Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
not just looking at a writer. We are, I think,
looking at a force of nature. Oh, absolutely.
A force of nature is the perfect way to put it.
We're unpacking the life and mind of a woman
who defied practically every single box the world
tried to put her in. We're talking about a literary
titan who recently left us, but whose voice is
probably louder now than it's ever been. We are.
We're talking about the one and only Mary Skande.
A truly fascinating subject. And so timely, like
you said, because we're reflecting on her massive
legacy following her passing just recently. In
April of 2024, she was 90 years old. 90. What
a 90 years. I know, it's a long time, but when
you look at what she packed into those decades,
it honestly feels like she lived about five different
lives. It really does. I was looking through
the research stack, and just the geography alone
is dizzying. You've got Guadeloupe, Paris, West
Africa, the U .S., back to France. It's all over
the map. But usually, you know, when we look
at writers from the Caribbean, specifically Guadeloupe
in her case, there's this expectation of what
their story is supposed to be. Oh, there's a
script. Exactly, you know the drill The themes
of exile, the tragic return home, the desperate
search for roots. It's almost a genre unto itself.
Precisely. And while Condé dealt with all of
that, exile, roots, identity, colonialism, she
did it in a way that just completely dismantled
the traditional narrative. How so? Well, she
was a living paradox. Here is a writer born in
Guadeloupe who spent her formative adult years
in Africa searching for that, you know, that
ancestral connection, only to realize she didn't
fit there either. She is an outsider in both
places. She didn't fit in Europe. She ultimately
didn't even fit the standard definition of a
Caribbean writer or any of the movements that
were popular at the time. She basically created
her own category. She just refused to sit at
anyone else's table. She really did. She famously
said, I write in Mary's Condé. I love that quote.
Not in French, not in Creole, but in her own
singular language. And that quote, I think, is
the North Star for this entire discussion. It's
a declaration of absolute independence. I write
in Mary's Condé. It's so powerful. But before
we get into the weeds of her philosophy and her
incredibly complex life journey, I want to start
with something that really illustrates the scale
of her achievement. We have to talk about the
alternative Nobel. Ah, yes. The new Academy Prize
in Literature. This is such a wild story, and
I feel like a lot of people might have missed
the details because of the controversy surrounding
the main prize at the time. So take us back to
2018. Okay, so 2018, the literary world is gearing
up for the Nobel Prize announcement, and then
just absolute silence. Nothing. It was unprecedented.
The Swedish Academy, which is the body that awards
the Nobel, was completely engulfed in this massive
scandal. It was a huge mess. We're talking about
allegations of... Sexual assault, financial impropriety,
leaks. It was a complete institutional meltdown.
I mean, it was so bad that they had to cancel
the prize for that year just to restructure and
and try to restore confidence. Which leaves a
vacuum. But. The literary world didn't want a
year without a winner. Exactly. A group of Swedish
intellectuals, librarians and cultural figures
felt that literature shouldn't have to suffer
because of the committee's failures. So they
they basically went rogue. They just did it themselves.
They formed the new academy. They invited librarians
all across Sweden to nominate authors and they
held a public vote. And finally, an expert jury
made the final selection. It was a much more
democratic, transparent version of the Nobel.
That's what I love about it. It wasn't just.
a stuffy committee in a back room deciding what's
important. It was a groundswell of support from
actual readers and librarians. Yes. And out of
everyone in the world, the winner was Mary Skande.
Which really speaks to her standing. I mean,
she had been a whispered favorite for the actual
Nobel for years, always on the betting list,
but never quite winning. And what did the citation
say? Why her? The New Academy citation, it really
nailed why she mattered. They praised her for
describing the ravages of colonialism and the
post -colonial chaos, but doing so in a language
that was, and I love this, precise and overwhelming.
Precise and overwhelming. That is such a visceral
description for a writer. And I feel like that
sums up the mission of this deep dive today.
