The South
Carolina Modern Language Review
Volume 1,
Number 1
Teaching Francophone Literature in
Translation:
Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
East Carolina University
Et, cependant l’entreprise coloniale cruelle et destructrice en son
principe nous offre, bien malgré elle, un fruit merveilleux qui illustre le
caractère indomptable de la créativité humaine. Cette langue d’emprunt, cette langue imposée fut repensée,
réinterprétée, remodelée par les peuples colonisés en fonction de leur génie
spécifique. (Maryse Condé)1
Given
the rich and diverse literary and cultural traditions of French-speaking
regions of the world, as well as the growing interest in and importance of
Francophone countries and cultures, as educators, we must address the question
of how la francophonie can be incorporated into the French undergraduate
curriculum. In response to this
question, I would like to give a very brief description of a few of the recent
curricular revisions made in the French program at East Carolina
University. Without threatening the
traditional canon of courses on French literature, culture and civilization,
the French curriculum committee added more course choices in Francophone
literature and cultures. In the courses required of French majors and minors,
the most significant change was in the sequence of culture and civilization
courses at the second-year level. By replacing a one-semester course on
French-speaking regions of the world with two courses—one dealing with
French-speaking regions of the Americas (Quebec, Louisiana, Haiti, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, Guyane) and one dealing with Francophone Africa—students now have
more choices. These curricular revisions also allowed for more special topics
courses in Francophone literature and culture at the upper levels.
Another
significant revision included updating and revising the course on Francophone
literature in translation. Often the domain of English departments, “literature
in translation” courses provide a unique opportunity for faculty in foreign
language departments to teach literature outside the foreign or second language
classroom in a context relatively free from language barriers. Furthermore, because the course fulfills
specific university and program requirements such as general education,
diversity, humanities, ethnic studies, this course allows foreign language
faculty to reach across the curriculum to a different audience and to introduce
students from diverse majors and backgrounds to Francophone literatures and
cultures.
In
1995, I was hired at East Carolina University as the Francophone specialist. I
found a listing for a Francophone literature in translation course in the
catalog. The course was listed as a “banked” or inactive course under the title
“French Black Literature in Translation.” Given the potential importance of the
course to the curriculum, I felt it merited review and reactivation. After some
searching, I found the original description of the course in departmental
files: it was as dated as the title and did not include any works published
later than the 1970’s. Content focused
primarily on the poetry of the Negritude movement, ignoring a vast segment of
the literary production of Francophone African and Caribbean regions. In revising this course, which I taught for
the first time in 1997, I focused on Francophone Caribbean literature. As far
as course content was concerned, one of my primary goals was to select a body
of representative works by writers from the French-speaking Caribbean (Haiti,
Guadeloupe, and Martinique) that included women writers and that also
illustrated important themes, movements or currents of thought (Négritude,
Antillanité, Créolité; Negritude, Caribbeanness, Creoleness). But, perhaps, my
most important criteria in the selection of readings was to choose texts that
would not only introduce students to other cultures and ways of seeing but
works that would inspire them to question their own culture and society.2
In the three semesters that I have offered this course, no other work has
engendered more discussion and debate than the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch
of Salem (Moi, Tituba sorcière noire de Salem, 1986). What I
would like to propose here are two approaches to the novel. The first I would describe as thematic in
nature and the other, intertextual and comparative. For each work studied in
class, I distribute a set of questions.3 I use these questions to
guide class discussions and as the subject of paired or group work during the
class period.
In I,
Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé is inspired
by historical accounts of the Salem witch trials and the brief references to
Tituba, a slave woman from Barbados who was the first to confess to being a
witch.4 Part of her “American cycle” of novels, in I, Tituba,
Black Witch of Salem, Condé focuses on the common history shared by the
Caribbean and the United States, as she states in an interview with Françoise
Plaff: “I want to stress that the
African diaspora in the West Indies and the Americas has a common history and
shares the same heroes, dreams, and aspirations”(69). Moreover, as a
Francophone writer who sets her fiction in the English-speaking Caribbean,
Condé further emphasizes the shared history of the Caribbean. To illustrate
this point in class, I integrate the ideas of the Martinican writer, Edouard
Glissant, who describes in his seminal work on Caribbean identity, Caribbean
Discourse (Le Discours antillais, 1981), how this common Caribbean
history with its origins in Africa has been obfuscated by colonization:
But in fact
colonization has divided into English, Dutch, Spanish territories a region
where the majority of the population is African: making strangers out of a people who are not. (5)
Furthermore, I
point out to students that Condé firmly grounds her work in New World history
from the very first page of the novel with her heroine’s brutal conception
aboard the slave ship:
Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on
the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing
to Barbados. I was born of this act of
aggression. From this act of hatred and
contempt.(3)
Thus, Tituba’s
journey, like the history of her people in the New World, begins with the
harrowing middle passage from Africa to the Americas.
