What Is Africa to Me? or Maryse Condé’s Love-Hate Relationship with “Ancestral Lands” Struggling with Budding Independence

Abstract

The involvement of French-speaking Caribbean intellectuals in the socio political development of their ancestral continent, Africa, has taken diverse literary forms, key among which are René Maran’s novel Batouala (1921), Frantz Fanon’s political testimony Les damnés de la terre (2004 [1961]), Aimé Césaire’s play Une saison au Congo (1966), Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s novel Juletane (1982), and Raoul Peck’s film Sometimes in April (2005). While dialoguing with these authors/works, Maryse Condé’s autobiography, La vie sans fards (2012)/What Is Africa to Me? (2017), prolongs this affiliation with the account of her relocation to four West African postcolonies, namely the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal between 1959 and 1970, with a year’s break in the uk.