Call it historical novel or whatever you wish, this is one of the greatest books I have read and paralles in a vague but definitve way some texts of García Márquez.
Maryse Conde is a Guadelupean black writer who has lived in a number of Antillean islands, West African countries, England, France and the U.S. She has lectured at prestigious universities on West Indian literature and related topics and has written a number of novels and plays.
In the 1980s Ms. Conde found documentation of about the then frequent witch trials conducted in the puritanical New England in the late 17th century, among them a rather laconic mention of a black woman slave Tituba from Barbados who was accused of witchcraft ("hoodoo") in Salem, Mass. 1692, then sold for the price of her prison fees and the cost of chains and shackles. Very little more was known about Tituba.
Ms. Conde decided to give life to Tituba, as she said: "a reality that was denied to her because of her color and her gender" and "because a black person is supposed not to have any history except the colonial one". In a fascinating, in places ironic but always highly compassionate thread, Conde recreates Tituba's completely unjust life story as a fictional rendition in the best Condean dreams-on-a-historical-basis format, which carries a heavy reality component to it, as some dreams do. In an almost surrealistic but still in a definite down-to-earth way, the book offers, almost compels, a highly liberating treatment that does not preach or idealize in the slightest but forces the reader into a new rearrangement of her/his mental orientations, be they connected with the unjust human history or its present forms; historical parallels of exploitation, repression and sheer insanity; racism; misogynism; black feminism; spirituality; cultural history; social ethics - - whatever is your angle after having read the unjust life story of an extraordinary woman.
The book is furnished with a thoughtful foreword by Angela Y. Davis and an afterword with an enlightening interview of Ms. Conde. The English translation from the original French is a pleasure to read.
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