I
emphasize to students that the underlying theme of all French Caribbean
literature is the quest for identity.
This quest can be expressed in universal terms of the heroic quest: the
hero who leaves his homeland to seek adventure and gain knowledge which he
brings back to his community. I demonstrate this point with the example of the
Haitian novel Masters of the Dew (Les Gouverneurs de la rosée,
1944) in which the character of Manuel is built upon the archetype of the
Hero-Redeemer who sacrifices himself for the common good.5 In this course, the exploration and
discussion of the quest motif in these novels provides a thematic framework for
my classroom approach. For each novel, I usually begin the discussion by
comparing, or by asking the students to compare, how the quest is expressed in
each work. In the French Caribbean, the quest without exception manifests
itself as a quest for origins (such as Negritude’s emphasis on a lost African
motherland) and the continuing search for and articulation of Caribbean
identity as articulated in the manifesto In Praise of Creoleness (Eloge
de la Créolité, 1989) by Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick
Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant.
One
activity I find helpful in assisting the students develop their ideas on
Condé’s novel is to have them compare the geographic movement within the novels
Black Shack Alley and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. In Black Shack Alley, we discuss the
linear movement from a rural to an urban space that parallels the protagonist’s
pursuit of an education. The movement can
be illustrated as follows (either on the board or on a handout):
Rural Urban
Plantation → Village → City
In small groups
of three or four students, I ask them to describe and illustrate the movements
they find in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem: What kind of movement(s) do you find in the novel? How would you describe and illustrate this
(these) movement(s)? Do they correspond to specific events in the
narrative? In Condé’s novel, Tituba’s
quest consists of numerous journeys that take her progressively further and
further away from her homeland to which she will return before her death, with
a greater awareness of her place within her community and within the history of
her community.
Because
Condé emphasizes Tituba’s spiritual growth as an integral part of her journey,
I devote a considerable amount of class time to this aspect of Tituba’s quest.
At her mother’s death, Tituba must leave the plantation and is taken in by Mama
Yaya, a spiritual healer and medicine woman both feared and admired for her
mystical abilities. I point out that the character of Mama Yaya is one of the
recurring “ancestor” figures within the tradition of French Caribbean fiction.6
The ancestor figure represents a vital spiritual link with what Edouard
Glissant calls le pays d’avant, “the land before”—Africa and the new world
America. Like Papa Longoué in Glissant’s novel The Ripening, Médouze in
Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley, Man Cia in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Wind
and Rain on Télumée Miracle, and, within a larger African-American context,
Pilate in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Mama Yaya carries with her
knowledge of the land, medicinal herbs, and most importantly the history of
people. Mama Yaya initiates Tituba into the “upper spheres of knowledge” (10)
and enables her to communicate with the dead: “The dead only die if they die in
our hearts. They live on if we cherish
them and honor them and honor their memory. . . . A few words are enough to
conjure them back” (10). This initiation into the spirit realm is an essential
segment of Tituba’s journey to selfhood and exemplifies what Margaret Moore
Willen describes as the valorization of the supernatural, community and orality
in Black Francophone writing (763)—a quality it shares with African-American
literature, and that according to Toni Morrison, falls outside Western
tradition:
In the Third
World cosmology as I perceive it, reality is not constituted by my literary
predecessors in Western culture. If my
work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the West, it must
centralize and animate information discredited by the West—discredited not
because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it
is information held by a discredited people, information dismissed as “lore” or
“gossip” or “magic” or “sentiment”. (388)
Through class
discussions, I attempt to clarify how the real and the supernatural exist on
the same plane; the barriers between the physical and the spiritual realms are
broken down. Tituba suffers the most in America because she is far from her
home in Barbados and therefore unable to communicate with her dead loved ones.
To elicit student ideas, I divide them into pairs and ask them to list,
describe and/or compare the following: Tituba’s spiritual mentors; Tituba’s
spiritual and geographical journeys; Tituba’s spirituality and Puritan
religious beliefs; the “ancestor”
figures in all novels.
