Maryse Liliane Appoline Boucolon, known as Maryse Condé, was a Guadeloupean novelist, born on February 11, 1937, in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe). She published numerous historical novels, including *Segou and Moi* and *I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem*… Through them, she introduced readers to Africa, which held a central place in her heart.
“La Vie sans fards is perhaps the most universal of my books. Despite the very specific context and the local references, it is not only about a Guadeloupean woman trying to discover her identity in Africa. First and foremost, it is about a woman struggling with the difficulties of life. She is confronted with this crucial and timeless choice: to be a mother or to exist solely for herself.”
Maryse Condé was born in 1937 in Pointe-à-Pitre, in Guadeloupe. She was the youngest of a family of eight children. In 1953, she left to study at the Lycée Fénelon, then at the Sorbonne, where she studied English.
During this period, she became interested in the common stereotypes surrounding the French-speaking Caribbean population, but also in Africa and its history, more specifically in the relationship Black people maintain with the rest of the world…
Her marriage and departure for Africa
At the end of her studies, she married Mamadou Condé, an African actor, in 1959. She moved with him to Côte d’Ivoire, where she spent ten years. During that time, she traveled throughout several African countries where she taught: Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal. She also worked as a journalist for the BBC and in France.
Her return to the United States
She divorced in 1981. A few years later, Maryse married Richard Philcox, an Englishman and the translator of most of her novels into English.
After many years of teaching at Columbia University, she now (2006) divides her time between her native island and New York.
Her works
Maryse Condé’s novels are extremely rich and explore issues such as sex, race, and culture across different places and periods, including the witchcraft trials in Salem, in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), and the Bambara kingdom of Ségou (present-day Mali) during the 19th century in Segou. She also wrote novels for the magazine Je bouquine.
Her political activities
She chaired the Committee for the Memory of Slavery, created in January 2004 for the implementation of the Taubira Law, which recognized the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity in 2001.
In this capacity, it was on her proposal that President Jacques Chirac established May 10 as the National Day of Commemoration of Slavery, celebrated for the first time in 2006.
In 2018, Maryse Condé was honored for her body of work with the New Academy Prize in Literature, an alternative award created when the Nobel Prize in Literature was not awarded in 2018 due to a sexual scandal involving the Swedish Academy.
QUOTES:
“Words, as everyone knows, are not only used to create meaning. They play, they make love. They compose music.”
“The novel is somewhat like the dress shaped by life.”
“To be at peace with oneself, one must accept oneself as though one were the foundation and the birth of everything.”
“Laughter is the first step toward liberation. We begin by laughing. We laugh, therefore we free ourselves. We free ourselves, therefore we can fight.”
[https://www.nofi.media/2018/02/georges-desportes-symbole-de-la-litterature-martiniquaise/41722](https://www.nofi.media/2018/02/georges-desportes-symbole-de-la-litterature-martiniquaise/41722)
