Sexuality and Female Friendship in Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Abstract

Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem offers a complex vision of what it means to be Caribbean at a particular moment in the history of colonization. Simultaneously the novel raises social issues, such as racism and religious bigotry, which are not limited to the era in which it unfolds. But it also destabilizes conventional, rigid notions of female heterosexuality, characterized in clearly heterosexist terms, and those of sexually ambivalent intimate female friendships. By rendering the boundaries between heterosexuality, lesbianism, and bisexuality more fluid and tenuous, the novel illuminates the tension between culturally normalized expectations of female sexuality and the realities of women's lives, and presents a means of avoiding the difficulties encountered when feminism is equated with a particular sexual orientation.