Maryse Conde

I was a Maryse Conde fan (forgive me for not putting the accent over the "e") after I read Desirada. I think it was the globalness of the book. Conde can take you from Guadeloupe to Piscataway, New Jersey in one story. And her language is so bittersweet...

But, have I found even a deeper appreciation for her after studying her in my Caribbean fiction class. I wrote a paper about her book, The Last of the African Kings called "The Disorder of Marsye Conde". The paper was also based on an essay she wrote about disorder and the West Indian writer. In her eyes, disorder is the gateway to creativity. By disrupting the order of things, one can be free to create.

The Last of the African Kings is about a couple, a black American woman and a Guadeloupean (sp?) man who struggle with identity in their own ways. Debbie, the wife, revels in the past, Conde refers to her as the Black Americana queen who lives so much in the past that she can't enjoy the present. It is only when she is in Guadoloupe and meets Spero, that she is able to let go..because she is not constantly reminded about Jim Crow. Conde's creation of Debbie takes shots at the how Conde viewed the Negritude movement (glorifying an African past without really understanding or appreciating Africa). Spero on the other hand suffers from Caribbean rootlessness. He is the descendant of the "last African king" but doesn't want to spend his life idolizing an ancestor, he rather live in the day.

Okay that is enough plot, you have to read the book for yourself. But in studying Conde, she has some really liberating ideas about the Black American writer, the West Indian writer, the Black American person, the West Indian person, etc. Granted, I may not agree with all of them, but the fact that she is so brazen with her ideas and uses her fiction as a political voice, makes me admire her greatly.

In an interview I read she said that she wrote The Last of the African Kings when she was depressed and that it was a bitter novel. I would agree with that. It was a dose of tough love, some of the ideas she tackled (cultural baggage, black love, hypocrisies in the African diaspora, etc) made me be like, whoa "she went there" (especially since this book was read in a class where I was the only black student), but these are issues that need to be discussed so that they can be resolved.

I already have Who Slashed Celanire's Throat, so that is next (or rather, high on the "to read" list).