Maryse Conde as Contemporary Griot in Segu

From the loose, subjective form of her earliest narrative, Heremakhonon, through the tightly conventional realistic novel of A Season in Rihata, and to the spare, oral-based narrative of I, Tituba, one feature remains constant in the novels of Maryse Condé: a point of view and tone of unrelenting irreverence. This essay examines the ways in which an attitude of irreverence underlies the discursive and narrative strategies present in the historical epic novel, Segu, and it connects the stance from which the story is told to the function of the griot ¹ in the traditional West African epic.

The opening lines of Segu are the words of a griot:

Segu is a garden where treachery grows . . . Segu is built on treachery. Speak of Segu outside of Segu, but do not speak of Segu in Segu.

(3)

Historically, the kingdom of 18th and 19th century Segu situated in the northern regions of West Africa, the land of Condé’s Bambara ancestors, represents not one isolated instance but the rise and fall of many kingdoms in pre-colonial Africa. Discursively, Segu represents the ongoing struggles, victories, and defeats of people of African descent in many countries around the world. The exploration of the meaning of those great and small defeats now and in the past of nations and individuals characterizes a major part of Condé’s project. At least, this constitutes one viable reading for people of the African Diaspora in the Francophone world and now, with recent translations, for the Anglophone world as well.

Edward Glissant aptly expresses the challenge behind Segu’s discourse and narration:

The main difficulty facing national literatures [Caribbean] . . . is that they must combine mythification and demystification [underlining added for emphasis], this primal innocence with learned craftiness.

(100)

Condé crisscrosses “myth” and demystification by combining the critical stance of a griot’s epic with the subjective realism of contemporary Western novels. In this way, she creates a work in Segu that is a milestone for the literatures of the African Diaspora. Also, the African griot’s epic forms inspire Segu and help explain the attitude of irreverence that colors the narrative’s discourse.

While Segu is rooted in traditional African story-making, at the same time it is grounded in the traditional European novel, and thereby succeeds in peopling pre-colonial African history. After discussing the ways in which Condé uses the epic, I will explain how the use of the epic’s collective voice and point of view alongside representations of individual subjectivity typical of novels problematizes the depictions of African women.

On the one hand, this epic novel “speaks of Segu outside of Segu,” tying Condé directly to the Négritude movement. Like Léopold Senghor, Léon Damás, and other Négritude writers, she responds to Hegel’s dismissal of Africa as a dark continent devoid of history by retelling the ancient African past. For this reason, I insist on her ties both to Senghor’s Négritude and to Césaire’s anti-colonial militancy, rather than belabor her difference from these earlier writers. On the other hand, Condé dares to position herself as storyteller as if she were speaking “in” Segu away from the earshot of foreigners. She speaks not only in a public voice of what is historically praiseworthy, but also in a private voice of what is shameful. As is so frequently done when women depict the domestic sphere, by breaking silence this female descendant of colonized writers breaks an in-house taboo.

Lurking behind the narrative of Segu is the hushed and treacherous question few African writers or scholars dare to enunciate clearly: how did we lose the rights to the use of the land and resources of an entire continent? By declining to romanticize Segu in all its glory or victimize it in its collapse, Condé departs from her earlier male Négritude models. She avoids a discourse that is locked into the rise of a great empire, and, at the same time, she avoids the recitation of a dirge about the collapse of an innocent victim culture, thereby knocking Europe off its historical pedestal...