“When you write,
you give your version of reality.”
Elizabeth Nunez.
Leaving the church in Sainte-Luce, Martinique. Taken at the start of 20th century.
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Nunez in full bloom
“Still waters run deep.” The
worn expression takes on a polished gleam with Elizabeth Nunez, who sends readers
reeling with her latest book, Bruised Hibiscus, in which she reveals the pain and
vengeance of two women who dare to defy the political and cultural taboos of colonial
Trinidad in the 1950s. The dizzying force of the novel seems at odds with the author’s
privileged upbringing in Trinidad and now tenured position as English professor and
director of the Black Writers’ Institute at Medgar Evers College in New York. At
the age of 56, Nunez appears to use her own security as a springboard—rather than
refuge—to explore life’s passions.
In addition to her three novels and scholarly publications, Nunez also contributes
to the literary world as director of the National Black Writers’ Conference, which
aims to improve opportunities for authors of colour, especially those from her beloved
Caribbean.
• When
Rocks Dance
(Ballantine, 1988)
• Beyond the Limbo Silence
(Seal, 1998)
• Bruised Hibiscus
(Seal, 2000)
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Condé at
the helm
Storyteller, activist, teacher
and critic–but perhaps one title best applies to Maryse Condé: navigator.
For the grande dame of Caribbean literature incites us to explore ever-shifting terrain,
from the cruelty of the slave trade and the self-hate caused by racism to the spiral
of lovers’ passion. In threading through the web of relations between Africa, the
Caribbean and Europe, Condé calls on her personal experience. Born in 1937
in Guadeloupe, she left her comfortable family at the age of 16 to study in Paris,
where the spirit of decolonization and the Négritude movement led her to criss-cross
Western Africa, first with her Guinean husband and then as a single mother of four
children. Returning to Paris in 1973, she completed a doctorate in Caribbean literature
from the Sorbonne while launching her literary career. Her first great success was
her Segu series (1984), renowned for its historically accurate and engaging portrayal
of the impact of Islam on animist West Africa and the brutality of the slave trade.
In 1985, Condé won a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the U.S. and went on
to set up the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Columbia University where
she continues to teach. Her 11 works of fiction (translated in several languages)
have earned her numerous prizes, including the prestigious French awards, Le Grand
Prix Litteraire de la Femme (1986) and the Prix Yourcenar (1999). Perhaps more importantly,
Condé is one of the few “foreign” authors to be accepted by Africans as one
of their own. She and her husband, Richard Philcox, divide their time between New
York and Guadeloupe.
• Selected
titles: Windward Heights (Soho Press, 1999); Desirada (Distribooks
International, 1998); The Last of the African Kings (University of Nebraska,
1997); I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Ballantine, 1994).
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The
celebrated author speaks openly of her new book, passion and politics with Elizabeth
Nunez, a leading literary light from Trinidad
EN: I was very moved
by a talk you gave two years ago about growing up in Guadeloupe and thinking of yourself
as no different from a French person. Could you talk about why it was important for
you to go to Africa?
MC: Elizabeth, I remember when I took you to a restaurant in Guadeloupe how surprised
and shocked you were to see that all the cooks and waiters were white, French people.
So imagine what it was like growing up in Guadeloupe some years back. The teachers
in the schools were French. The priests, when we went to Mass with our families,
were white. We lived in a completely white, French environment. It seemed normal
to me. I did not ask any questions. Of course, when I looked at my face in the mirror
I could see that it was black, but for me, colour was totally unimportant. I felt
I was exactly like the people around me, that is to say, French and white. Then when
I went to France I discovered that the colour of my skin meant something. It was
not an accident that I was black. There was a deep difference between me and the
people whose skin was white. I had to go to Africa to discover the meaning and importance
of that difference.
EN: And what did you discover?
MC: At the beginning I thought the difference was that black people had a common
culture that was different from the culture of French people. I believed that all
black people were united by a common origin, a common history. We were basically
one people divided by the evils of slavery. I, who was born in Guadeloupe, was separated
from the people in Guinea, where I was in Africa, simply because of the slave trade.
EN: Do you think differently now?