We want to understand what made her voice so
overwhelming. It is a journey worth taking. We're
going to unpack the life of a woman who... rubs
shoulders with Malcolm X and Che Guevara, a woman
who didn't even publish her first novel until
she was nearly 40. Incredible, isn't it? And
a woman who refused to let anyone else define
her. And to understand the woman who ended up
on that stage in 2018 accepting that prize, we
have to start way, way back in the beginning.
We have to go to the source. Okay, let's set
the scene. It's 1934, Puente Peter, Guadalupe.
So to understand Maryse Condé, you have to understand
the specific class dynamics she was born into.
This is key. Okay. She was not born into poverty,
which is such a common trope in Caribbean literature
of that era. You know, the struggling artist
rising from the cane fields. That was not her
story. Not at all. Her birth name was Maryse
Lillian Apolline Bucolon. Her parents were the
definition of the black bourgeoisie. The notes
mention her mother directed a school for girls
and her father founded a bank. A bank. That sounds
incredibly established for that time and place.
It was. Her father, Auguste Bucolon, founded
La Banque Antelese. In the 1930s, in a French
colony like Guadeloupe, being black and owning
a bank was a massive, massive statement of status.
They were pillars of the community. But crucially,
they were also deeply assimilated into French
culture. They saw themselves as French citizens,
first and foremost. They were proud of their
education, their manners, their connection to
the mother country. So she grows up in this environment
of... prestige and maybe a little bit of pretension.
But there was a unique family dynamic, right?
It wasn't just about the money. It was about
the family structure itself. It was all about
age. Mary's was the youngest of eight children.
Eight. But the age gap was massive. Her mother
was 43 when Mary's was born. Her father was 63.
63. That's essentially grandfather's age. Exactly.
Yeah. Her next oldest brother, Guy, had been
born 11 years before her. So she grows up in
this house full of adults or siblings who are
practically adults and already leaving the nest.
She must have been so isolated in a way. She
described herself as l 'enfant gâté, the spoiled
child. The spoiled child. That's such a loaded
phrase. Did she mean it in a negative way? Not
really. She owned it. She attributed it to her
parents' age. When you have a child that late
in life and there's such a gap, that child often
occupies a very... special, sometimes isolated
position. She was doted on. She was given everything
she wanted. But she was also lonely. She was
observing the adult world from a kind of pedestal.
She wasn't running around the streets with the
neighborhood kids in the same way. And usually
that kind of isolation combined with access to
education, I mean, her house must have been full
of books. That breeds creativity. Oh, for sure.
I saw that she started writing incredibly early.
How early? Before she was 12. And get this for
confidence, she wrote a one -act, one -person
play as a birthday gift for her mother. That
is amazing. Happy birthday, Mom. For your gift,
you get to watch me perform a play I wrote about
myself. That is some serious main character energy.
It shows a desire to project her voice, doesn't
it? But it also hints at the rebellion to come.
She was not a docile child. She was absorbing
all this high French, culture -reading French
classics, learning the manners. But she was chafing
against the constraints of her class. Right,
because being bourgeois in Guadeloupe at that
time meant acting a certain way. You had to be
proper. You had to represent the race well. Exactly.
You had to uphold the image of respectability.
And Mary's, well... She struggled with that.
She was naturally inquisitive and maybe a bit
wild. She graduated high school, and then, as
was the custom for her class, she was sent to
the Lycée Fenelon in Paris. The natural next
step. Go to the mother country to finish your
education and become a proper French lady. That
was the plan. But the mother country didn't exactly
embrace her, and she certainly didn't embrace
the rules. What happened? She was expelled after
two years. Expelled? From a prestigious school
like that? That's a big deal. Do we know the
specific incident? The records are a bit vague
on the one big incident, but they suggest a general,
persistent, rebellious nature. She just wasn't
falling in line. She was loud. She was opinionated.
