Crafting memory: literary (Re-)creation in Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards

Throughout her illustrious creative and scholarly career, which spanned over five decades, French-Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1934-2024) earned a reputation as an iconoclast, a rebel disdainful of conventions and averse to simplistic formulas. A habitual provocateur, Condé reveled in her role as a rule-breaker, who challenged Negritude’s masculinist discursive norms, and ushered in a paradigm shift in the prevailing vision of Africa as central to Caribbean cultural formation. This study examines the place of African diasporic literary traditions in La vie sans fards (2012). A confessional tale delivered in a taut, propulsive narrative brimming with equal amounts of tragic intensity and dramatic energy, the memoir traces Condé’s eventful life in Africa in the turbulent decade of the sixties. I am especially interested in Condé’s evocation of a vast array of African diasporic writers as inspirational in her own artistic development, and as crucial to the awakening of her diasporic vision. It is my contention that Condé’s bold, radical departure from her earlier reactions vis-à-vis the African literary landscape demands attention. Considering the author’s proclaimed goal to unravel the absolute, complete truth, this essay situates Condé’s reminiscences within the broader context of a veritable boom in life writing and its study.