Views on images in Maryse Condé’s writing

Abstract

Maryse Condé's writing focuses on the history of slavery, female identity and memory, maintaining a fruitful dialogue with pictorial imagery. The writer has a painter's view of the world in her apprehension of nature. The myth of the island nourishes a highly feminized imaginary where the woman, foster mother or lover, is identified with the land and the sea. The protagonists of Condé’s novels indomitable as the ocean, struggle in their identity journeys against the constraints of an imposed destiny.

The pictorial image, born from the depths of the unconscious, exerts a redeeming role on the figure of the painter, shared by contradictory feelings in his identity construction. Condé valorises the cathartic nature of art, coupled with the joy of procreation experienced by some heroines in their acts of creativity. Condé’s pictorial references recover the images of an individual history rooted in the insularity of the Caribbean and in ancestral Africa. Beyond the beliefs of Condé’s characters prevails the universal language of art.