And she was discovering Paris wasn't what she
thought it was. That's the key. She was discovering
that the France her parents idolized, this land
of liberty, equality, fraternity, was actually
a cold, alienating place for a black woman. The
racism she encountered in Paris was a shock compared
to her protected upbringing in Guadeloupe. So
she gets kicked out of the family. Nancy Lacey.
Does she go home in shame? Does she apologize
to her banker father? Absolutely not. She doubles
down. She moves to the Sorbonne Nouvelle to study
literature, but she's not studying. She's getting
politically organized. Oh, interesting. She helps
establish the Luis Carlos Prestes Club. Luis
Carlos Prestes, the Brazilian communist leader.
The very same. So you have this young woman from
a spoiled conservative. Up a middle class background
in Guadalupe, moving to Paris, getting kicked
out of prep school, and then diving headfirst
into leftist anti -colonial politics. Wow. She's
shedding that bourgeois skin and fast. That is
a radical pivot. Yeah. It's like she looked at
the path that was laid out for her and just took
a hard left turn. And that political awakening,
that sets the stage for the next arguably most
defining chapter of her life. Oh, absolutely.
We need to talk about the African Odyssey. This
is The Crucible. This is where Marius Kande is
truly forged. Without these next 12 years, we
just don't get the writer we know. And I think
we need to pause here and contextualize this
for you, the listener, because today we have
a very specific view of going back to Africa.
It's often seen through a genealogical lens,
right? DNA tests, tourism, finding your specific
tribe. Exactly. But in the late 1950s, this was
a geopolitical movement. Absolutely. It was the
era of independence. The winds of change were
blowing across the continent. Ghana becomes independent
in 57. Guinea in 58. There was this feeling among
the black diaspora in the U .S., the Caribbean,
Europe, that Africa was rising. The sleeping
giant was waking up. And they needed to be part
of it. They wanted to help build this new world.
It wasn't just about visiting. It was about contributing
to a revolution. It was an ideological quest.
Exactly. It was idealistic. It was romantic.
And Condé gets completely swept up in this current.
It all started with a play, appropriately enough.
In 1958, she was at a rehearsal for Jean Genet's
famous play, The Blacks. And there, she met a
Guinean actor named Mamadou Condé. And things
moved pretty fast from there. Very fast. They
married in August 1958, and by November 1959,
she was moving to Africa. But here is the first
crack in the romantic facade, and it's a detail
that's often missed. What's that? The relationship
was already crumbling before she even left Paris.
Wait, really? She moved to a continent she'd
never been to with a husband she was already
having trouble with. Well, actually, she moved
to the Ivory Coast alone first to teach. She
eventually rejoined Mamadou in Guinea and they
had children together. But the marriage was fraught
from the start. But the drive to be in Africa,
to connect with that part of her heritage, it
was stronger than the problems in her marriage.
She was chasing an idea, a dream of belonging.
She was. So she spends the 1960s. essentially
the entire decade, bouncing between the Ivory
Coast, Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal. This is a
tour of the absolute hot spots of West African
independence. And look at the timing. She's in
Guinea under Sekou Touré. She's in Ghana under
Swamin Krumah. She is right in the center of
the experiment of African socialism. She's not
watching it on the news. She's living it. She
says she became politically conscious through
a group of Marxist friends in Guinea and the
name she drops in her memoirs. It's like a who's
who of 20th century revolutionaries. It's staggering,
isn't it? She rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X
during his tours of Africa. She met Che Guevara.
She knew Julius Nyerere, the future president
of Tanzania. She was friends with Maya Angelou,
who was living in Ghana at the same time. Can
you just imagine the conversations in those rooms?
You have the American civil rights leaders, the
Caribbean intellectuals, the African revolutionaries,
all trying to figure out how to dismantle imperialism.
It must have felt like the most exciting place
on earth. to be in 1962. It sounds like a utopia
of black radical thought. But, and this is the
but that defines Condé's entire career. It wasn't
the paradise she expected. Let's dig into that.
