Crossing the Mangrove

Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean novelist, playwright, and critic who has explored the African diaspora in the Caribbean for decades. She is the recipient of many literary prizes, including the New Academy Prize (or Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2018. While acclaimed in French and Francophone studies, Condé is less known to English-speaking audiences. Her first novel, Hérémakhonon (1976), introduces many of the themes that appear throughout her work: identity, race, and gender. In her essay collection The Journey of a Caribbean Writer (2014), she explains the importance of Africa and the African diaspora to her identity and work: Africa “revealed me to myself and allowed me to see, with my own eyes, the world in which I live and to look at things round me in my own way, I Maryse Condé, Black, female and Caribbean” (Tepper, Anderson, “Maryse Condé, at Home in the World,” The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2023). Despite suffering a serious illness, Condé continues to publish as of 2023. Her more known novels include the historical Segu (1984)—which details the arrival of Islam to Mali—and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986)—which details the life of the enslaved Tituba, who was at the heart of the Salem Witch Trials—while her most recent work to be translated and released in the US is The Gospel According to the New World (2021).