Spero's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay": Maryse Condé's The Last of the African Kings

For three generations, Spero Jules-Juliette and his family venerated their African ancestor, King Béhanzin of Dahomey, who had been exiled by the French to Martinique in the late nineteenth century. On December 10, 1990, however, Spero, a mediocre Caribbean painter living on an island in South Carolina with his African American wife, Debbie, forgot the reverential ceremony dedicated to the African king who had fathered Spero's grandfather during his exile in the French West Indies. In The Last of the African Kings, Condé poses the problem of racial and cultural identity. Spero and Debbie are of the same race. Their marriage, though, is dysfunctional, and they seem incompatible. An academic historian, Debbie valorizes Spero's African past and exalts the cultural icons of the sixties. Spero's nonchalant spontaneity and political indifference and his turning away from his Ancestor epitomize one pole of the tension between living in the present or in their African past.