Yeah. Because I think the easy narrative is she
went to Africa and found herself and lived happily
ever after. But that's not what happened at all.
Not even close. She went looking for belonging.
She went expecting to be embraced as a returning
daughter, a long -lost sister coming home from
across the water. And the reality was? The reality
was she was often seen as an outsider. She was
seen as a tuba. Tuba. That's the West African
slang for a white person, isn't it? Or a foreigner.
Right. A westerner. Even though she was black.
Her culture, her dress, her mannerisms, her language.
They were French. The local populations didn't
see her as one of them. They saw her as a French
woman with black skin. Exactly. And she writes
about the pain of that realization, that skin
color was not enough to bridge the cultural gap
of centuries. That must have been devastating.
To reject Europe, run to Africa, and then be
told, you're European. It was a profound identity
crisis. And politically, she was seeing the cracks
too. She witnessed what she called many contradictory
events. She saw that the end of colonialism didn't
magically solve all the problems. It just created
new ones. It often birthed new corruptions, dictatorships,
and chaos. She saw the new African leaders acting
just as oppressively as the colonizers they'd
replaced. Sekou Touré in Guinea, for example,
became increasingly authoritarian. And it got
dangerous for her too. This wasn't just intellectual
disappointment. She was actually deported from
Ghana. Yes. After Nkrumah was overthrown in a
coup, the mood changed instantly. Foreigners,
especially those associated with the previous
regime, were immediately suspect. She was accused
of suspected subversive activity. Was she a spy?
Or involved in something? No, no. She was just
an intellectual with opinions, associating with
the wrong people at the wrong time. But being
kicked out... being labeled a subversive it just
shattered the dream so this period which lasted
until 1972 It destroyed that romanticized view
of Africa that was so popular in the diaspora.
It completely destroyed it, specifically the
ideas of the Negritude movement. Right. We should
define that quickly for the listener just so
we understand what she was reacting against.
Negritude. Negritude was a literary and political
movement led by people like Aimé Césaire from
Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal.
The core idea was a unified black identity. that
all black people, regardless of where they lived,
shared a common African soul or essence. All
right. Celebrated traditional Africa as a source
of pride, rhythm, purity. Very essentialist.
Very. And Conde is living the reality on the
ground and saying this essence theory, it's not
holding up. She lived the messy, complicated
truth. She realized that shared ancestry didn't
mean shared culture or shared politics. I feel
like that experience is the fuel for everything
that comes later. Because when she finally starts
writing novels, she isn't writing fairy tales.
She's writing about that mess. She's writing
about that friction. But notice the timing. She
leaves Africa in 1972. She worked for the BBC
in London for a bit, then goes back to Paris
to teach. But she doesn't publish her first novel
until 1976. She was 42 years old. Yes. That is
late, especially for someone who started writing
a play at age 12. She clearly has this insane
life experience. Yeah. Why until 42? She was
very open about this. She said she lacked confidence.
Really? She said she did not dare present her
writing to the outside world. She felt intimidated
by the great writers she admired. She just didn't
think her voice was literary enough. That is
so wild to hear from someone who would become
a Nobel contender. It just goes to show you,
imposter syndrome hits everyone. Doesn't matter
who you are. And when she finally did start,
she didn't tiptoe in. She kicked the door down.
Her first novel was Hera Maconon. Let's unpack
that title. Hera Maconon. It's a Malinky word.
It literally means waiting for happiness. Which
sounds lovely. Yeah. A nice story about finding
joy. It was anything but. The book was a firestorm.
It was published in 76. And get this. It was
actually pulled from the shelves of several bookstores
in Africa and heavily criticized in Paris. Pulled
from the shelves. Why? Was it sexually explicit
or something? It wasn't the sex, though there
was that. It was the politics. The book was a
blistering critique of the success of African
socialism. Oh, wow. Remember. In the 70s, supporting
these independent African movements was almost
a sacred duty for black intellectuals. You don't
criticize the revolution. You supported the cause.
