40), suggesting that Veronica’s quest relies on the ‘revis[ion] or transcend[ence] of the Césairian narrative’ (p. 38). Furthermore, Sansavior’s rigid categorization of performances of a commodified African identity risks reproducing the very stereotypical performances against which she cautions. Ascertaining that Les Derniers Rois mages engages the ‘permanent questioning of text and context that Condé attributes to literature’ (p. 83), Sansavior fails to accentuate the intertextuality within ‘Les Cahiers’, resulting in a missed opportunity to reinforce the relation between language and politics.