Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon as Fictitious Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction

When speaking of her Antillean identity, Maryse Conde stated once that "certains ont la chance d'etre Antillais en naissant, moi je dirais en parodiant Simone de Beauvoir que je ne suis pas nee Antillaise, je le suis devenue" (Rosello 571). This statement, inspired by Beauvoir, is evidence of Maryse Conde's intricate relationship with her Antillean identity. For Conde, autobiographical writing functions as a means of understanding the Self within the complex cultural and linguistic pluralism that often defines the postcolonial era. Written in 1976, Conde's first novel Heremakhonon has been labeled by scholars as one of her "African novels." The novel's African theme is announced in the title, since "heremakhonon" is a Malinke word that means both "wait for happiness" and "welcome house." Written in the form of a fictional autobiographical narrative, Heremakhonon pushes life-writing to its limits, challenging the borders of the genre itself. While the novel undoubtedly presents itself as the autobiography of the fictional protagonist Veronica Mercier, the reader must constantly distinguish between the fictional and the autobiographical since Veronica Mercier and Maryse Conde share many common traits. Although Heremakhonon is by no means a traditional autobiography as delineated by Philippe Lejeune's famous pacte autobiographique, the many biographical similarities between the author and Veronica Mercier provide the text with a clear autobiographical dimension. This essay proposes to analyze Veronica Mercier's fictional autobiography while comparing it to elements and experiences from Maryse Conde's life, in order to show that Heremakhonon doubles as a work of autobiographical fiction. Maryse Conde is often referred to as a nomadic intellectual who, through her writing, weaves together several cultures. Her geographical trajectory can best be described as a cultural hybridization that includes her native island of Guadeloupe, the mother continent of Africa, the colonial power of France, and the United States. Many of her works fall under the category of autobiographical fiction to such an extent that the boundary between fact and fiction is often blurred. When speaking of the relationship between Conde's own experiences and the themes and subject matter of her literary creations, Beverley Noakes states that "something of her own life often serves as a starting point for elements in her novels" (128). Today Maryse Conde is best known as a novelist, playwright, literary critic, professor, and radio producer. Born Maryse Boucolon in Pointa-Pitre in 1937, she was the youngest of eight children. Conde left the island of Guadeloupe in 1953 at the age of sixteen to pursue her studies in Paris. It is also in Paris that she met and married Mamadou Conde, an actor from Guinea. While in Paris, she studied at the Universite Paris III, Sorbonne and earned the equivalent of a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature and has lived and taught in the African nations of Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. In addition, Conde has been a professor of Black African literature at the Universite Paris IV, Sorbonne and has also taught in the United States at Columbia University in the Department of Romance Philology. She did not return to the island of Guadeloupe to take up permanent residence until 1986. Like Conde herself, Veronica Mercier is a nomad in search of her identity as well as a collective history that she can claim as her own. Although much of the novel takes place in West Africa, Veronica's nomadism and her desire to know more about her pre-colonial past provide the novel with literary themes that are unmistakably Caribbean. Her nomadic search for cultural roots and ancestors leads her on a journey from Guadeloupe to Paris, then to West Africa, and back to Paris at the end of the narrative. Veronica, like Conde, wanted to know what Africa was like before Western colonization. Veronica reveals her rationale for coming to Africa to her student: ". …