And here comes Condé saying, actually, this is
failing. This is corrupt. The emperor has no
clothes. She was airing the dirty laundry in
public. She was critiquing the very thing she
had gone to Africa to find, and the protagonist.
The book is written as a first -person narrative,
and it so closely parallels Conde's own life.
But she stressed very heavily that it was not
an autobiography. Did you call it? She called
the main character an anti -moi. An anti -self.
Ooh, I like that concept, an anti -self. Break
that down for me. The character, Veronica, is
a wealthy, educated, Guadalupean woman in Africa.
But she isn't a hero. She isn't noble. She's
characterized by what Condé called sexual libertinage.
She sleeps with a minister in the corrupt government,
a man she knows is corrupt. Wow. She's indifferent
to the suffering of the people around her. She's
searching for identity, but she's doing it in
a way that is selfish, messy, and not at all
the noble. sufferer that people expected from
black female characters. So she alienates the
political left by criticizing socialism. She
alienates the nationalists by showing corrupt
Africa. And she alienates traditionalists with
a promiscuous anti -heroine. She really was fearless.
Or perhaps she just couldn't be anything other
than honest about her complexity. She refused
to write propaganda. She wanted to explore the
ambiguity of being a wealthy, educated black
woman in a poor black country. That power dynamic
fascinated her. Now, around this time, her personal
life is changing, too. She divorced Mama Ducande
in 1981, although they didn't separate for a
long time. And then she makes a partnership that
becomes incredibly important to her career. Yes.
She meets Richard Philcox. Right. They married
in 1982. Richard Philcox is British, a white
Englishman. And he became the English language
translator for almost all of her novels. That
is such a unique dynamic. We'll definitely talk
more about their specific process later because
it gets really intense at the end of her life.
But it's interesting that her voice to the English
speaking world is filtered through her white.
British husband. It absolutely is. And it allowed
her to have a global reach that many Francophone
writers struggle to achieve. But it also speaks
to her refusal to be bound by racial categories
in her personal life. She loved who she loved.
So she's 40 something. She's published this controversial
book that got pulled from shelves. She is known,
but she isn't a superstar yet. When does she
actually become a legend? When does she get put
on the map? That would be with her third novel,
Segu, which was published in two volumes in 1984
and 1985. Segu. Okay, this is the big one. If
you only read one Condé book, this is usually
the recommendation. This is the blockbuster.
It's this massive historical epic set in the
Bambra Empire of Mali. So we're going back before
full colonization. We start. In the late 18th,
early 19th century, the Bamber Empire was a powerful
animist kingdom. Condé traces its decline. But
she does it in a very specific way. She follows
the family of a nobleman, Dusica Traoré. It's
a saga. It feels like Roots or 100 Years of Solitude
or something. It's a massive saga. Dusica has
these children who are scattered by the winds
of history. One becomes a soldier in the French
colonial army, turning against his own people.
One converts to Islam. One is sold into slavery
and ends up in Brazil. Another stays and tries
to fight the changes. So it sounds like she's
trying to encompass the entire black diaspora.
in one family tree that is exactly what she is
doing she is examining the roots not as a single
tap root going down into the earth but as a rhizome
spreading out in all directions she shows the
arrival of islam the arrival of the europeans
and the slave trade as these massive disrupting
forces and it was a bestseller it was huge it
sold hundreds of thousands of copies it proved
that she wasn't just a provocateur she was a
master storyteller it had the narrative drive
of a thriller but the depth of a history textbook
It allowed her to explore those themes of slavery
and colonialism, but with a level of historical
detail that captivated readers worldwide. It
made her a household name in France. And once
she had that success, she just kept reinventing
herself. She didn't stick to this historical
epic formula, which would have been the easy
path. Not at all. She moves from the epic history
of Segu to something completely different, like
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem in 1986. I love
the concept of this book. We all know the Salem
Witch Trials. We know T. Tuba, the slave woman
who was one of the first accused. But usually
in history books or in Arthur Miller's The Crucible,
she's just a footnote. A prop. She's a prop in
the white character's drama. Precisely. In Miller's
play, she's a minor figure who triggers the plot
but has no interior life. She's just a plot device.
