Conversations with Maryse Condé

by Françoise Pfaff

This book is an exploration of the life and art of Maryse Condé, who first won international acclaim for Segu , a novel about West African experience and the slave trade. Born in Guadeloupe in 1937, Condé lived in Guinea after it won its independence from France. Later she lived in Ghana and Senegal during turbulent, decisive moments in the histories of these countries. Her writings—novels, plays, essays, stories, and children’s books—have led her to an increasingly important role within Africa and throughout the world. Françoise Pfaff met Maryse Condé in 1981, when she first interviewed her. Their friendship grew quickly. In 1991 the two women continued recording conversations about Condé’s geographical sojourns and literary paths, her personality, and her thoughts. Their conversations reveal connections between Condé’s vivid art and her eventful, passionate life. In her encounters with historical and literary figures, and in her opinions on politics and culture, Condé appears as an engaging witness to her time. The conversations frequently sparkle with humor; at other moments they are infused with profound seriousness. Maryse Condé is the recipient of the French literary awards Le Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme and Le Prix de l’Académie Française. She currently teaches at Columbia University and her most recent works include Tree of Life and Crossing the Mangrove .

Genres: Nonfiction

189 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 1996

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem in 2020 and Windward Heights in 2021, I vowed to dive deeper into Maryse Condé's work. She's such a gifted writer and I have loved both novels I have read from her.

Since I'm reading her work in French, it is often a bit more of a daunting task. Not only is my French not the best, Condé, being originally from Guadeloupe, often weaves Creole into her narrative, which makes it stylistically more rich and interesting, but also a bit harder to understand. Therefore, I thought I would read some nonficiton works of Condé first. I'm always interested in a writer's personal life and their opinion/analysis of their own work.

Conversations with Maryse Condé is a collection of eight interviews that Francoise Pfaff organised with Maryse Condé from 1982 to 1994. The interviews give insight into Condé's tumultuous life, her early novels (Hérémakhonon, Une saison à Rihata,Ségou, Moi, Tituba, sorcière… Noire de Salem, La Vie scélérate, and Les Derniers rois mages), and her opinion on literature and other writers.

Unfortunately, most interviews left me somewhat disappointed. They felt disjointed, as they often lacked in context. On top of that, Francoise Pfaff wasn't always asking the right questions, which made a lot of the interviews rather boring. The two writers also didn't dive as deep into Condé's work as I had hoped. If one wanted to get Condé's particular take on her own novels, you won't really find it here. Sure, they are discussed in some parts but not at great length and certainly not analysed.

On top of that, Condé comes across as arrogant and unlikeable. She doesn't seem to take criticism well, even though she insists that she does in one of the interviews (lol). Whenever Pfaff asked a more critical questions Condé rebuffed her in the most childish and disrespectful way, simply claiming that was Pfaff (or other critics) was saying isn't true etc. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

The interviews also didn't really wanna make me pick up another novel of Condé's. And not because she was unlikeable – I don't really care about that – I just mean that the interviews really didn't sell me on any of her novels. The way in which they were discussed made them seem like quite the chore to read tbh. I'm still interested in Ségou and potentially Hérémakhonon, but I'm not sure when I'll feel up for that task.

Funnily enough, since Condé and Pfaff discuss many other authors, this book actually made me curious to check out what these other authors are about, e.g. George Lamming, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Edouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Patrick Chamoiseau, Suzanne Lacascade, Michèle Lacrosil, Wilson Harris, Edward Brathwaite, Earl Lovelace, and Manuel Zapata de Oliveia. Most of them are Caribbean authors, and that's generally a huge gap in my reading life, so I can't wait to see what they are about.

