Maryse Condé Obituary, Death Cause – Maryse Condé, a Guadeloupean author who had written more than 20 books, was also an activist and an academic. She was the only person to ever win the New Academy Prize in Literature. Condé passed away at the age of 90. Condé, whose works that include Segu and Hérémakhonon, was considered to be a giant of the West Indies. He wrote candidly about colonialism, sexuality, and the black diaspora, and he brought readers all over the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history. His works include both novels and essays.
While writing about the “unputdownable and unforgettable” epic Segu, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo praised her as “an extraordinary storyteller.” Author Justin Torres wrote that “one is never on steady ground with Condé; she is not an ideologue, and hers is not the kind of liberal, safe, down-the-line morality that leaves the reader unimplicated.” Bertrand Russell was the recipient of the Booker Prize. Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who has won multiple awards and is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on X that Condé was the “Grande Dame of World Letters” and that she had left behind a body of work that was “driven by the quest for a humanism based on the ramifications of our identities and the fractures in history.”
Condé, who was born Maryse Boucolon in Guadeloupe in 1934 and was the youngest of eight children, referred to herself as a “spoiled child” who was “oblivious to the outside world.” During an interview with the Guardian, she stated that her parents “were convinced France was the best place in the world” and that they never taught her about slavery. She was dismissed from school after two years of attending school in Paris, where she had gone to receive her education at the age of sixteen. “When I came to study in France, I discovered people’s prejudices,” she said. Simply due to the fact that I was black, people thought I was of lower quality. I needed to demonstrate to them that I was indeed gifted, and I also needed to demonstrate to everyone that the color of my skin did not matter; what mattered is what is in your mind and in your heart.
While she was attending the Sorbonne, she began to learn about the history of Africa and slavery from other students. She also discovered that she understood and sympathized with the Communist movement. As a result of her intimate relationship with Haitian activist Jean Dominique, she became pregnant. For the purpose of restoring her status as a black single mother, she married the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé in 1958. She later stated that this decision was made in order to achieve this status. After a few months, their relationship became strained, and Condé relocated to the Ivory Coast. He then spent the subsequent decade in various African countries, such as Guinea, Senegal, Mali, and Ghana, where he interacted with notable figures such as Che Guevera, Malcolm X, Julius Nyerere, Maya Angelou, and the future president of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, as well as the Senegalese film-maker and author Ousmane Semale.
Condé struggled to find her place in Africa because she was unable to understand the local languages and was assumed to have sympathy with the French colonial government. After some time had passed, she would comment, “I am now aware of how inadequately prepared I was to experience Africa.” “I had a very romantic vision, and I simply wasn’t prepared, either politically or socially,” she said. Up until the point that she was suspected of engaging in subversive action in Ghana and deported to London, where she worked as a BBC producer for a period of two years, she continued to articulate her opinions. In the end, she went back to France, where she attended Paris-Sorbonne University and worked toward earning her master’s degree and doctorate in comparative literature in 1975.
Her first novel, Hérémakhonon, was released in 1976. Condé stated that she waited until she was nearly 40 years old to write her novel because she “did not have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world.” As the story progresses, the protagonist, a Guadeloupean woman who has received her education in Paris, comes to the realization that her quest to discover who she is is more of an internal journey than a geographical one. After some time had passed, Condé recalled the Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo telling her, “Africa… has codes that are easy to understand.” This is due to the fact that you are looking for something different, specifically a land that would serve as a foil and enable you to become what you have always dreamed of being. And on that level, there is no one who can assist you. “I believe that she might have been correct,” Condé wrote in a later piece.
She had been separated from her spouse for a considerable amount of time before she filed for divorce in 1981. The following year, she married Richard Philcox, who was one of her English-language translators. Her third novel, Segu, which was published in 1984, was the catalyst for her rise to popularity as a contemporary Caribbean writer. The novel chronicles the life of Dousika Traore, a royal adviser in the African country of the same name during the latter half of the 18th century. Over the course of sixty years, she is forced to confront the growing problems posed by religion, colonization, and the existence of the slave trade. The New York Times referred to it as “the most significant novel about black Africa published in many a year,” and it went on to become a best-seller with tremendous success.