So Conde takes that footnote and makes her the
protagonist. She reimagines the entire history
from Tituba's perspective. That's such a powerful
act of reclaiming history, giving a voice to
the voiceless. And it's deeply feminist. Conde
gives Tituba a sexuality, a spirituality, and
a sharp wit. She isn't just a victim, she's a
survivor. Conde fills in the gaps of this historical
record with fiction, saying, if history won't
tell her story, I will. She even has Tituba interact
with Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. She's
mixing history and literature in this wonderful
postmodern way. And then she does it again with
Windward Heights in 1995. Ah, yes. Her reworking
of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Which is
such a bold move. I mean, Wuthering Heights is
a sacred text to some people. You don't just
mess with Heathcliff and Cathy. Unless you are
Mary Scondé. She had read Bronte when she was
14. It stayed with her, the passion, the violence,
the outsider on the moors. But she did something
brilliant. She set the story in Guadalupe and
Cuba. Heathcliff becomes Razier, a darker -skinned
outsider in a Caribbean context that's completely
defined by colorism. She called it a perverse
but joyful game. That's the quote. She said to
be part of so many worlds, part of the African
world because of the African slaves, part of
the European world because of the European education
is a kind of double entendre. Double entendre.
Two meanings. She used her heritage, which she
saw as a mix, a hybrid to reshape a classic of
European literature. She wasn't asking for permission
to enter the cannon. She was taking the cannon
and making it her own. She was saying, my Caribbean
landscape is just as dramatic, just as worthy
of high tragedy as the Yorkshire Moors. She really,
she refused to be pigeonholed. And that leads
us to this whole question of identity, which
we touched on at the start. She really resisted
being labeled as a French writer or even a Caribbean
writer in the traditional sense. She did. And
you have to remember, in the Caribbean, literary
movements are very serious business. We mentioned
Negritude earlier, the African roots movement.
But later, in the 80s and 90s, there was Creolite.
Right. Led by writers like Patrick Chamoiseau.
What was their pitch? Creolite argued that Caribbean
identity wasn't African or... European, but distinctly
Creole. It focused on the specific language,
culture and hybridity of the islands. They wanted
writers to write in Creole or a French that mimicked
Creole structures. They had a manifesto called
In Praise of Creoleness. And Conde's reaction?
She was basically like, nope, not joining that
club either. Why? I mean, it sounds like it fits
her better than Negritude. It acknowledges the
hybridity. She found it too prescriptive. She
felt Creolite was just another set of rules telling
writers how they should write to be authentic.
She didn't want to be told she had to use Creole
words to be a real Guadalupean writer. She wanted
freedom. She wanted the freedom to be cosmopolitan.
She wanted the freedom to write about Salem or
Africa or Paris without having to check a box
first. I write in Mary's Conde. There it is again.
It's a declaration of independence. She's saying,
my experience is the only validity I need. But
we have to be clear. Just because she rejected
these political movements doesn't mean she wasn't
political. Oh, absolutely not. She admitted she
couldn't write anything without political significance.
She said, I have nothing else to offer that remains
important. Her work is drenched in politics,
feminism, race, colonialism. I mean, look at
Tree of Life. La vie c 'est la route. She tackles
the building of the Panama Canal and how that
affected the West Indian middle class, a huge
historical event that's often ignored. Look at
Victoire, which is a fictional biography of her
maternal grandmother. It explores the fight for
black rights in Guadeloupe. So she was always
looking at power dynamics. Always. She just refused
to follow a party line. She critiqued everyone,
white colonizers, black dictators, men, women.
No one was safe from her analysis. And she wasn't
just writing novels in a room either. She was
a serious scholar. A formidable academic career.
