Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

4 Alliances and Enmities in Maryse Condé’s Historical Imagination

4 Alliances and Enmities in Maryse Condé’s Historical Imagination For me Tituba is not a historical novel. Tituba is the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested at all in what her real life could have been. I had few precise documents. . . . I hesitated between irony and a desire to be serious. The result is that she is a sort of a mock-epic character. When she was leading the fight of the maroons, it was a parody somehow. Maryse Condé, afterword to I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem Marie Chauvet’s récit Amour concludes with the oneiric and sacrificial assassination of the sadistic local commander Calédu, who embodies for the protagonist, Claire Clamont, the oppressive legacies of racism and patriarchy. And yet for Maryse Condé, commenting on this symbolically charged denouement, “the well-known link between executioner and victim is apparent, even if the conclusion is reversed, even if the conclusion is not a triumph since, in the end, nothing has changed. The death of Calédu would not be enough to stop the march of history.”1 And so for Condé, it makes little difference whether Calédu murders Claire (the false foreshadowing in Claire’s climactic dream) or, as it turns out, Claire kills Calédu; oppression in Haiti marches on. In a critique with Jamesian overtones, Condé wishes that Chauvet “had gone further in dissecting for our benefit the sterility of the machinery of power that is set in motion. She doesn’t do so, opting instead for brief notations on the growing misery of the peasant class.”2 And yet this subtle critique of Chauvet might be read in contradiction to another of Condé’s critical pronouncements: “Myth,” writes Édouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse, “is the first of a still-naïve historical consciousness, and the raw material for the project of a literature.” No, retort the women writers in their own individual way. We have to rid ourselves of myths. They are binding, confining and paralyzing.3 109 Alliances and Enmities Claire’s symbolic act of killing Calédu might be read precisely as what Condé describes (and prescribes), a liberation from the phallocentric and pigmentary myths that certainly oppress Chauvet’s protagonist and, by metonymic extension, Haitian and Caribbean women. And yet, at the same time, Condé gently reproaches Chauvet for dwelling too long in this subjective realm of myth, for not providing a more objective account of the historical conditions that have permitted the unfolding of the structures and institutions propagating oppression. Condé’s own historical fiction might be said to strive to strike a balance between these two realms, myth and historicity. But then again, Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano does to an extent dwell in the realm of history while eliding myth. At one point in Chauvet’s historical novel, the protagonist, Minette, makes the acquaintance of Zoé, a free black who is working for the Saint Domingue underground resistance, so to speak, forming illegal alliances whose common aim is to free the slaves of the French colony. Zoé is one of the first characters in the novel to speak to Minette explicitly of the injustice and brutality of slavery. Thanks to Zoé, Minette experiences one of her first revelations in the novel: “Everything was unjust—the laws, the order of things, the entire pattern of social prejudice” (87). Moreover, Zoé points out to Minette: “My parents were slaves in Martinique. It is a country that very much resembles St-Domingue as far as suffering and injustices are concerned” (87). Zoé’s childhood on a French island in the Caribbean , along with Condé’s own critical remarks about Chauvet, provide us with a constellatory segue to the Guadeloupean Condé, who sets the action of one of her most famous novels, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , in Barbados and New England. In this mock historical autobiography , one of the victims of the Salem witch trials narrates an account of her youth in Barbados, her travails with Samuel Parris and the Puritans in New England, and her return to Barbados to join the ranks of a maroon society. As in Chauvet’s novel, Tituba is also a mock bildungsroman about a Caribbean woman whose own existence is the result of an interracial rape. Condé’s novel begins with an account of this violation: “Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck Christ the King on day in the year 16** while...