When the Tout-Monde Is Not One: Maryse Condé’s Problematic ‘World-in-Motion’ in Les belles ténébreuses (2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017)

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, Edouard Glissant defined his “relational philosophy,” which was useful in describing the importance of movement and discovery in the Francophone text. At the end of the twentieth century, Glissant’s Tout-Monde contributed to a theoretical framework for thinking about a physical world and a body of literature made in motion and from positive encounters. However, in our current era, where free-circulation, mobility and exchange have become compromised, more pessimistic narratives have emerged. Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s novels Les belles ténébreuses (2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017) reflect the apprehension and pessimism of the current chaotic “world-in-motion,” which Arjun Appadurai defines as an unequal world that blocks the multitudes of unprivileged from being able to confront the sociocultural, economic and political “disjunctures” of transnationalism. This chapter analyzes how Condé’s novels reveal skepticism with respect to Glissantian ideals about Relation in the Tout-Monde of exchange. The fundamental questions she asks in her radical remapping of Glissantian philosophy in her novels demonstrate a concern that positive mobility, transnationalism, human contact and exchange are illusions in the angst of our era as we witness the increasing global tensions of our age.

Maryse Condé’s Les belles ténébreuses (2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017) evoke our current “world-in-motion”¹ as a space and time that offer very little to those who are marginalized. She challenges us to think about Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s aspirational “Tout-Monde”—“un monde qui fait bouger choses et gens” (1995, 35) [a world that makes things and people move]—and whether or not it could ever be a reality on a planet that is increasingly hostile to ideas about global shared citizenship, despite the relational environments in which we live. As we read her novels written in the last few decades, we are reminded of what Marc Augé notes in Pour une anthropologie de la mobilité (2009):

In the ‘surmodern’, ‘overmodern’ world, subject to the triple acceleration of knowledge, technology and the market, the gap is growing every day between the representation of a borderless globality that would allow goods, people, images and messages to circulate unrestrictedly and the reality of a divided, fragmented planet, where the divisions denied by the ideology of the system find themselves at the very heart of this system. (14)²

In general, Condé’s novels studied here entreat us to think about the following questions: What exactly are the global, nefarious winds (and from where do they come) that blow characters across the four corners of the world? Why can’t her multicultural and diverse protagonists build meaningful relationships and enjoy a positive being-in-the-world³in a Tout-Monde of exchange and “relation” as Glissant defines it? How do young Caribbean and African peoples’ choices and the environments in which they must operate, determine their identities, agency and ultimately their selfhood? Can these choices radically remap the world of relation?

This chapter thus analyzes how Condé’s novels reveal skepticism with respect to Glissantian ideals about Relation in the Tout-Monde of exchange. The fundamental questions she asks demonstrate a concern that positive mobility, transnationalism, human contact and exchange are, in the angst of our current era, illusions for many Africans and Caribbeans who experience increasing global tensions. Islamic radicalization, gender inequality, economic exploitation and environmental disasters in Condé’s Les belles ténébreuses and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana thus express a chaotic world-in-motion fraught with socioeconomic and political disjunctures that counter the Glissantian aspirational Tout-Monde.

Edouard Glissant’s Aspirational Tout-Monde of Relation

As early as 1981 in Le discours antillais, Édouard Glissant proposed to the francophone literary world his “relational philosophy,” which was useful in describing the importance of movement and discovery in novels by authors of French expression. Particularly, his philosophy of Relation in Le discours anitllais, and as expressed later in Poétique de la Relation (1990), Tout-monde (1995), Traité du Tout-Monde (1997) and Philosophie de la Relation (2009), offered an aspirational theoretical framework of how to think about the Caribbean as it reflected “the refusal … to distinguish among poetry and ideology or politics” (Hachad 2013, 126). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, writers from the francophone world made us all voyageurs through narratives touting the positivity of mobility and movement in a Tout-Monde where all relations were possible and borders were fluid. In Eloge de la créolité (1989), Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant further celebrated Glissant’s mapping of the multiple, creolized diverse world that presented to Caribbean people a way of looking at their history through multiple spaciotemporal lenses: “Our History is a braid of stories. We have tasted all languages, all dialects. … We are at the same time, Europe, Africa, nourished by Asian, Levantine, Indian, and we also recognize the legacies of pre-Columbian America. Creolity is ‘the diffracted but recomposed world,’ a maelstrom of signified in a single signifier: a Totality” (26–27, translation M. B. Taleb-Khyar).

