Highlighting Black Intellectuals and Artists Around the World: Maryse Condé

Join us in celebrating amazing Black intellectuals and artists around the world! Today we are celebrating Maryse Condé @maryseconde, an iconic author of over ten novels, short stories, essays, and articles on African and Caribbean literature.

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Maryse Boucolon (later Condé) was born in Guadeloupe in 1937. Her parents were among the first black instructors in Guadeloupe. Her mother, Jeanne Quidal, directed her own school for girls, and her father, who had been an educator, founded the small bank “Le Caisse Coopérative des prêts” which was later renamed as “La Banque Antillaise.” Condé began writing at an early age. Before the age of 12 she had written a one-act, one-person play, as a gift for her mother’s birthday. She did not publish her first novel, Hérémakhonon until she was nearly 40 because, as she said: “I didn’t have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world.” Condé would not reach her current prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer until the publication of her third novel, Ségou (1984). Following the success of Ségou, in 1985 Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the US and became a professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbia University in New York City in 1995. Condé has taught at various universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. She retired from teaching in 2005. Condé’s novels explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986); the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Ségou (1984-1985); and the 20th-century building of the Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in Tree of Life (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. Her first novel Hérémakhonon, was published in 1976. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: “I could not write anything… unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.”