To
further emphasize the cultural and historical specificity of Tituba’s journey,
I focus on her quest in terms of marronnage:
the marrons or maroons were rebel slaves who escaped to freedom in the
mornes or hills. They have been reclaimed and rehabilitated in Caribbean
fiction as folk heroes who embody refusal of colonial authority. According to Pascale Bécel, Tituba more accurately
embodies the practice of la petite marronne:
While the grand
marron elects the mornes as the locus of resistance to slavery, the petit
marron or practioner of petite marronne inhabits an interstitial space between
the plantation system and its outside ‘where the runaway absents himself partially
and temporarily, and usually at no great distance, from the plantation and
continues to live in ambivalent symbiosis with it until he returns. (612)
My
second approach to the novel is an intertextual reading that encourages
students to see, to paraphrase one of my former professors, “the way in which
texts speak to each other across time and space”. Henry Louis Gates gives another useful definition in his work
Figures in Black: he defines intertextuality as “the nonthematic manner by
which texts respond to each other” (41). In class discussions, I concentrate on
four possible “intertexts”: the
historical, the literary, folklore as text and the social (con)text. These
items can be introduced by lecturing and discussed with the class as a whole or
in small groups. The latter gives students the opportunity to work through and
articulate their ideas in a relatively stress-free atmosphere. I always follow up group work with an open
class discussion.
Historical
text: The very pretext for writing I,
Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a response to what Condé saw as a void in
written historical documentation. When
asked by her publisher to write the story of a female heroine from her region
and while in the process of researching the topic, Maryse Condé explains how
she "came across" the character of Tituba:
I just felt
interested by the story and curious to see what happened to Tituba. It is only
when I started asking people and historians around me, and did not discover
anything factual about her, that I decided I was going to write her story out
of my dreams. I felt this eclipse of
Tituba's life was completely unjust. I felt a strong solidarity with her and I
wanted to offer her her revenge by inventing a life such as she might perhaps
have wished it to be told. (199)
Because Condé
tells this story from the perspective of the oppressed other, her view is
essentially revisionist: Condé revises
and rewrites history by writing her story. This desire to revise what is
perceived as an incomplete history continues with Condé’s inclusion of the
Jewish character of Benjamin Cohen D’Azevedo, who becomes Tituba’s owner,
friend, and lover and ultimately, the one who grants her her freedom so that
she can return to her homeland. Thus, Condé underscores the history of racism
and oppression shared by the Black and Jewish communities. The historical
aspect of Condé’s work further emphasizes and illustrates for the students the
importance of history in Francophone Caribbean literature. Because this novel
is last novel we read, I ask students to compare how each author deals with
history.
Folklore as text: Throughout the
novel, Condé reclaims and rehabilitates, to quote again Toni Morrison,
information “discredited” by the West
through her emphasis on the supernatural, spirituality, magic, and oral
tradition. The intertext becomes intratext when Tituba returns to Barbados and
learns that her story has become part of the community’s history, inscribed in
the collective memory. She is recognized on the ship by one of the sailors as
“the daughter of Abena, who killed a white man?” to which Tituba responds:
Having someone recognize me after ten years of
absence brought tears to my eyes. I had
forgotten this ability our people have of remembering. Nothing escapes them! Everything is engraved in their memory!”
(136)
Folklore,
magic, and oral tradition play a significant role in other novels we read in
class, such as Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart. I have the
students compare and discuss the use of folklore in these two novels, focusing
in particular on the role of women in the transmission of oral history and
spiritual knowledge.
The
literary text: The most interesting
intertext is perhaps the inclusion of Hester Prynne from Hawthorne’s Scarlet
Letter.7 Hester befriends Tituba in prison. But this is a new Hester, one who, to quote
her character, was raised to believe in sexual equality. During one of their
many conversations she describes her feminist utopia:
I’d like to
write a book, but alas, women don’t write books! Only men bore us with their prose. I make an exception for certain poets. Have you read Milton, Tituba?
Oh I forgot you don’t know how to read. Paradise Lost, Tituba, a marvel
of its kind . . . . Yes, I’d like to write a book where I’d describe a model
society governed and run by women! We
would give our names to our children, we would raise them alone. . . .
(101)
If students
choose this topic for their research projects, I encourage them to present
their ideas to the class. Another work that may be discussed in this context is
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The social (con)text: The novel, I,
Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is also part of Condé’s reponse, along with The
Last of the African Kings and Tree of Life, to the rags-to-riches
narrative of the great American dream. In these three novels, America is
portrayed as a land of broken promises and shattered dreams. For Tituba,
America is a dark land that inspires not hope but fear: she was “banished” to
America, separated from her loved ones:
“ . . . America? Who had ever gone to America?” (35) To show how Condé
exploits this positive image of America, I prompt students to list positive
stereotypes of America and Americans and to compare these ideas with the dismal
images portrayed in the novel.