Glissant’s relational Tout-Monde philosophy contributes to a theoretical framework for thinking about remapping a world and a body of literature made in, and emerging from, motion, encounters and the créolisation that results from movement and mixing. Such a world exemplifies the importance of free-circulation and exchanges not threatened by neoliberal capitalist “disjunctures,” which Arjun Appadurai explains are evident in “the complexity of the … global economy.” Socioeconomic and political disjunctures are the results of “increasing inequality with respect to land, money, and security” (1996, 3). These static challenges make up our chaotic “world-in-motion,” as Appadurai defines it, and have “produce[d] fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice and governance” (Appadurai 2000, 5). The chaotic world-in-motion presents barriers to individuals’ rights to enjoy a phenomenologically understood being-in-the-world; a position of the self that in Glissant’s framework is positive, cosmopolitan and autonomous, yet operating also in harmony with others and the environment (Meyers 2008, 79). The Tout-Monde promotes a créolization that allows for mixing and the “connecting many cultures … resulting in something new” (Glissant 1997, 37). This creolization is recognized in works by Glissant, as well as in the later writings of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant (1990), as having emerged in part from the brutality of colonialism. Therefore, they recognize that créolization is inherently a double-edged sword—one side promotes the positivity of multiculturality, the other the past of violence and brutality.

The relational world of the Tout-Monde has often offered a roadmap for understanding the themes of authors of French expression from the Caribbean who search for the answers to contemporary questions of immigration, migration, locality and positionality in the twenty-first-century world. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, capitalisme et schizophrénie (1980), Glissant’s Tout-Monde places importance on intersectionality, positionality and rhizomatic, nomadic wanderings: “La notion de rhizome … récuse l’idée d’une racine totalitaire” (2009, 23) [The notion of the rhizome … rejects the idea of a totalitarian root, my translation]. Glissant affirms the importance of rhizomatic thinking in Philosophy of Relation, noting that “what I call a poetics of Relation” means that “all identity extends in relation to the Other” (23).⁴

However, Glissant’s conception of the rhizome and the fruitful wanderings it ensures in a relational Tout-Monde of exchange is not without tension. Jarrod Hayes points out in Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree the challenges to Glissant’s conception with respect to Caribbean identity and sense of place:

In spite of the fact that Glissant’s notion of the rhizomatic was inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, his version not only is attached to a specific geocultural context—the Caribbean—but also allows for an identity rooted in that place. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant rejects the root; unlike them, he keeps rootedness. (12–13)

It is within this tension between movement and rootedness as affecting identity, place and a sense of being-in-the-world that I situate Condé’s Les belles ténébreuses and Le Fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana. Her version of a Tout-Monde lacks the positivity of Glissant’s and moves beyond his and the major Creolist theorists of the 1990s Chamoiseau, Bernarbé, Confiant’s conceptions of it in order to engage with twenty-first-century challenges, such as increasing violence against women that are unprecedented in their severity.

As many of Condé’s characters reveal, the need to be rooted in a country/nationality/ethnicity in order to form identity and to enjoy the freedom of discovery as the subject travels the world is fraught with complication. Her novels disclose that in our current time, free-circulation, mobility and rhizomatic exchange in a world of relation have become increasingly problematic ideals and physical impossibilities as we face progressively global, isolationist political climates in the West that are fueled by ever-growing hyper misogyny, xenophobia, racism, fear and, at the writing of this chapter, the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tension between the Glissantian aspirational Tout-Monde and the chaotic world-in-motion fraught with socioeconomic and political disjunctures as described by Appadurai is a constant theme in Condé’s narratives. For Condé, being a sujet global [global subject], benefiting from the positive relations one can make through goods and exchanges in a Western-hyper-capitalist-cosmopolitan model, is a reality only for the very few. Condé’s protagonists are severely hampered, profiting little from free-circulation and relations with Others as they become bound in scenarios that lead them down paths where choosing to do good is often stymied. Condé’s protagonists struggle to forge their identities and find their place in the world. This identity challenge is particularly burdensome for young men and women of color—Kassem in Les belles ténébreuses and Ivan and Ivana in Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana—as both novels demonstrate. Their rhizomatic wanderings in the twenty-first century do not lead to identities that link abundantly with others but rather to a present, as notes a character in Condé’s Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana, where “nous vivons dans une telle époque que personne ne sait où donner de la tête” (251) [we live in an era where no one knows which way is up].

