STEPPING OUTSIDE THE MAGIC CIRCLE: THE CRITICAL THOUGHT OF MARYSE CONDÉ

Romanic Review, May-Nov 2003 by Nesbitt, Nick

The writings of Maryse Condé are critical to their core. Her novels dismantle the pieties of everyday life to look at what lies underneath: the fragile narcissism of subjects who erect façades of ideology and self-importance around the naked core of their being to ward off ever-impinging social violence. This social violence can take the most varied forms; from the most intimate tribulations between mother and daughter, to the anonymous violence of neocolonial societies of systematic dependency, in which every individual encounters constant daily reminders-in employment, in consumption, in leisure and travel, in education, in language-that it is not they, but a far off Metropolis that determines the parameters of their existence. To survive in such a context, to survive not simply as human animals who have a right to minimal social benefits (the health care, unemployment insurance, aid for single mothers, and other benefits that Guadeloupeans enjoy in contrast to many other Caribbean nations), but to survive as human individuals against the constant undermining of one's autonomy is, according to Condé, to construct and produce.

Like the slaves who were their ancestors, slaves who refused to be reduced to animalistic quotas of production by their masters, but who rather produced a new culture from the shattered remains they found at hand-Wolof, Norman and Breton, Bantu, East Indian, Native American, Chinese, and many others-the contemporary subjects of French neocolonialism produce, constantly. In their situation of structuralized dependency on the Metropolis, however, certain paths of production remain blocked. Where would one find the capital to start a hotel when one must compete with Meridian, Sofitel, and Accor? How can one place locally-produced goods in competition with massproduced European items, particularly when a local preference for all that is European negates any value-added benefit from the marker "Made in Guadeloupe"? But human subjects will produce as long as they live.

The critical thought of Maryse Condé seeks out the heteronymous productions we resort to when our autonomy is blocked. We barricade ourselves within a private world, of family or romance or fiction, where the illusion of autonomy can persist, until eventually the reigning structural dependency infiltrates its way into our lives through cracks in the walls we have built with the received, pre-socialized materials we have at hand (the ideologies and beliefs of parents, educators, friends, the media). Every subject, every individual, exists in his or her individuality as a construct of pre-existing society. There is no individuality prior to socialization; the maroon cannot escape into autonomy, but only into the sheer animality of mere survival in the forests. ' What Rousseau called the inferior "freedom" of the state of nature may indeed be preferable to the violence and terror of slavery, and perhaps even to the soft contemporary dependency of neocolonialism. It is, however, both an unsustainable illusion in a globalizing world and unequal to the modern possibility of autonomy first imagined by Rousseau and actualized beyond anything he could imagine in the Americas in the events of the Haitian Revolution. Human autonomy is not an originary human essence, the foundation of our "Being," but a construct and production of modernity. The Enlightenment created the ideological conditions for Louis Delgres' 1802 revolution that, like the Haitian Revolution, was addressed not to ameliorating local working conditions, but to a universal claim for human autonomy and the rule of law irregardless of color ("A l'univers entier, le dernier cri de l'innocence" wrote Delgrès before he blew himself up, along with his troops, and a few of those Napoleon sent to reconquer Guadeloupe).

Paradoxically, the same unceasing colonial progression of modernity into every dimension of Guadeloupean life has so far served primarily to capture colonized subjects in a net of systematic dependency, from consumerist consumption to political irrelevancy as subjects of Matignon and the EU. While what we make of those materials is indeterminate, everything we use to build our fortress of subjectivity-our biological destiny, language, food, and beliefsystems-comes from beyond us, pre-formed. And when social violence forces subjects to flee into the masquerade of alienated subjectivity, every individual must constantly bail out the encroaching floodwaters that seep through the cracks of that barricade. The materials used to construct each fortress of subjectivity itself are, in this antagonistic situation, like so many Trojan horses that constantly re-import the social violences a fragile subject strives to keep at bay. It is in this sense that one may describe the work of Maryse Condé as profoundly critical: instead of constantly helping subjects to patch up these leaks in their individual belief systems (whether Créoliste, Africaniste, Doudouiste, Frandste, Etats-Uniste or any other -iste), or pandering to identity politics to make one feel beautiful in an ugly world (both internal and external), Condé works to describe the illusory spells subjects weave around themselves, and to rend their veil. This is unquestionably a violent gesture in and of itself, shattering the force of the magic incantations we tell ourselves ("I am free/beautiful/whole/at home/loved"). But no one is forced to read her. Moreover, the hope a reader finds in Condé's work is that in recognizing oneself in the fragile, fictional subjects she describes, one might gain some purchase on one's own life, that one might visualize one's own entanglement in these multiple webs of dependency masquerading as autonomy. Like an analysand gaining insight and, perhaps, some measure of control through knowledge of his or her subjection (to the unconscious, to ideology), Condé's literature hopes to be therapeutic; only, it can never acknowledge this for fear of invoking the reader's defense mechanisms ("Who is she to tell me about being Guadeloupean?"). Each book only hopes silently to find its way to readers who might recognize themselves in the fragile characters described therein.