Condé
also expresses her views on contemporary American society as she gives a voice
and tells the untold story of her heroine. Setting the novel during this early
period of American history allows Condé to express her ideas about contemporary
American society. She adeptly
transposes Tituba’s fear of the “dark continent” of America to a
twentieth-century context, as she states in her interview with Anne
Scarboro:
Writing Tituba
was an opportunity to express my feelings about present-day America. I wanted to imply that in terms of
narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and racism, little has changed since the days of
the Puritans. (202)
She continues her critique of American society:
Every black
person living in America will tell you that racism still exists. A few success stories that are told over and
over again for propaganda reasons must not hide the fact that for the majority
of blacks, life is still hell. As a
foreigner and French-speaking person, I don't suffer directly from it. On the
contrary, I am still a curiosity; but I am too lucid not to see how the society
works. (200)8
By
including I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem in this course, I attain my
previously stated course objective of introducing the students to other ways of
seeing the world and their own society. We usually conclude the discussion of
the novel with a debate on the social context—a debate which consistently
provokes the most controversy and heated discussions. Condé’s novel exemplifies
Edouard Glissant’s concept of questionnement9 –a profound
questioning of history and society. In this social interpretation of I,
Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, students confront a scathing critique of
American society. Whether they agree or
disagree with Condé’s ideas on racism in the United States, most students feel
compelled to question and respond to this vision of America. Their act of
reading thus becomes an act of questionnement that will hopefully reach beyond
the classroom.
Description and objectives:
This course is an introduction to the literature and cultures of the French-speaking regions of the Caribbean and will focus on the question of racial and cultural identity in works by writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. Through readings, films, class discussions, and independant research, we will examine the historical and political contexts (colonization, slavery, decolonization) of Francophone Caribbean literature as well as issues of gender and the role of women.
Texts: Mayotte Capécia The White Negress/I Am a Martinican Woman
Aimé Césaire A Tempest
Patrick
Chamoiseau Childhood
Maryse Condé I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Jacques Roumain Masters of the Dew
Simone Schwarz-Bart Bridge of Beyond
Miriam Warner-Vieyra Juletane
Joseph Zobel Black
Shack Alley
Grades: Class participation and class work (oral and written) 10%
Quizzes 30%
Essays (2) 20%
Final project and presentation 20%
Final Exam 20%
A=100-90%; B=89-80; C=79-70%; D=69-60%; F=below 60%
Attendance: Punctual and regular attendance is required. Regular class attendance is a major component of your participation grade and is essential to your successful completion of this course. Continuous preparation is absolutely necessary. Excessive absences (more than 2) will result in a lower grade. Quizzes are mandatory and must be taken as scheduled. Exceptions will be granted only in extreme cases. You should come to class prepared to discuss the work assigned.
Essays: You will prepare 2 essays on the readings. The topics and dates for essays will be announced in class.
Reports: During the semester, you will prepare a research project and present your findings to the class. (See handout for detailed instructions.)
Appendix II
FORL 2622 Topics
for presentations / project
As indicated on
the syllabus, each of you will make one presentation on a topic of your choice.
Your presentation should be a sort of “progress report” of your research for
your final project. Choose a topic
that you are interested in—this should be an enjoyable learning experience.
Possible topics for projects:
Past topics:
The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman (the novel and film)
The Color Purple
(the novel and film)
Du
Bois, Washington and Zobel: the role of
education
Interracial
relationships and marriage
Racism
in the military
Black
entrepreneurs
Haiti
and the United States
Other ideas:
·
Portrayal
of minorities in television and film
(Example: Portrayal of
minorities in movies; “Black” sitcoms
and racial stereotyping; controversial
series or episodes in TV history).
·
Cultural
identity and nationality
·
Race and
politics
·
Literature
and history
·
Racism (in
the US, at the university, in France, etc.)
You may have
other ideas you would like to develop and research. The only criteria are
·
Your topic
should be something you want to learn more about.
·
It should
be related to the course.
How will you be
graded?
·
Presentations: Credit or no credit. The only things you need to turn in for
presentations are your notes and outline.
·
Project: Your grade will be based primarily on
content and organization . You should
begin thinking about a topic soon.