As usual, I'm leaving you with a list of things that I found notable from this book:

– At age sixteen, Condé left Guadeloupe for Paris, where she completed high school and attained university degrees in French, classics, and English
– Condé’s parents isolated her and her siblings as a child, they weren’t allowed to associate with most other Black children, nor with mixed, nor white kids – overall, her parents only associated with other successful and wealthy Black families on Guadeloupe
– Condé is against seeking literal transcriptions of real-life relationships in novels
– Condé’s mother died shortly after she left for Paris, Condé said that with her her only significant link to Guadeloupe died as well… which is why it took her so long to return to her native island
– In Paris, she became a Marxist
– In Ghana, in 1966, Condé was arrested because she had a Guinean passport and people took her for a Sékou spy … she stayed in prison for a week, thanks to the intervention of a lawyer she intended to marry she was set free; her passport was taken from her and she was deported from the country though!
– “Yes, I think that White or Black, all men are children. A woman’s relationship with men is always maternal: she must constantly comfort them, tell them that they are strong, very handsome, and very intelligent. I believe that all men are like that.”
– “For France, Francophonie is a way to maintain an overseas empire based on linguistic superiority and to strengthen dependency that can exist between a colony and its mother country.”
Condé taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and was annoyed that the students were more interested in “suntans and surfing” than what she had to say
– FP: “Do African and West Indian authors write for Europe?” MC: “I don’t believe so. I write for myself and possibly for those who read my works, whatever their country may be.”
– “Artists and creators may have the duty to listen to our people before it’s too late. In doing this, we may rekindle a pride that they are also about to lose. We may restore their power of speech and imagine what they can be tomorrow. This is the role of creators: not only to preserve the past but also to invent the future.”
– “If you are overly familiar with a place or rooted in it, you cannot write truthfully about it.”
– Condé believes that one cannot be a literary critic and writer at the same time
– Condé’s maiden name is Boucolon
– She started writing fiction later in life because she “had been busy raising my children”
– She started writing plays but when she experienced how difficult and costly it was to stage them she gave up writing them altogether and stuck to novels
– “The notion that theater is better suited for reaching the masses is a myth when plays are written in French (which Condé’s plays were) and conform to petit bourgeois traditions.”
– “I think we are all Césaire’s children.”
– Condé rewrote her book entirely to shift from a third to a first person narrator
– “The novel is not a handbook telling you what to do, and none of my books should be considered as such. I am not offering lessons. I show people who live their own lives.”
– She talks about how criticism/slander affected her, when critics called her “a voyeur and a whore” she cried
– She wrote Segu over the course of two years
– Condé never works with the translators of her works
– She wrote I, Tituba… in six or eight months while she was teaching at a small college in Los Angeles
– “I believe in action for action’s sake. For instance, I am an indépendantiste. I am a militant supporter of Guadeloupe’s independence though I am convinced I’ll never live to see it.”
– “I think that all my books simply say the same thing in different settings.”
– Condé wrote the play “The Tropical Breeze Hotel” for her friend, the Black actress Sonia Emmanuel because she couldn’t find any good roles in Paris => women supporting women
– “Les derniers rois mages may also invite African-American women to undergo a sort of self-criticism. Based on the ones that I know, of course, I wonder if they don’t expect too much from a man.” – EHHH YIKES?
– Condé loved Baldwin when she was young, she read Go Tell It on the Mountain several times, with passion. She also liked Morrison’s early works, Beloved and Jazz not so much. And she didn’t like Richard Wright at all, same for Ralph Ellison.
– Condé compared Morrison to Walker, and comes to the conclusion that Morrison is more politically correct, “she doesn’t venture into topics like excision that may displease or irritate people. In my opinion, she doesn’t disturb anybody.” (HARD DISAGREE … have we read the same books????)

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The awareness of failure must not prevent or retard action.”

This collection of interviews, conducted and translated by Françoise Pfaff, cover a wide range of topics. Amongst them Maryse Condé's life, her beliefs, her observations on race and power, her opinions of other writers's works, and, of course, comments on her own works.

Part of her earlier life, her childhood specifically, I already knew as I've read her brilliant memoir Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood. Condé was born to an upper class family in Guadeloupe, her parents being amongst the first Black professionals in her country, went to study in Paris as a young lady and was disillusioned by the bourgeois upbringing she had after encountering leftist and Marxist beliefs, left to live in West Africa, specifically Guinea, where she was further disenchanted when Touré, a self-professed Marxist, used terror against his own citizens. In this period she was divorced and raising four children on her own, was arrested, jailed and deported while she was in Ghana after Nkrumah was ousted, and lived a life of constant turbulence and drifting for a while. This all brings to mind Condé's own quote from Segu: "Why was life no more than a bridge from disillusion to disillusion?"

