Sur les Traces de Maryse Condé

[C]reativity is a complex process which obeys no rules ... Creative imagination goes beyond the limits of reality and soars to areas of its own choice. (1) Maryse Conde and I entered the French at Department Columbia University at the same time in the fall of 1995. I came to her seminar, "Exotisme et Discours Colonial," out of pure curiosity about the department's new hire, as I had initially planned to focus on the period of French literary history stretching from the fin-de-siecle through the period of the entre-deux-guerres for my graduate studies. Fascinated by the Surrealists and their aesthetic forbears, I sought out those places in literature where beauty and anger, fantasy and interrogation, laughter and revolt combined to initiate change--both aesthetic and socio-political. My authors were Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Breton, and Eluard. My only knowledge of francophone Caribbean literature consisted of a few commonplaces and catchphrases concerning Cesaire that I had been exposed to through the filters of Breton and Sartre. But the world--worlds--opened up for me in this first experience with Professor Conde. And by the end of my second seminar with her that spring, "Filles, femmes memorables," I had discovered a chorus of new, powerful voices, not least of which was Conde's own. I had begun exploring previously unimagined spaces where beauty and anger, fantasy and interrogation, laughter and revolt combined to initiate change--both aesthetic and socio-political. It quickly became clear that I would have to let go of the banalities of postcolonial literary theory I had picked up and been espousing without challenging. In effect, the "discours colonial" that Conde evoked was not merely some foolishness fixed in the distant past to be analyzed and dissected. Rather, it is very present, and is something that Conde has exposed and disputed throughout her career--in her novels, in her scholarly writings and, of course, in her classrooms. It was in this last space that my personal connection to Maryse Conde was forged. There, for the first time, I found myself faced with the daunting task of expressing my ideas on texts written by authors I had never heard of before, from countries I had never before been asked to consider as producers of literature. But giving in to my insecurities and remaining silent in her class of relying on well-placed quotes culled from other theorists were not options. Professor Conde simply would not accept such passivity--such timidity--from me of from any of her other students. She forced me to be braver as a reader and as a scholar, surely as an individual as well. She helped me to resist the oft-exaggerated politics implicit in so much of Francophone Caribbean literature and its study. Indeed, perhaps the most important lesson I ever learned from Maryse Conde was not to be intimidated before any text. To be respectful, yes, but also to be unafraid--unafraid of my own voice. How honored was I, then, to have been called on to help organize "Order, Disorder, and Freedom: an Homage to Maryse Conde," Columbia's celebration of Conde on the eve of her retirement as professor in the French Department and as chair of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. This gathering together of scholars of Conde's work and of her colleagues and collaborators, past and present, at this colloquium on Columbia's campus created an exceptional experience for participants and attendees alike. The subsequent task of editing this volume, however, proved to be a somewhat more tricky undertaking. Indeed, in my attempts to find an appropriate "order" in which to place these various testaments to Conde's life and work, the irony inherent in such an endeavor was by no means lost on me. According to what terms does one divide up and categorize responses to and reflections on a writer who herself defies categorization? How does one begin to separate the personal from the formal from the thematic, when all three and more are evoked in each and every individual contribution? …