MC: I made an important discovery in Africa: I did not share the same language
as the people in Guinea. We did not eat the same food–this may seem trivial to you,
but it is important. We did not dress the same way, we did not enjoy the same type
of music, we did not share the same religion. In a few months, I found myself terribly
isolated. I could not even communicate with my Guinean husband. So I made a second
discovery: race, in fact, is not the essential factor. What is important is culture.
As I did not share the culture of the Guinean people, of the African people, I left
Africa, and, as a result, my marriage ended.
EN: Then would it be fair to say that culturally there are now more similarities
between you and your husband, Richard Philcox, though he is white and British, than
there were between you and your first husband, though he was black and African?
MC: When I met Richard twenty years ago, I was in my period of political activism
and I could not see myself with a white man. My children, also, were very nationalistic
and so they were shocked and disturbed that I would be involved with a white man.
But eventually I came to understand that the colour of one’s skin does not matter.
I found that a white man was closer to me than my first husband, even closer to me
than the majority of the people I knew. It is a matter of understanding: in a word,
love. Marriage should not be viewed as part of a political agenda. It concerns the
feelings and personal choices of two people.
EN: To return to the time when you left Africa, did you go back to Guadeloupe or
to France?
MC: One has to make a living, so I went to France, though it was difficult there
for me to find a job. But in France I immersed myself in the Guadeloupean and Martiniquan
society living as a person in exile. Five years later, I went back to Guadeloupe.
EN: So what are your thoughts now about Africa? Do you sometimes feel ashamed of
Africa when you hear stories of the corruption there? I often think that a cruel
joke is being played on us today. Just as we are beginning to restore our pride in
our rich African heritage, we are being bombarded with media reports about the corruption
that seems to be rampant in Africa.
MC: I lived for twelve years in Africa. I must confess they were the most difficult
years of my life. I was in Guinea and Ghana. One cannot deny the corruption of the
régimes there. The people in those regions are suffering from the evils of
their rulers. They are dying of hunger and disease. We have to face the fact that
there is a lot of evil and hardship in Africa. But it should not lead us to conclude
that Africa is inferior. It took years for European countries to arrive at democracy.
Even now many of them have not achieved it. France, for example, is constantly being
ripped apart by strikes and riots. So why should we be ashamed of the problems of
Africa? They are aggravated by neocolonialism, by the lack of education for the people.
This situation is the consequence of many years of colonialism, of independence that
happened under the worst possible conditions. So I am not ashamed at all. Africa
is trying hard to find solutions. I believe that one day it will.
EN: In your novel The Last of the African Kings you seem to satirize those middle-class
African Americans who speak only in glowing terms about the African people and are
critical of those who focus on the corruption that exists there. You wrote about
a fictitious “prestigious black college in Atlanta where duty towards one’s race
was taught as devoutly as science and literature.”
MC: Those African Americans who think this way are simply trying to find a way
to hide their deep inferiority complex. They are ashamed of Africa as it is today,
and they prefer to lie about the corruption and evil there. Let’s face it: Africa
has been robbed of its grandeur, of its power, of its magnificence. If we keep having
the kind of discourse that conceals these painful facts, we will have an incomplete
view of Africa. It is time we realize that we have a duty towards the suffering of
our people. I am not interested in fighting for reparation for slavery or for financial
aid. I am fighting to find a solution that I can give to the people of Africa who
are in despair, who need to find a way to restore faith in themselves. To quote [Jamaican
black nationalist] Marcus Garvey, “I would like to teach the black man to find beauty
in himself.” The problem for me is not fighting white people who are bad and evil,
but fighting our own people who are bad and evil.
EN: Yet you write a lot about slavery, which I find unusual for a Caribbean writer.
Caribbean people seem to sweep such stories under the rug. We seem to want to think
well of the “mother country,” of the Europeans. Recently, a British expatriate reviewer
in Trinidad, bristling under the criticism of colonialism in my latest novel Bruised
Hibiscus, implied that I had bitten the hand that had fed me. I was shocked by the
silence that followed her review, even from my family. No one stood up to say the
obvious–that it was I who had fed the British through slavery and colonialism. What
do you hope to achieve with the stories you tell about slavery?
MC: People often ask me for whom am I writing. The answer is I am writing for
myself. I write about slavery, Africa, the condition of black people throughout the
world because I want to order my thoughts, to understand the world, and to be at
peace with myself. I write to try to find answers to the questions I ask myself.
