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The mangrove of identities

Roots and hybrids in Maryse Condé's classic

Josephine Condemi
a story by
Josephine Condemi
 
 
The mangrove of identities

Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez, known to everyone as Francis Sancher, is dead. The village schoolteacher found him, face down in the mud of the mangrove. “Who killed him?” ask the people of Rivière au Sel, on the island of Guadeloupe (Caribbean), where Sanchez-Sancher had moved in the last phase of his life. To bring trouble, according to many. No blood on the body: the doctor in the autopsy ruled that it was an aneurysm. What remains of Sancher can go home. And the wake can begin.

Maryse Condé (1937) is a writer, critic and playwright. Born in Guadeloupe, she emigrated to France at the age of 18 to study. She lived in Ghana and Senegal from 1960-72, then returned to Paris where she completed her studies at the Sorbonne. Professor emerita of ‘French and Francophone Literature’ at Columbia University, she has taught at the Sorbonne and Berkeley. In 2018, she received the ‘alternative’ Nobel Prize for Literature. She chairs the ‘Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage’. In 2020 she was awarded the Legion of Honour.

35 years have passed since the publication of Crossing the Mangrove1 by Maryse Condé. The novel has not lost an iota of its relevance: indeed, perhaps it is even more necessary today, in times when ideologies of identity purity are being reinforced, than in the Europe of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the prophecies of the ‘”end of history”2

Relationships as mangrove roots

Who was Sanchez-Sancher? The night of the wake is an inner reckoning for many people: twenty interior monologues follow one another for as many stories of intersecting relationships, like the roots of a mangrove. “Sans-cher”, the “dearest-less”, the uprooted, the foreigner, has left a deep mark on the people he has met: each one delivers a portrait of him, in subjective form, which emerges in turn, by analogy or difference, from the set of knowledge that the entire small community has heard, elaborated, invented over the years, in the form of word of mouth or gossip. Sancher the Cuban, the Colombian, the faggot, the rapist, the layabout, the writer, the drunkard, the doctor, the paranoid, the dreamer: “the popular imagination cheats the cards. It transforms men, whitens them, blackens them to the point that a mother would not know the child she has given birth to” (p.77).

But those who tell about someone else always also tell about themselves: we listen to the thoughts of people who differ in gender, census, skin colour, which often correspond to as many differences in power and privilege. Moïse the postman, nicknamed Maringoin- mosquito; Mira the motherless; her half-brother Aristide; the medium Man Sonson; the teenager Joby; the elderly Dinah; Sonny with the ‘songbook in his head’ (p.68 ); the nurseryman Loulou; the breeder Sylvestre Ramsaran; the schoolteacher Lèocadie Timothée; the storyteller Cyrille; Wilma’s mother Rosa; the lover Carmélien; Vilma the betrothed; the Haitian Désinor; Madame Dodose Pélagie; Lucien Évariste the writer who does not write; Émile Étienne, the historian who collects memories; Xantippe who lives in the woods: they are all searching for something or someone.

Each voice shows itself in its own life path and in so doing casts new light (and shadow) on those of others. To follow each stream of consciousness is to dive deep into the logics, desires and regrets of worlds that are called upon to coexist and often conflict in confined spaces: worlds that the stranger Sancher has placed even more in tension, because “Only those who have lived within the four walls of a small community know how bad it can be and how afraid of strangers” (27).

All these tensions nurture a novel that explains nothing but shows a lot, far from the harmonious and romantic idealisations that often characterise the gaze of those who seek in small communities some returns to ‘golden ages’ never experienced. Far from the exoticising gaze that contributes to the game of expectations to be confirmed or subverted by the community itself, to the script with which it represents itself, to the construction of that “‘worn-out and too tight garment around the armpits, which they put on every morning” (p.153).

The impossibile crossing

Crossing the Mangrove takes its title from the novel of the same name that Sancher was trying, with little success, to write. “It is not possible to cross the mangrove. You get stuck in the aerial roots of the trees. You sink and suffocate in the brackish mud” (117) Vilma had replied worriedly and he had nodded, before dying face down in the middle of the forest.

Sancher is obsessed with his genealogy, he believes he must break a curse that dates back to when his ancestor fled France to take refuge in Guadeloupe after committing a series of crimes. He tries to “unravel the skein of life” (105) by waiting for death where, according to him, it all began. But in a mangrove there is no correspondence between trees and roots: not only because, in the tangle, it is difficult to establish which tree each root belongs to, but because each branch can throw out new roots and it is therefore difficult to establish what comes first and what comes later3. You can’t go up the branches, no family tree can be traced and thus no claim to authenticity due to some distant ‘foundation’ or lineage.

Guadeloupe is an archipelago of islands in the southern Caribbean Sea. The name Guadeloupe was given by Christopher Columbus in 1493: before that, the Caribbeans, who had themselves driven out the Arawaks, called it Karukera, “the island of beautiful waters”. A French colony since 1635 (and until 2014), owned by the crown since 1674, Guadeloupe was home to thousands of black people enslaved on sugar and cocoa plantations for centuries. Slavery was banned in 1816 and since 1871 the island has had representation in the French Parliament. In 1946, the Martinican deputy Aimé Cesaire, founder of the Negritude movement, proposed the law that transformed the colonies into Overseas Departments and Communities.