This is the other side of the coin. She taught
at the Sorbonne, at Berkeley, at UCLA. She was
a professor emerita at Columbia University in
New York. She actually chaired the Center for
French and Francophone Studies there. So she's
teaching the very subjects she's deconstructing
in her fiction. Exactly. And helping to define
the field of Francophone literature for a new
generation of students. She was introducing American
students to Caribbean literature, but always
teaching them to question the labels. She brought
that same rigorous questioning spirit to the
classroom. I want to fast forward a bit to the
later years because her story doesn't just fade
away into retirement. We mentioned the new Academy
Prize in 2018. That was a huge moment of recognition
for her. It was. It validated her entire career.
To be chosen as the alternative to the Nobel
is a statement that you are at the absolute peak
of world literature. It was a crowning achievement.
But physically, things were getting harder for
her. Yes. She developed a degenerative neurological
disorder. It was never publicly named as a specific
disease like Parkinson's, but the effects were
severe. It made it difficult for her to see.
She eventually went blind and difficult to speak
or use her hands. This brings us back to her
husband, Richard Philcox. Their partnership became
even more crucial in this final chapter. It went
from professional to, well, existential. It's
incredibly moving. For her 2023 novel, The Gospel,
according to The New World, she physically couldn't
write it herself. She couldn't type. She couldn't
see the page. So how did they do it? How was
the book written? She dictated the entire book
to Richard. Imagine that process. You're translating
your wife's words, but first you have to transcribe
them as she speaks them, creating the book together
in real time. It's incredibly intimate. It required
a total synchronization of minds. Richard had
translated her for 40 years. He knew her voice
almost as well as she did. And the literary world
took notice. They did. They became the first
wife and husband author -translator team to be
shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
And she was 86 years old when she was longlisted.
The oldest writer ever long listed. It just shows
that her mind was sharp. Her creativity was completely
undimmed, even as her body was failing. The book
itself is this fable about a mixed race child
who might be the son of God. It's full of humor
and magic. It wasn't a sad final book. It was
playful. Still experimenting right up to the
end. Exactly. And sadly, the journey did end.
She passed away on April 2, 2024, in Abt, France.
Leaving behind a body of work that is truly staggering.
Novels, plays, essays. essays, children's books,
a whole library of human experience. So as we
wrap this up, I want to try and synthesize this.
How do we summarize the impact of Mary's Condé?
I think she was a grand storyteller of world
literature. That's the key phrase. She took the
specific experience of the Caribbean, that feeling
of being torn between Africa, Europe, and the
Americas, and she turned it into something universal.
She navigated the post -colonial chaos, not by
trying to tidy it up, but by diving right into
it. And she never gave us easy answers. Never.
And that brings me to my favorite provocation
from her life. She wrote an autobiography called
What is Africa to Me? And even after all those
years living there, even after writing Segu,
even after all that reflection, she admitted
that by the end of the book, she still didn't
know what Africa meant to her. That is brave,
to spend your whole life asking a question and
then admit, I still don't have the answer. In
a world that demands clear definitions, you are
this, you are that, this is your narrative, arc,
Conde said. I don't know. She embraced the ambiguity.
She embraced the mess. She told us that identity
isn't a fixed point. It's a journey that never
really ends. And maybe that's the big takeaway
for you, the listener, today. We're all under
so much pressure to define ourselves, to have
a brand or a clear identity. But Mary's Condé
proved that you could live a life full of contradictions.
You can be a spoiled child and a radical. You
can be a mother and an intellectual. You can
be an outsider everywhere you go. And you can
still create something magnificent. You can simply
write in your own language, on your own terms.
I write in Mary's Condé. What a legacy. Indeed.
A singular voice that will be missed but never
forgotten. Thank you all for listening to this
deep dive. If you haven't read her, go pick up
Sagu or I, Tituba. It's not just homework, it's
an adventure. We'll see you next time.