Writing for me is a type of therapy, a way to be safe and sound.
EN: So you don’t have an instructive goal in mind?
MC: No, not really. It would be too easy to say that I am writing to educate
my people. For the early generation of writers, like Aimé Césaire,
that was their goal–teaching, writing for their people. For myself, for my generation,
we are much more modest. We are writing to make the world understandable to us first
of all, and if it is understandable to us, perhaps others will understand the world
better.
EN: Is this why you do not write your books in Creole? According to some intellectuals
like Patrick Chamoiseau in Martinique, as Caribbean writers we should write our stories
in Creole, the language of the majority of the people in the Caribbean.
MC: I refuse to accept that kind of dichotomy between French and Creole. As I
like to say, Maryse Condé does not write in French or Creole. Maryse Condé
writes in Maryse Condé. Each of us has to find a voice, a way of expressing
the emotions, the inner impressions that we have, and to do that we should use all
the languages that are at our disposal. In my last novel, Célanire cou-coupé,
there is a glossary at the end of the book. In it you will find words in African
languages, in Creole languages, in Spanish. In order to express the story I wanted
to tell, in the manner I wanted, I had to use many resources. That kind of narrow
choice between French and Creole is a political choice. In politics it is necessary
to speak in the language that can be best understood by our people, that is closest
to our people, but when we write, we should be totally free to choose the medium
that is best suited to our desires and aspirations.
EN: And for you, is that language French?
MC: My French, my own brand of French. It is not the language you hear in France.
It is a combination of the language of a person born in Guadeloupe, who listens to
the many different sounds of language, and my own personal language.
EN: So what makes someone an authentic Caribbean writer?
MC: I hate the word authentic. Here, I am, Maryse Condé, born in Guadeloupe,
having lived in Africa and Paris, and now living and working in New York. Here you
are, Elizabeth Nunez, born in Trinidad, working and living for most of your life
in New York. We are both authentic Caribbean writers. It is a question of a personal
choice, how we relate to our mother country in the Caribbean, how we see our place
in the world, how we see ourselves and who we are.
EN: Yet I sometimes think that because I live outside of the Caribbean, people there
think either I have lost the right to write about the Caribbean or that I have been
away too long to be able to write authentically about it. Do you ever experience
a similar anxiety?
MC: What does it mean to write authentically about the Caribbean? When you write,
you give your version of reality. I am never anxious to justify myself to the public.
If they believe that I am not a true Caribbean writer, that’s fair enough, but I
do believe that I have all the right to speak about Guadeloupe and that I am a total,
genuine Guadeloupean writer.
EN: But do you think there is a distinctive Caribbean literature?
MC: Yes, but it is difficult to define. Edwidge Danticat [a young Haitian author
living in New York] is writing an aspect of Caribbean literature. You, Elizabeth,
are writing an aspect of Caribbean literature. I am writing an aspect of Caribbean
literature and the people who are writing at home, who never leave home–Patrick Chamoiseau
for example–they are writing an aspect of Caribbean literature. The totality of all
these different voices compose a symphony which is Caribbean literature. I am not
going to define it because it is too complex, too plural, too changing to have only
one narrow definition.
EN: Some people label me a feminist writer because of the strong female characters
in my novels. But the truth is that I don’t deliberately try to create strong women.
My characters are patterned after the women who have influenced my life: those who
refused to see themselves as victims and took charge of their lives. There are also
very strong female characters in your novels. Would you say you are a feminist writer?
MC: My answer is similar to yours. I was educated by a strong mother and a strong
grandmother. My sisters are strong. All the women I knew in Guadeloupe were strong.
They triumphed over the conditions that limited them. My books are a reflection of
what I see in life. I don’t think I am a feminist. I write about what I know.
EN: I loved your novel, Windward Heights. It was liberating to see Emily Brontë’s
classic work through the eyes of a black cast of characters. You effectively dismantled
racist theories that would dispute our common humanity. Was this your intention or
did you have more personal reasons for writing your novel?
MC: Somebody gave me Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when I was about 15
and was still living in Guadeloupe. I was a very sombre child, a very lonely child.