The mangrove mud is viscous: the boundary between solid and liquid is compromised, there is a risk of getting lost, of losing the form with which one was previously de-formed, of getting absorbed4. The terror that emerges from Vilma’s words is the same as that of those who approach something they know they cannot dominate, control completely, and from which they can potentially be changed, when not distorted. The terror of those who cling to the ‘threadbare garment’ for fear of evolving, for fear of admitting that what we are only emerges from our relationships, on which it is impossible to have a definitive word. The mud of the mangrove, a tree that lives between two worlds, regenerates and decomposes, reminds us that our face changes over time, through the relationships we experience, in ways we cannot entirely control, and that this can be both terrifying and liberating.

What is creoleness?

The year before Crossing the Mangrove, Solibo Magnifique5 was published by the Martinique author Patrick Chamoiseau: here too a man, the storyteller Solibo, dies, and here too the quest is launched to understand what happened from the words of other characters, the witnesses of the death during the last performance. But already from the back cover, it is made explicit that it was modernity that killed the storyteller: Solibo is thus the symbol of a pure, authentic local culture that dies on impact with globalisation. 

In 1989, Chamoiseau, who will receive the Goncourt Prize in 1992, had published together with the writer Raphael Confiant and the linguist Jean Bernabé a manifesto of creoleness6: “neither European, nor African, nor Asian, we proclaim ourselves Creoles”. Creoleness is defined as a “mangrove swamp of virtuality”, “a swirl of meanings in a single signifier: a Totality” to be resurrected through writing in the Creole language. In Praise of Creoleness there is a genealogy to which one can trace back: on the contrary, as already pointed out, in Crossing the Mangrove this operation is impossible.

Not surprisingly, Sancher, the writer protagonist in absentia, the man-mangrove, is powerless, unable to write his own novel.And the other writer, Lucien Évariste, the committed activist who has never yet written a book, in his dreams of glory imagines having to justify himself before the local critics for not knowing how to write in Creole.Not surprisingly, Chamoiseau, the first reader of the work chosen by Condé, declared that he would change the title to “Tracée dans la mangrove, in order to evoke both the path of the runaway slave and the Creole act of crossing7” and, for his part, did not spare comments on the footnotes inserted by Condé to explain the Creole terms: “Let us leave to the echo the task of reaching others; our task is to speak to ourselves, for ourselves, with an authenticity acquired from inside, by virtue of our own conscience8”. 

On the contrary, for Condé the imposition of equivalence between Creole culture and language “ implies a notion of ‘authenticity,’ which inevitably engenders exclusion, as ‘authenticity’ is based on the very normative ideology that for so long consigned us to the world’s periphery9”. True to its belief that the duty of the writer is “to make people realize that everything is not perfect10” Condé later devoted herself to reconstructing the etymologies of the word “Creole”: from the Spanish criollo, it may derive either from criadillo or from a crasis of criar and colono, always meaning “educated” and “not savage”‘, to indicate first the Spaniards born in the colonies and then, from 1600, also the Africans born on plantations and their way of life. Highlighting how Creole only became the lingua franca between masters and slaves in Guadeloupe in the 1800s, Condé asks: “Are we going to considered genuine the sole production of writers fortunate enough to live at home? In that case, we would be going against the tide of history as well as against the sociopolitical realities of our time. […] Cannot the Creole culture—I mean the culture of the Caribbean islands—be transplanted and survive just as well through the
use of memory? In other words, aren’t there new and multiple versions of creolite11?”

The anthropologist James Clifford wrote, the year before the release of Crossing the Mangrove: “In an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic’: caught between certain cultures, implicated in others. […] Identity is conjunctural, not essential”12. A mangrove with many roots, between memory and desire.


  1. Original French edition: Condé, M. (1989). La Traverseé de la Mangrove. Paris: Mercure de France. English version: Condé, M. (1995), Crossing the Mangrove. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday. ↩︎
  2. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history. In Quadrant, 33(8), 15. ↩︎
  3. The rhizome of the mangrove inspired the construction of Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1980). Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, II. Parigi: Editions de Minuit. ↩︎
  4. Cfr. Fabietti, U., Malighetti, R., Matera, V. (2012). Dal tribale al globale. Introduzione all’antropologia. Milano: Mondadori, 171-72. ↩︎
  5. Chamoiseau, P. (1988). Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Gallimard. ↩︎
  6. Bernabé, J., Chamoiseau, P., Confiant, R. (1989). Éloge de la Créolité, Paris: Gallimard. English version in Bernabé, J., Chamoiseau, P., Confiant, R.,
    Taleb Khyar, M. (1990), In Praise of Creoleness. In Callaloo, 13 (4), 886-909 ↩︎
  7. Chamoiseau, P., Balutansky, K. M. (1991, Spring) Reflections on Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove. In Callaloo, 14(2), 390. ↩︎
  8. Chamoiseau, P., Balutansky, K. M., op. cit. 395. ↩︎
  9. Conde, M. (1998). Créolité without the Creole Language?. In Caribbean Creolization, trans. Balutansky, K. ed. Balutansky and Sourieau, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ↩︎
  10. Taleb-Khyar, M. B. (1991). An Interview With Maryse Condé and Rita Dove. In Callaloo, 14(2), 347-366. ↩︎
  11. Conde, M. (1998). Créolité without the Creole Language?. op. cit. ↩︎
  12. Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge (Mass.) – London: Harvard University Press ↩︎

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