From Liminality to a Home of Her Own? The Quest Motif in Maryse Conde's Fiction

Isn’t it ever possible to live in the present? And, if need be, to put up with the hideous aspect of one’s wounds? The past should be put to death. Otherwise, the past will kill. Weren’t Djéré and Justin what they were because of all these stupid stories about ancestors and Africa? Two magi kings, two drunkards, the laughing-stocks of dreary Verdol? Wasn’t this the downfall of too many of their black acquaintances who were so busy constructing imaginary genealogies that they no longer had the strength to conquer their own America in their turn?

(124) ¹

This utterance by Spéro, the protagonist of Maryse Condé’s 1992 novel Les derniers rois mages, represents what I see as the culmination of the quest motif both in Condé’s six “Caribbean novels,” as I shall call them (from Hérémakhonon to Les derniers rois mages but with the exception of Ségou), and in her own personal quest. ² In both cases the quest involves a reconsideration of several assumptions which Condé considers to be characteristic of Negritude: Africa as motherland for the Antillean, an idealized image of Africa as a lost paradise for the black diaspora, the innate solidarity of the black race, and even the very concept of race itself as an explanation of difference. ³ Indeed, read side by side, Condé’s interviews and lectures on the one hand, and these six novels on the other, bear the relationship of statement to illustration.

Through a reading of the six novels in question as representing a drawn-out quest, and with constant reference to Condé’s lectures, critical articles, and interviews, in this study we will examine the quest motif in Condé’s work. In doing so, we shall at the same time notice a movement from a liminal position towards a sense of belonging on the part of both Condé herself and also her Antillean protagonists. I am using here Victor Turner’s terminology positing the three phases of the rite of passage as progressing from separation to liminality to reincorporation. ⁴

Since Françoise Lionnet, in her article “Traversée de la Mangrove: Maryse Condé et la créolité,” provides us with an excellent study of Condé’s return to créolité as manifested in Traversée, comments on this text will be limited mainly to the discussion of race. In her article, Françoise Lionnet refers to the personal path Maryse Condé has travelled since 1953. Lionnet sees a parallel between the author’s lived experience and the evolution of her thought as expressed in her fiction “from Hérémakhonon to La vie scélérate, from Ségou to Tituba” (2). She states that by 1989, in her interview by VèVè Clark, Condé has made a complete turn-about in relation to her attitude ten years earlier, and that “the irony and self-distancing of the seventies had been replaced by a total entrenchment, a sincere reflection on Caribbean specificity.” This reflection has resulted in a

rejection of nostalgia in any form, rejection of historical, aesthetic, exotic or political preconceptions that tend to fetishize the past or slavery and to idealize political commitment, nature or the people; rejection of a self-pitying ideology that would reduce Guadeloupe to a marginal and oppressive land that one flees of necessity.

(3)

According to Lionnet, Traversée represents to some extent the crystallization of Condé’s return to her native land. However, she does not dwell on the quest motif in Condé’s fiction, her article being primarily concerned with an analysis of the creole qualities of Traversée de la Mangrove. Nor have other critics of Condé’s work done the kind of analysis that I offer here. ⁵

Maryse Condé herself aptly summarizes the argument in the words, “From one rejection to another, from one closed door to another, I arrived before a third door which was the Antillean door” (“Notes sur un retour au pays natal” 17). ⁶ In this lecture...