Les Belles Ténébreuses

Maryse Condé’s 2008 Les belles ténébreuses focuses on two men, Ramzi and, the younger, Kassem. Kassem is a bi-racial Frenchman, son of a Guadeloupean father and a Romanian mother while in the opening pages, Ramzi is described as “30-something … mixed of a thousand bloods” (27). He is charismatic, smoking cigars from Havana especially made for him, as he wears a black dinner jacket like that of “Keanu Reeves in The Matrix” (115). Ramzi, also mixed ethnically and nationally, is an entrepreneur who dabbles in illegal spheres and invents a perfume called “Nefrititi” with a reprehensible Italian partner named Aldo Moravia. Ramzi’s more sinister persona involves working as an embalmer known for rendering the dead, particularly young women, more beautiful than in life with special “face powders and creams” (100). Kassem eventually comes to believe that Ramzi is, in fact, a serial killer who laces his perfume and lipstick products with deadly poisons that kill hundreds of young women who eventually wind up on his embalming table. This killing enterprise takes on global proportions as Ramzi moves his operation from an unnamed African country to France and then to the United States. Although Kassem realizes that Ramzi is “a serial killer … [t]he most dangerous in humanity’s history,” he cannot prove it (239).⁵ Ramzi’s global cosmopolitan image (as a man who speaks multiple languages and is culturally astute) gleans him invitations as a guest in the homes of powerful men across the world. He becomes a “Supreme Leader” of “the Revolution” (first Muslim and then later for an undefined, loosely religious cause) which he claims “will help” humanity (113). Kassem, who is diminished by his own precarious existence, thus cannot challenge Ramzi’s international reputation, making repeatedly evident Condé’s message that only the most strong and cunning capitalists survive. Her title’s meaning constantly haunts the narrative as “les Fleurs des ténèbres” become darker for Kassem as the story progresses (72).

Kassem slowly realizes in his dealings with Ramzi that darkness and beauty, and good and evil, are intertwined. Another lesson the young man learns is that only the powerful gain money and fame, allowing them ultimately to come out ahead. This power is always won at the expense of those who are weak and without means to challenge the might of strong capitalist networks as notes Ramzi to Kassem in the closing pages of the novel: “Personne n’est indifférent à l’argent. C’est l’argent qui mène le monde. Mais attention à toi! Ce sont les individus comme toi qu’on coffre” (281) [No one is indifferent to money. Money rules the world. Watch yourself! It’s individuals like you who they lock up]. Here, Ramzi is referring to Kassem’s visible bi-racial identity that from the beginning of the narrative has made his life difficult. Although Condé’s novel pleads for the right of each individual to self-define, or as Glissant would affirm, forge relations by not claiming a national identity, a race or a genealogy, Kassem as an example proves this to be impossible. Nations and nationalities can be fraught with positives and negatives as Kassem is regularly reminded. Métissé, half Guadeloupean, half Romanian, born in France, but always feeling like he has been relegated to the margins, the young man’s sense of identity is constantly conflicted.

Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana

Condé’s most recent novel is a narrative reflecting our current times, depicting the inordinate challenges many are facing on a daily basis as they try to navigate the socioeconomic and political “disjunctures” of the twenty-first century that Appadurai defines. Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana many say will probably be Condé’s last work since at eighty-three her health is failing. The author had to dictate her narrative because of a degenerative illness that prevents her from using her hands. The oral quality of the novel is woven into the fabric of the prose, and is evident in many instances as the denouement of the story of twins Ivan and Ivana unfurls. The narrator directly interjects her voice, reminding readers that this story is, indeed, one that must be told. It is destined to be passed down as a lesson for generations to come. The twins’ “triste destin” is “une illustration frappante de cette mondialisation qui souffle sur nous comme un mauvais vent” (346) [a shocking illustration of this globalization that blows on us like a bad wind].

While they are nonidentical twins, “Ivan et Ivana avaient d’abord été un seul œuf. Puis une mutation s’était produite” (347) [Ivan and Ivana were first one single egg. Then a mutation happened]. Being “the same but different” haunts their existence, from the time that they are “divided into two” (374). Ivana is seemingly destined to do good and succeed; Ivan is the opposite, as his destiny is determined by violence, crime and one bad experience after another, experiences over which he seems to have little control. Condé is perhaps evoking the ancient concept of marassas, the divine twins as in Vodou. Ironically, these are mythical children born as embodying love, truth and justice, yet with respect to Condé’s twins, their trajectories are anything but these qualities. They also represent links between earth and heaven as well as personifying astrological knowledge. Marassas twins can be mythical lovers tied into the same soul.⁶ Indeed, Ivan and Ivana’s incestuous relationship is one of the central themes of Condé’s plot and integral to the denouement of moral choices each makes. The mythological (and sexualized) twins’ trope facilitates Condé’s wish to present readers with a series of hypotheses on how one’s being-in-the-world is determined by fate, destiny and/or luck.

