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The Return To and Beyond the Mother: Maryse Condé and Representations of Maternity

An analysis of three autobiographical or biographical texts by Maryse Condé—Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood, ‘The Voyager In, the Voyager Out’, and Victoire, les saveurs et les mots—shows a recreation of the life of the writer's grandmother that addresses issues specific to the construction of identity in the French Antilles. In particular, two themes are highlighted by the representation of the relationships between Condé and her mother, Jeanne Boucolon, and Jeanne and her own mother. As well as the theme of the often painful mother-daughter relationship, there is the theme of voyages. These themes show that self-representation in the literature of the Caribbean often articulates the struggle to repair relationships that have been damaged by colonization, by the slave trade and the rigidly hierarchical society that resulted. There is often a reaching back to the mother or another maternal figure such as the grandmother to reconstruct personal history and possibly to resolve pain caused by the rupture experienced by the peoples brought from Africa and their descendants. The work of Édouard Glissant, in particular the concept of ‘opacity’ which allows the Other his or her right to remain unknown or unknowable, is useful to our understanding of Condé's representation of the women of her family; her recreation of her grandmother's life is a type of ‘mythical narrative’ that allows her to claim her grandmother as part of who she is, yet at the same time leave this person/character in some ways inexplicable and therefore uncircumscribed. These texts show Antillean history and relationships with an attention to the individual lived experience and the ways in which this experience is shaped by society.