Confronting the Communal: Maryse Condé's Challenge to New World Orders in Moi, Tituba

Abstract

In her 1986 novel Moi, Tituba sorciere ... Noire de Salem, Guadeloupean writer and theorist Maryse Conde rewrites and recontextualizes the events of the 1692 Salem witch trials by focusing her attention on one of the incident's most central, yet most marginalized, players--the West Indian slave-woman Tituba. Inspired and permitted by Tituba's disappearance from the official historical record to freely imagine her post-Salem story, (1) Conde traces a detailed journey for her heroine-from the Caribbean islands to New England and back. In so doing, she not only paints a provocative portrait of 17th-century Puritan culture, but also interrogates multiple contemporary New communities. By her behavior and by her very being, Conde's Tituba introduces a powerful force of disorder into the literal and the discursive communities through which she circulates. In her unremitting quest for love and tendency to erotic self-objectification she steps back and forth over the line of a disordering narcissism, (2) challenging at every pass those communal expectations regarding feminine identity that conflict with or seek to repress her conception of herself as an individual. The textual resistance enacted by Tituba is paralleled by Conde's own resistance (expressed through Tituba, the novel) to those extra-textual communities with which she, as a post/colonial woman author from the French-speaking Caribbean, is meant to be aligned. Thus while the novel indisputably fulfills the desire [of U.S. feminists, multiculturalists, and francophone studies scholars] for a first-person narrative by a strong Third woman, (3) Tituba in fact expresses a narcissistic defiance of the very concept of community on which such perspectives are premised. Not only, then, does Conde push against facile and ultimately constraining recuperations of her heroine by progressive post/colonial (and) First World discourses, but she further, and perhaps even more significantly, issues a challenge to those scholars who presume to get the joke the novel plays on its sympathetic but naively politicized admirer-critics. As several theorists of Caribbean literature have noted, community is a significant concern for writer-intellectuals of the region in their struggle to determine viable socio-political identities in the face of centuries-old practices of dispossession, ahistoricization, and disenfranchisement--both by racist foreign imperial structures and by rapacious neo-colonial orders. Caribbean artists have long been compelled to articulate parameters for defensive solidarity, positing community as an objective to be achieved--to be actively constructed both in language and in law. This communal imperative is particularly evident in the French-speaking Caribbean, where multiple liberationist discourses have emerged over the past several decades. From the Indigenist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s in Haiti, to Aime Cesaire's negritude, prominent in the 1940s and beyond, to Edouard Glissant's antillanite and poetics of relation, articulated in the 1970s and 1990s, respectively, to the creolite movement outlined by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant in the late 1980s, the francophone Caribbean has produced a surfeit of models for collective identity. Jean Price Mars's call to combat Haiti's exploitation and alienation via the assertion of an Afro-nationalist collective ethics, aesthetics, and politics; Cesaire's faith in the possibility of a strong Afro-Caribbean identity tied to that of a global black community; Glissant's insistence that obstacles to political and cultural independence in the Antilles be countered by asserting le vecu commun, that is, I'affirmation collective appuyee sur l'acte des peoples; (4) and the Creolists' aggressive declaration of a heterogeneous but fundamentally cohesive Caribbean essence--these are the foundational, community-based ideologies that have framed regional literary production over the last several decades. …