Growing up in poverty in Guadeloupe, raised by their mother Simone and grandmother Maeva who considers them as “deux maudits” (two damned) (94), Ivan and Ivana are from the outset forced onto different paths. As their lives unfold, Condé presents readers with an age-old question, is one born evil or good, or does environment play a role in the individual’s proclivity for doing/being one or the other? Where Ivana excels at school, Ivan is consumed by jealousy and rage. Although given multiple opportunities to exceed, like Kassem, Ivan is constantly pulled into relationships with others that lead to his manipulation, unfulfilled identity quest and ultimate self-destruction. His mother, Simone, thinking that perhaps their estranged father (a Malian musician named Lansana with whom she spent one night only) could set Ivan on the right path, sends both children to Mali. Condé’s commentary on gender here comes into play.

In her descriptions of the gender dynamics to which Simone, her daughter and grandmother are subjected, Condé also exposes a weakness in Glissant’s notion of the Tout-Monde.⁷ Gender inequality is a given and very much determines the outcomes of women’s lives that are more often than not oppressed by violent realities. Simone’s deference to her male partner and her daughter Ivana’s lack of agency in the face of masculine domination demonstrate women’s incapacity to go against the grain of patriarchal forces in society, particularly in the Caribbean and Africa. Although doing well and making her way in the world, despite poverty on the island, Ivana is compelled to bend to the rules of the father, which force her to accompany her brother to Africa. Her dreams of either becoming a nurse or police officer in order to help people are dashed by her brother Ivan’s constant cycle of mishaps and bad choices. Early in the novel, in a rage of jealousy, Ivan goes to prison for murdering Ivana’s high school sweetheart. When he is released, Simone decides to send both children to Mali. In Mali, Ivana succeeds again to make the best of a situation in a war-torn country where Islamic jihadists threaten the local community, particularly women, every day. She volunteers at a local orphanage and dedicates herself to singing and studying the traditions of her father’s village.

Condé’s lesson about the influence of environments on individuals’ lives and outcomes is encapsulated in Ivan’s constant insistence that “Je suis ce que je suis” (224) [I am what I am]. He is constantly manipulated and consumed by the will of others. In Mali, his father’s heavy hand and unwillingness to get to know him also push him first to join the local militia, then to become caught up in radical jihadism, murder and a life that spins out of control. From the chaos of Mali, the twins travel to France where Ivana follows her dream to be a policewoman, enrolling in the police academy in Paris. Contrastingly, Ivan, after failing at an internship and a series of odd jobs, is engulfed again in drug dealing and, eventually, consumed by a terrorist group operating in the banlieues of Paris. Bending to the will of the group, he is convinced to carry out an ultimate act of violence: an armed attack on a retirement home for police veterans where Ivana happens to be working as a volunteer. In a blaze of gunfire, he accidentally kills her.

Fate, Destiny and Luck in the Tragic Disjunctures of Globalization

In Condé’s narratives, the prise de conscience necessary for her young people to achieve a positive and fulfilled being-in-the-world never takes place. The lessons they do learn are fourfold: first, physical and metaphorical geographies of relation, which could facilitate multiple crossings of boundaries and the creolization so celebrated in Glissant’s Tout-Monde, do not lead them to a better understanding of how to navigate the complicated and debilitating socioeconomic and political disjunctures of globalization. Second, ignorance about the world and their past lead characters to being duped, and worse still, death. They often become victims at the hands of powerful people and forces around them. Condé emphasizes that because of ignorance and their general lack of knowledge about their pasts, as well as their naiveté in navigating the world’s challenges in the present, her young characters are destined to be disempowered. Third, if not powerful enough to make their own paths, individuals will become the identities made for them by others. Environments shape characters’ representations of themselves. Kassem becomes what Ramzi sees him as being: a lackey. Ivan becomes a terrorist, manipulated constantly by radicals with a cause. Fourth, patriarchal systems lead to women experiencing increased violence, even death at the hands of men consumed by their desire for power. Although Ivana exceeds in her desire to follow a path that she has chosen, she becomes a victim to the patriarchal systems in which she is bound. Her mother, Simone, also is a victim of the powerful, which are usually men relying on strict systems of patriarchy. Both women end up martyrs for their people.