Length: 6-10 pages (typed,
double-spaced). Sources: at least 5 different sources. You should follow MLA guidelines for format and citations.
1. How does the novel begin? What effect does it have on you as the
reader?
2. Describe Tituba’s relationships with the
following characters:
·
Darnell
·
Jennifer
·
Abena
·
Yao
·
Mama Yaya
3. Describe Tituba’s childhood. What are her feelings toward her
mother? How does her mother feel about
her?
1. What feelings does John Indian arouse in
Tituba? How does he feel about her? Why
does Tituba call for Mama Yaya’s assistance?
2. Who is Susana Endicott? Describe John Indian’s relationship with
her.
3. Compare John Indian’s religious schooling
with Tituba’s spiritual education.
4. When Tituba’s mother appears to her, she
groans, “Why can’t women do without men?”
Does Tituba heed her mother’s warning?
5. What does Tituba give up for love? Do you
agree with her actions?
2. Bridge of
Beyond, Juletane and I, Tituba : compare these characters. Choose one of the
following pairs.
a.
Télumée and Juletane.
b.
Juletane and Hélène
c.
Tituba and Télumée
d. Mamadou and John Indian
3. Bridge of Beyond, Juletane and I,
Tituba: How are men portrayed? (You may concentrate on one or two of these
novels.)
Notes
1From
Maryse Condé’s foreward to the intermediate reader Diversité: la nouvelle
francophone à travers le monde.
2For a list of works
covered in the course, see the sample syllabus I have included in appendix
I. The difficulty in obtaining books
has been the greatest obstacle in compiling the course bibliography. Some works
in translation are no longer in print, such as Edouard Glissant’s The
Ripening (La Lézarde), or difficult to find. In addition to these
works, I also include the films Sugar Cane Alley by Martinican director,
Euzhan Palcy, Chocolat by French director Claire Denis, and the
documentary of Franz Fanon’s life and work, Black Skin, White Masks. For
their class project, students choose a topic for a research project early in
the semester. I encourage comparative
and interdisciplinary studies (for examples, see appendix II).
3I have included sample
discussion questions and composition topics appendix III.
4For a record of the Salem Witch
Trials, see the website: www.umkc.edu/famoustrials
5See Beverley Ormerod’s An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel for a complete study of The Masters of the Dew.
6The discussion of the ancestor
figure can be introduced as part of the lecture or as a small group discussion
or activity.
7Unfortunately, this allusion
slips by many students unrecognized. To fill in this gap, I might assign a
short research activity to be completed before beginning this class discussion.
A comparative character study of Hester in the Scarlet Letter and in I, Tituba,
Black Witch of Salem would also be an interesting project topic.
8In an interview with Barbara
Lewis, Condé sustains her negative portrayal of American society but she also
acknowledges the symbolic importance of America as a role model:
.
. . the Caribbean people see America as a place where a black person can be
successful. But those of us from the
Caribbean who come here regularly, we know there's another reality. We tell our people that there are black
people begging and living in the streets, and they don't believe us. We don't want to destroy all their hopes,
because people have to hope for something.
America is a positive symbol. We
have to admit that. If a black person
has energy and talent and works really hard, he or she can succeed in America.
(544)
9In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant states: Knowing what happened (why—that is, for what “valid” reason—the whites exterminated the Indians and reduced blacks to slavery, and whether they will be held accountable) is the question that one (yes, that Faulkner) cannot afford not to ask. A question that will require no active reply. The important thing is, not the reply, but the question. (80-81)
Bécel, Pascale.
"Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem as
a
tale of petite marronne." Callaloo 18.3 (1995): 608-615.
Budig-Markin,
Valérie and James Gaasch. Diversité: la nouvelle
francophone à travers le monde. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Condé, Maryse.
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
Gates, Henry Louis.
Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press,
1987.
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse.
Trans. and intro. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Lewis, Barbara. “No Silence: An Interview with Maryse Condé.” Callaloo
18.3 (1995): 543-50.
Morrison, Tony. “Memory, Creation, and Writing.” Thought
59.235 (1984): 386-90.
Ormerod, Beverley.
An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. London: Heinemann,
1985.
Plaff,
Françoise. Conversations with Maryse Condé. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Scarboro, Ann Armstrong. Afterword. I, Tituba,
Black Witch of Salem. By Maryse Condé.
Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
Willen, Margaret Moore. “A New (Mé)Tissage:
Weaving Black Francophone Literature into the Curriculum.” The French
Review 69.5 (1996): 762-74.