Reviewed by Kiini Ibura Salaam
A dark beauty with mysterious powers and a slashed throat steps off a boat in West Africa. She is contracted to teach at the Home for Half-Castes at Adjame-Santey, the capital of one of the smaller French Colonial countries of West Africa. Initially her motives are unclear, but she quickly takes over the Home and creates an unparalleled institution of undeniable beauty and questionable morality. Her manic desire to uncover the secrets of her life leads her to return home to Guadeloupe where she unleashes a ravenous rage and avenges all who contributed to her tortured existence. She is Celenire, and her insatiable thirst for revenge drives this story of ritual, history, family and loss.
Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? is a grand homage to the pathos and tragedy of the displaced. Against the backdrop of luxurious sunshine, bamboo groves and coconut palms, monkeys, leopards, caymans, sugar cane fields, and tobacco farms, Maryse Condé recreates the world colonialism knocked askew. Twisted realities, displaced cultures, and orphaned children are forced into a complex weave of relationships in which everyone is hungry to avenge a death, to care for the sick, for a new life, for survival, for love, for power, for absolution. They stagger through the pages of Condé’s novel, grasping across the chasm of loss to fight and mate in a desperate search for justice and a place to belong.
Fueled by copious research, Condé provides dizzying details of French colonial outposts in Africa and the Caribbean. While feeding the reader delicious geographic and cultural tidbits, which create an ambience ripe with sensuality, intrigue, and foreboding, Condé manages to pull together strands of Caribbean fables, feminism, and West African traditions to tell a story that soars over its weighty themes with humor, sensuality, and grace.
Condé’s mastery of language sparkles as she introduces us to Greek shopmen, Muslim outcasts, French priests and governors, and African princes dedicated to becoming colonial civil servants. French nuns sail through the Indies, China, and Japan to save the unfortunate. Penal colonies neighbor islands where children are born of desperate couplings between Chinese laborers, indentured Indians, and formerly enslaved Africans. It is the world of the Sisters of Charity and the African Missionary Society, saints who bleed, and gold diggers.
At the center of this dark fabulist tale is Celanire. She—like the survivors of colonialism—is torn asunder, enraged, conquered, but alive. Celanire overcomes a horrific act of violence to become a woman who rolls through polite society with the force of a wrecking ball. She is a woman who marries into power and claims the French colonial diaspora as her playground, and who satiates her thirst for vengeance, leaving misfortune, confusion, destruction and heartbreak in her wake. Like the helpless mortals who tremble before her, the reader is in turn bewitched, besotted, and frightened by Celanire. At the command of Condé’s pen, love mingles with hatred; attraction is accompanied by revulsion. Yet, no matter what depth of emotions Celanire arouses, she remains a mystery as deep and dark as her skin. Condé’s juxtapositions and revelations allow admiration, delight and disgust, but not intimacy. No one, not even the narrator, is ever close enough to understand the workings of Celanire’s heart.
Unlike all the unfortunate souls who cross her path, Celanire seems untouched by her journey. Condé maintains a feverish pitch of tension and anticipation, but Celanire ends the book as she begins it: fierce, uncompromising, beautiful, and fully in control. By the time the parade of Celanire’s terrible events finally subsides, we are no closer to Celanire than we were at the beginning. It is with utmost respect for Condé’s mastery that the reader salivates for the cataclysmic event—be it natural or supernatural—that can take on this wild spirit, churn up her certainties, and show her a surprise or two.
As Celanire’s unstoppable mischief reaches its frenzied conclusion, Condé assumes a tighter and tighter grip on readers. Dark and weighty themes shimmer in the luster of Condé’s writing. The reader, enthralled by Celanire’s bizarre existence, surrenders to the pull of Condé’s delightfully lush tale. No one is safe in Celanire’s clutches, but we are safe with Condé as she sweeps us into a wild romp through West Africa, Guadeloupe, and Peru into the heart of a mystery that laments the legacy of colonialism, vindicates a damaged woman, and keeps some secrets for itself.