My mother died when I was very young and for years I tried to reconnect with her.
I looked for her everywhere, in nature, everywhere. When I read Wuthering Heights,
I felt it was written for me. I identified completely with Heathcliff’s passion to
find Cathy after her death. I wrote my novel to prove that in spite of differences
in time, conditions, or ideology, women could communicate with each other because
we share common desires and experiences. Emily Brontë could speak to Maryse
Condé more than a century later because her story was similar to my personal
history. I was compelled to rewrite Brontë’s story, not to show the differences
between Caribbean women and English women, but, rather, to show what we had in common.
EN: I notice that you begin the book by saying you hope Emily Brontë will approve
of your interpretation of her masterpiece. Did that wish for her approval limit you
in any way?
MC: I must confess that I totally forgot Emily Brontë, the author, when
I was writing my novel. What I concentrated on was the passion between Cathy and
Heathcliff, the excessive love that fused these two characters. But I read Brontë’s
novel often, and I kept it on my desk open to the page where Cathy says, “I am Heathcliff.”
That is a beautiful line. It tells about the intensity of passion possible between
two people. When I was finished writing my novel, I wondered what Brontë would
think of it, but it was not a serious question I asked myself. I never tried to compete
with Brontë. She posed no problem for me.
EN: Can you talk a little about your work at Columbia University? I know you created
the Department of Francophone Studies there. In fact, you are the chairperson.
MC: In New York there is a lot of space devoted to the English- and Spanish-
speaking Caribbean people, but there is hardly any space for French-speaking Caribbean
people. It seems as if we don’t exist. When I tell people I am from Guadeloupe, they
are puzzled. They have never heard of Guadeloupe. When I was invited to teach Caribbean
literature at Columbia University, I felt I had a duty to use my position to create
a department to attract people from the French Caribbean so that they would have
a space to talk about themselves and about their work and so make their presence
known. I won’t say I changed the face of New York–that would be arrogant–but at Columbia,
at least, people now know that Aimé Césaire is not the only Francophone
writer from the Caribbean.
EN: You are far too modest, Maryse. I know you are also an advocate for all Caribbean
literature. Not only have you organized some major conferences on the subject but
you recently established the book prize, Prix Des Amériques Insulaires et
de la Guyane, for the best literary work written in any of the languages of the Caribbean.
MC: Some people criticize me for accepting money from Amédée Huyghues
Despointes who funded the prize. They say he is a béké [a white Creole
from the plantocracy], but the man loves Guadeloupe as I love Guadeloupe. He is concerned
about the country’s future. We are in the year 2000. We should be finished with these
divisions between black and white and move towards unity.
EN: You have a new book, Célanire cou-coupé.
MC: It’s a departure from my other novels. My daughters have been complaining
that all my novels are sad and painful, so I wrote a comical novel, a fantastic novel.
It is based on a story I read in a newspaper in Guadeloupe, in 1995, about a baby
girl who was found dead, her throat slashed, in a heap of rubbish.
EN: That doesn’t sound like a happy novel, Maryse.
MC: Listen and tell me what you think. Everyone wanted to know why the baby was
killed that way. I mean, a woman who wants to get rid of her baby doesn’t usually
slash the baby’s throat. There is a special cruelty and malice in doing such a thing.
So people in Guadeloupe began to speculate that the baby was used as a human sacrifice.
In my novel, I imagined she was brought back to life by a doctor who repaired her
throat. The girl then goes in search of those who murdered her.
EN: That is a very sad story.
MC: Wait. The girl begins to attack everything that we think of as sacred. For
example, she goes to Africa at the beginning of colonization. When she sees that
colonization is failing because there is no communication between Africans and Europeans,
she decides that the way to improve the situation is to have a bordello where African
women could make love to white men. Ah, you are laughing.
EN: That is funny.
MC: So, you see, I was not wrong to say the novel is comical.
EN: Farcical.
MC: Yes, that is the word.
EN: How do you manage to do all that you do, Maryse? You are a magnificent writer,
you have a brilliant career as a professor, scholar, administrator, literary activist,
mentor to fledging writers, and yet you have a very active family life.
MC: Honestly, I do not have an answer.
I do not make an effort to be one or the other. I am everything at the same time.
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