So it's no surprise that throughout these conversations, taking place some twenty odd years after all this, have a disenchanted and blunt tone to them. I think Pfaff covered everything she possibly could.

There were certain comments that gave me pause while I read them. Her praise of Naipaul and her fascination at his separation from his West Indian origins, as she criticised it, but since I haven't read his work yet and only know him for his "controversial" statements I won't dwell much on that. Her criticism of Toni Morrison's work, as being politically correct, even while praising her as a great writer and remarkable stylist. This comment is made while she compares Toni to other Black American women writers with more radical leanings in their writing: Lorde, Davis, and Walker. So it seems partly true, but given that Toni's whole writing centred on Black American life and history in the U.S.A, politically correct doesn't seem the right word here to describe it.

Other than that her praise of Ousmane Sembene's films and their importance, which I agree wholeheartedly with, and her exploration of West Indian literature, her love and interest in the African diaspora, amongst other topics, were great to read. The most fascinating point from these conversations to me was her remarks on European criticism, specifically French, to her work. Only as story-telling, without mention of structure and the writer's craft. And about the expectations and entrapments of the Black writer:

"It's a trap that writers of the African diaspora often fall into because we have the misfortune of being published by the Other. The Other confines us to an image, perceives us in a particular way, and we don't always have the possibility of saying no and presenting ourselves differently."

And to expand on this also mentions the conundrum Black writers face while making their art:

"Black writers find themselves in a very difficult situation: on the one hand, they have their own people who read them locally and ask for and expect certain things; and on the other hand, there is the press, which creates literary success, objectifies, stresses exoticism, and asks for something else. In between these two demands, writers have to find themselves."

Overall this is a great collection. Especially for those interested in Condé's work or those who have read her work. This was truly thorough and gives a sense of Maryse's work and of her ironic personality, her honesty, and her intelligence.

[Trine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in the vast and complex literary oeuvre of Maryse Condé.

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever it comes to nonfiction I find it a good idea to read the introduction, even if it's just a skim, so I can best understand the goals the writer/editor had for the text. This way I avoid making a public fool of myself by negatively assessing a text for doing or not doing things the interviewer and translator, in this case, explicitly stated that they did and did not do in an introduction not longer than a page and a half.

Interested in preserving the natural flow of conversation as much as possible, Françoise Pfaff edited the interviews with a light hand, resulting in the typical meanderings from an introduced topic. But it never becomes boring. If you need critical deep dives that you can lift directly for a school assignment I suppose this material won't suit you either. Pfaff stated she took a more biographical approach to her questions. And yet there is still so much rich material here I wonder why anyone would impose Spark Notes-like expectations on two intellectual Black literary luminaries about their business.

What order Pfaff did impose was to excerpt and organize the interviews according to topics on Maryse Condé's childhood and specific works that marked particular periods in her life. As a reader who came to know Condé as a novelist, this book helped to expand my idea of her as a playwright as well as a children's literature writer. This grounded her more firmly in Guadeloupe: many of the plays were staged there and Guadeloupean troupes performed it elsewhere. What I read of her before tended to situate her as a writer in the USA or France but not so much in Guadeloupe. There were also more references to the other Caribbean countries than I expected, especially Jamaica, Haiti and Panama. On occassion Condé had to correct Pfaff's assumptions on what people in general did or did not know with a line like, This is common knowledge among West Indians.

Pfaff asked questions with firm ideas of what Condé wrote and why she wrote it which naturally resulted in Condé's answers being ironic or direct refutations in turn. I loved it. It was a refreshing difference from other interviews in which authors do their best to be forever diplomatic. I didn't always agree with her or I at least had questions but she never provided answers that were easy to dismiss. Beyond her own childhood, personal life and work she commented on other writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Fanon.

It is, in short, a treasure of a text both for world literature and Caribbean peoples in particular. I remain hopeful there are definite plans to translate the second book of this series into English soon.