The Journal of West Indian Literature joins many in celebrating the life and writing of Maryse Condé, the dynamic Guadeloupean author who passed away on April 2, 2024 at the age of 90. Her prolific and globally-recognized body of work offered postcolonial feminist perspectives informed by her peripatetic life led across the Caribbean, Africa, Western Europe and the US. Among the many awards she gathered in her lifetime were two major honors by France – a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor in 2014 and a Grand Croix in the National Order of Merit in 2019 – and the New Academy Prize in Literature, an alternative prize created when the Nobel was not awarded in 2018. She was twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, first for her entire body of work in 2015, and then for her novel The Gospel According to the New World in 2023. She chaired Columbia University’s Center for French and Francophone studies from its foundation in 1997 to 2002. She retired from teaching in 2005.
Her debut novel Hérémakhonon was published in 1976 after Condé returned to France (where she had been sent from Guadeloupe for high school) after over a decade spent in West Africa. She completed her doctorate in comparative literature in 1975. Her major works include the novels Ségou (1984) and its sequel Ségou II (1985); Moi, Tituba, sorcière: noire de Salem (1986; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), based on the story of an enslaved woman tried for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts; and Une Saison à Rihata (1981; A Season in Rihata), set in late twentieth-century Africa. Condé continued to explore with great complexity and nuance themes of postcolonial identity, gender, memory, community belonging, and Black diasporic life in her later works such as Traversée de la mangrove (1989; Crossing the Mangrove), La Colonie du nouveau monde (1993), La Migration des coeurs (1995; Windward Heights), Desirada (1997), Célanire cou-coupé (2000; Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat?), The Belle Créole (2020), Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003; The Story of the Cannibal Woman), Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006; Victoire: My Mother’s Mother), Les belles ténébreuses (2008), En attendant la montée des eaux (2010; Waiting for the Waters to Rise), Fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017; The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana), and L’Évangile du nouveau monde (2021; The Gospel According to the New World). She was known for challenging orthodoxy of all kinds and was especially resistant to the idea that she needed to write in creole or to conform to masculinist ideas about the nature of créolite.
In her later years, Condé, despite failing health, continued to delve into profound storytelling, describing it as a compelling yet enigmatic compulsion. During her JWIL Twitter residency on Condé in April 2023, Kavita Ashana Singh (@kavitaashana), a Caribbean literature professor at the University of Houston and a former student of Condé’s, reflected on the inseparability of life and writing in the Guadeloupean writer’s oeuvre. Singh’s interview with Condé appears in JWIL’s November 2022 issue. We honor her life and her work.
