Reviewed by Mireille A. L. Djenno
The Story of the Cannibal Woman is, arguably, the most autobiographical novel Maryse Condé has written to date. The prize might also go to her first novel Hérémakhonon (1976) but Condé has been quick to dismiss speculation along those lines in both cases. Nonetheless, any awareness of the contours of Condé’s biography makes it interesting to read this novel allegorically and very difficult to resist speculating about her feelings about her own life and choices.
Rosélie Thibaudin, the novel’s central character, is a woman of a certain age and uncertain prospects. A painter – although she has practiced many professions, including the notoriously primeval one – Rosélie finds herself living in Cape Town, South Africa after the end of apartheid having led to that point, a very eventful life that would not have been readily predicted from her humble beginnings on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
Rosélie shares both Condé’s artistic bent and humble Afro-Guadeloupean heritage although, presumably, Condé’s cosmopolitan existence, as a successful academic and author of a dozen novels, owes more to her own merits than does Rosélie’s itinerant habit, which has been facilitated by the various men in her life: “Change your man and you change your rhythm of life” is the assertion that opens an early chapter and even at the end of the novel Rosélie retains the conviction that “The life of a woman is never over. There is always a man to help her continue on her path.”
Helping Condé along her path has been Richard Philcox, Condé’s husband and frequent English translator (including the novel under review) to whom the book is dedicated. The dedication seems doubly appropriate since the portion of her biography that this book most heavily relies upon as a recurring theme is that of the difficulties associated with being a mixed couple as both Condé and Philcox and Rosélie and Stephen Stewart are: “The mixed couple is a strong wine for strong constitutions. The fainthearted should abstain.”
Rosélie’s marriage to Stephen is an odd match in more than the obvious sense. Rosélie marvels at the vocation of Stephen – a university professor who teaches Irish literature – when she first meets him:
“So people spend their time wallowing in fiction, getting worked up about lives they have never led, paper lives, lives in print, analyzing them and commenting on these fantasy worlds. By comparison she was ashamed of her own problems, so commonplace, so crude, so genuine.”
Condé gives authenticity to those whose problems are not fictional and goes so far as to suggest that “Novelists are scared to invent the incredible, in other words life itself.” It is difficult not to read a certain quantity of cynicism and self-recrimination into this assertion. Could it be that Condé is disillusioned with the life of the mind she has herself has led?
Stephen’s murder (the culprit of and motivation for which is the mystery at the center of this novel) forces Rosélie to reexamine her choices in life and to evaluate what she thinks she knows about her partner of twenty years, herself, and the world.
The hostility toward them as a couple is one factor (“Day after day, under every sky, under every latitude, so much incomprehension! So many insults! So many snubs!”) but Condé uses more ink dissecting the couple’s inner dynamic which itself is an easy metaphor for race relations of all kinds: “In fact, had Stephen been her benefactor? Sharing his existence, living in his shadow had perhaps caused her enormous damage and prevented her from becoming an adult.”
Condé asks: Is it possible in love (or because of it) to transcend a grotesque imbalance of power such as has been the case between black women and white men historically? Is there any way for whites not to have a paternalistic attitude toward blacks, even those that are their literal bedfellows? Stephen, always working to promote Rosélie’s painting career tells her at one point “You know, you’ll never make it on your own.” While Condé’s answers to her own questions at times seem like facile responses advocating colorblindness, the more sustained responses to the dilemma and all their implications are: it’s complicated.
The novel is not paced as a thriller or constructed along the typical lines of a mystery but rather, consists of Rosélie’s cascading recollections of the events and people in her life that led her to Cape Town. Nonetheless, the writing is suspenseful and the whodunit aspect of the novel, although given short shrift (in this review and in the novel), is not ineffectual.
Whether or not the reader chooses to consider the possible implications for the Condé’s inner life from that of Rosélie’s, this is an enjoyable novel and while by no stretch of the imagination Condé’s best, it is unquestionably provocative and engaging.