A Fugue of Legacies: a Meditation for Maryse Condé

Abstract

Pas sa faute si elie souffrait du complexe des victimes et s'identifiait a ceux qui sont poursuivis. Maryse Conde, Histoire de la femme cannibale Comment pourrais-je oublier mon passe? dit le Juif. Non seulement il me poursuit depuis ma naissance mais, parfois, j'ai la conviction qu'il sera mon avenir. Edmond Jabes, Le livre de l'hospitalite I have come back to Brooklyn today, a return to my native land that constitutes a coming only because we are here together--coming home not to a place, but to the deepening of a relationship that shares mutual concerns over the intricacies of belonging, the struggles around politics of identification and, for you as a writer, the insistence on a certain form of dis-identification necessary to creative freedom. I have responded to your curiosity, Maryse, to your openness, to your queries about a disturbing New York incident by offering to take you and Richard Philcox through the section of Brooklyn known as Crown Heights. This neighborhood was the scene of interracial riots in 1991 between Blacks and Jews after a Hasidic driver accidentally killed a Guyanese-born boy, Gavin Cato, setting off the violence that then killed a young Australian Yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum. You are wondering what such a neighborhood can possibly look like, imagining it, and, literally, trying to figure it. As you have in each of your novels, from unnamed African countries, to Salem, to Segou, to Capetown, you will combine the experiential, the historical, and the imaginary aspects of this little trip, distilling something from it that, through your writing, will become art. So we are crawling through traffic on Bedford Avenue, passing jerk chicken shops, coiffeurs advertising braiding (weaving) and corn rows, music shops blaring reggae, salsa, zouk, RB do-rags become streirnels, the men's round, fur-trimmed hats; woven hairpieces are replaced by sheitls, the wigs of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish women, as we slowly cross one of those invisible frontiers delineating neighborhoods round in New York City. Roland Barthes might have spun one of his mythologies in Crown Heights, reading racial tensions as being all about hair! Crossing the grand old boulevard that is Eastern Parkway, we have moved from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Guyana, to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, from Creole to Yiddish, from roti to challah, from conch to gefilte fish. You are at in these shifting borderlands, global citizen that you are, and these are the spaces and places that your protagonists explore on their journeys to self-discovery, from Veronica to Tituba to Marie-Noelle to Celanire to Roselie, to name but a few. Your refusal to align yourself with any dogmatic essentialism, be it racial, nationalist, feminist, ethnic, in favor of the continued construction of the true land of the free, that of the literary imagination, is textualized as a willingness to explore difference(s), invent possible new relationships, traverse spaces and cultures. …