In Memory of Maryse Condé (11 February 1934--2 April 2024)
In Memory of Maryse Condé (11 February 1934--2 April 2024)
It is with deep sorrow that the Small Axe Project notes and tries to digest the passing of the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (11 February 1934--2 April 2024). Novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, teacher, and more besides, she was a formidable and incisive thinker and an elegant composer of pages of prose. Across an extraordinary body of work, including such unforgettable books as Ségou (1984, 1985), and Moi, Tituba ... Sorcière de Salem (1986), she mined the gendered character of the historical trauma of the African diasporic condition. Significantly, Condé belonged to a generation of Caribbean intellectuals and artists whose direct experience of the African continent (Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana) was formative for their moral-political sense of post-emancipation Black presents in the Americas. One only has to read her memoirs, Le cœur à rire et à pleurer : souvenirs de mon enfance (1999), and La Vie sans fards (2012). She will be missed by us all, those who knew her, and those who didn't. Bon voyage Madame Condé.
Photo of Maryse Condé Copyright Matsas Leemage-Hollandse Hoogte