Background
Maruse Conde was born on February 11, 1937 Guadeloupe to Auguste and Jeanne Quidal. She was raised in a middle-class family and was the youngest sibling (by over ten years) of four sisters and four brothers.
(Prizewinning writer Maryse Condé reimagines Emily Brontë'...)
Prizewinning writer Maryse Condé reimagines Emily Brontë's passionate novel as a tale of obsessive love between the "African" Razyé and Cathy, the mulatto daughter of the man who takes Razyé in and raises him, but whose treatment goads him into rebellious flight. Retaining the emotional power of the original, Condé shows the Caribbean society in the wake of emancipation.
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Maruse Conde was born on February 11, 1937 Guadeloupe to Auguste and Jeanne Quidal. She was raised in a middle-class family and was the youngest sibling (by over ten years) of four sisters and four brothers.
After completing her secondary studies in 1953 at age 16, she was sent to the Lycée Fénéleon and to the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied English literature and experienced racial discrimination first-hand. During her time as a student in Paris, she became politically active and joined the Communist Youth. She also met Mamadou Condé, an actor she married in August 1959 and with whom she left Paris for Guinea in Africa. This was an important period in her life, where she became deeply involved with Marxism while immersed in what was for her a new and different culture. In addition, she witnessed Guinea s political upheaval and repression under the regime of Sekou Toure.
Condé's years in Africa were hectic yet fruitful to her development as a writer. She was befriended by renowned African activists Kwame Nkrumah and Amilcai Cabral and attended gatherings that included Malcolm X and Ernesto "Ché" Guevara as speakers. She worked at the Ghana Institute of Language in Accra until 1968, when she was arrested for her political activities and later deported. Dur¬ing the early 1970s Condé moved to London to escape political persecution. In London she worked for the BBC, then served as a translator in Senegal, was an editor for Presence Africaine (African Presence) in Paris, and taught at the Université de Paris IV. In addition, she married Richard Philcox, an Englishman who has also translated most of her works.
Condé began her writing career as a critic and playwright, and later became a novelist while living in Paris from 1970 to 1986. The year 1976 was notable for major accomplishments: she earned a doctorate and was appointed lecturer at the Sorbonne and also published her first novel Hérémakhonon. Une Saison à Rihata (One Season in Rihata), her second novel, was published in 1981. Between 1984 and 1985 Condé published a two-part historical novel titled Sega, and The Children of Segue, both of which became bestsellers establishing her international reputation as a novelist.
After living abroad for more than 30 years, Condé returned to Guadeloupe in 1986, making the island her official home while she held professorial appointments abroad. Her 1986 novel Moi, Tutuba, sorcière noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem), a fictionalized biography of the forgotten witch of Salem, was awarded the Gran Prix Littéraire de la Femme, hi 1992 she published Les derniers rois mages (The Last Magi), an account of the spirit of an African king who returns to visit his descendants in South Carolina. More recent publications include the novel La colonie du nouveau monde (The Colony of the New World, 1993); a play, The Tropical Breeze Hotel (1994); and Windward Heights (1999), an interpretation of Emily Brontë's classic work Wuthering Heights as seen through the eyes of a black cast of characters. Her latest works, Célanire cou-coupe (1999) and La Belle Créole (Tire Beautiful Creole, 2001), have yet to be translated into English.
(Prizewinning writer Maryse Condé reimagines Emily Brontë'...)
The age gap between her closest siblings led to feelings of loneliness and boredom. An academically outstanding student, her interest in writing began at age seven with a one-act play she wrote for her mother's birthday her spirits undampened by her mother's less than enthusiastic response to the play's authoritarian characterization of her. Condé was fascinated with what she perceived was the power of the written word to stir people's emotions "I think that's when I wanted to become a writer, to have such power over people. A seven-year-old who can bring her mother to the brink of rage, even tears, feels very, very powerful". Included in her childhood recollections was the insularity of her well-to-do middle-class parents, who prohibited socialization with anyone who was dissimilar to her, such as poor blacks, whites, and people of mixed racial background, referred to as mulattoes.
Quotes from others about the person
Her writing has received literary acclaim. Critics write that "one gains a comprehension of what a revolution is like, what new African nations are like" and conclude that "The wise reader will go home," as the protagonist of Hérémakhonon does, "to continue more calmly to reflect, and observe". Condé believes that women writers have played an important role in the evolution of West Indian literature. She states that women have done this by breaking the "canon" and writing about topics that male writers do not mention, such as the interracial discrimination of "men who preferred women with fair skin and blue eyes, or long hair. So a newer generation of women has spoken out against this".
Her personal life, too, was changed by the clash of cultural values she experienced while living with her mother-in-law. She escaped this situation by fleeing to neighboring Ghana in 1964 with her four children. She divorced Mamadou Condé in 1981.