Name: Heremakhonon
Rating: 4.25 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780894108860

Maryse Condé

Veronica Mercier, a sophisticated Caribbean woman teaching and living in Paris, goes to a West African country to complete her search for self-identity. There, she finds herself involved with a nigger with ancestors - a cold, calculating minister for the interior and heir to the presidency.

Heremakhonon

Macy HB

What can children do against the barrel of a gun? Even as a bluff. All this of course is a bluff.

Oh for the Westernized with their long, psychological explanations, their childhood through a tooth comb and their hairsplitting. I’ve been told there’s no room for personal problems here.

As I wasn’t there, I shall never know the truth. And then if I had been there the prisms of my desires and dreams would have distorted the reality. It’s a fact there’s no such thing as reality. The facts are made of Venetian glass.

Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives… To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and self-creation. – Dionne Brand (A Map to the Door of No Return)

Maryse Conde’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical one on the psychic costs of the intertwining histories of colonialism and slavery. It is an experimental novel with nonlinear temporality which I found a little hard to follow as it follows the character from Guadeloupe, to Paris and then to Guinea. Quite a similar style to Toni Morrison that I did not particularly connect with it but it reminded me of other works of black diasporic intellectuals with similar themes such as Dionne Brand’s 

 and more recent work by Ta-Nehesi Coates of his time in Senegal and perhaps quite controversially Naipaul’s books on Africa. This book was published in 1976 a time of both great changes in post-colonial Africa. Maryse’s book captures the disillusionment of the time as various African states descended into corruption and authoritarianism. Her book is set in Sekou Touré's Guinea which I don’t know much about as well as the failures of the negritude movement.

Marion

Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives… To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and self-creation. – Dionne Brand (A Map to the Door of No Return)

Maryse Conde’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical one on the psychic costs of the intertwining histories of colonialism and slavery. It is an experimental novel with nonlinear temporality which I found a little hard to follow as it follows the character from Guadeloupe, to Paris and then to Guinea. Quite a similar style to Toni Morrison that I did not particularly connect with it but it reminded me of other works of black diasporic intellectuals with similar themes such as Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Maya Angelou’s Ghanian memoir: All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes and more recent work by Ta-Nehesi Coates of his time in Senegal and perhaps quite controversially Naipaul’s books on Africa. This book was published in 1976 a time of both great changes in post-colonial Africa. Maryse’s book captures the disillusionment of the time as various African states descended into corruption and authoritarianism. Her book is set in Sekou Touré's Guinea which I don’t know much about as well as the failures of the negritude movement.

Heremakhonon

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