Geographies of Relation that Lead Nowhere

On a certain level, the physical spaces, geographies, topologies and temporalities of Condé’s novels exemplify Glissant’s theories of relation as characters operate in a multicultural Tout-Monde; they follow their “traces,”⁸ as Glissant notes: “We all know that the line is what put us all, no matter from where we come, in Relation” (1997, 18). Kassem in Les belles ténébreuses, with his French passport in hand, travels to an unnamed francophone African country to work in a hotel-park called Dream Land (in English in the text). Once there, he encounters many of the same inequalities and unjust practices that play out in society along the lines of color, class and access (or not) to power as he experienced at home. The hotel is frequented by “Swedes, Danish, Fins, Germans and Americans” who he notes are “the pure natives of nationalities with hard-currency and weak sun” (22). Kassem emphasizes “this is the rule” for global subjects positively networked and with economic means. The white, the privileged, those with passports from first-world countries, enjoy the power of making relations freely and without fetters, allowing them to “‘profit from the poor’” (22). Rich, cosmopolitan, global subjects circulate in a world in relation and are able to avoid being victims exploited by capitalism. For the despotic government ruling the African country, maintaining order and protecting the international reputation of the Club Med-like park is achieved by betraying the indigenous people who live there. Just after a terrorist bomb goes off killing everyone in the hotel, the country’s dictator Jean-Benoit Cinque’s (known as Big Boss) police force profits from the attack to round up the “jobless, the homeless, whores, Senegalese, and carpet sellers” in order to demonstrate to Westerners that the more undesirable populations of the country are being kept in check (23). Kassem is saved by luck simply because the hotel’s head chef sent him out to pick tomatoes. Condé’s views on luck and how the randomness of events can affect individuals’ lives are the lessons we draw from Kassem’s survival. He is constantly put into positions where the reader is forced to ask, is he compromised because of, or despite, his actions.

The world-in-motion described in Les belles ténébreuses opens in the unnamed African country’s capital Porto Ferraille (an interesting name evoking French/Spanish/Portuguese references as well as trash and garbage heaps). Characters go see Tom Cruise in Collateral or La Guerre des mondes by filmmaker Luc Besson. Kassem and Ramzi forge relationships with many others from the world’s historic past and present. Either these people (primarily famous male figures and creatives) are depicted in his immediate reality, or in the histories they learn as wandering migrant subjects with no roots: Marco Polo, Malcom X, Hilarion Hilarius,⁹ Fidel Castro, Jesus, Hitler, as well as the famous French soccer player, Zinedine Zidane, and the cyclist Lance Armstrong all cross the protagonists’ path (Modenesi 2011, 218). Further weaving the threads of their cosmopolitan existence, both Kassem and Ramzi draw on a multitude of literary works they attribute to shaping their identities: from Rimbaud’s Ophélie, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, to Léopold S. Senghor’s Femme noire and Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The protagonists also engage with the music of Vivaldi, Antonin Dvorak’s Requiem and François Couperin’s Leçons des ténébres, which echoes Condé’s title. Once the protagonists arrive in the United States at their final destination in New York, they flock to Harlem where they are surrounded by the music of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday (190).

Despite a multitude of connections, including Afrocentric texts and music, people and places, Kassem’s reality cannot escape the lurking darkness of the post-9/11 climate. The first decades of the twenty-first century have produced traumas of terrorism, Islamophobia, and radicalization, overwhelmingly presenting outcomes that are more adverse for people of color. Condé’s narrative is full of a generation of lost souls, displaced by socioeconomic hardships, wars, famine and natural catastrophes that leave the have-nots with less and less. Her novel reveals that even in a world of free-circulation, young people, particularly men who take out their frustrations on the bodies of women, are constantly pushed to the margins and find themselves at the mercy of manipulators, neocolonial neoliberalism, and vapid and morally corrupt revolutions. Kassem, and so many young people like him, is left in merciless freefall. He, like Ivan in Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana, is a nomad following paths that lead to no sense of purpose. His journey, completely organized by Ramzi who needs him to help carry out his nefarious deeds, allows no enlightenment and strength for a “retour” to one’s “pays natal,” as Aimé Césaire describes in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939); a work, ironically, that is quoted by Kassem in Les belles ténébreuses and Ivan in Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana. Being able to return to a homeland for Kassem and Ivan no longer is a possibility since they have been so far removed from their sense of place due to the violent lives that have cut them off from family ties, friends and community belonging.

The geographical spaces of nations and continents in Le fabuleux et triste destin are as conflicted as the protagonists that inhabit them. Condé takes readers through a geographical map that connects the ethnic details of the twins’ lives from their time in utero to their brief adulthoods living and traversing countries and continents. Like many of her novels, the author traces an Atlantic triangle that spans from the Americas (Guadeloupe) to Africa (Mali) to Europe (France). We begin “In utero: ou Bounded in a Nutshell” (in English in the original, a quote from W. Shakespeare’s Hamlet). We then travel through “Ex Utero” in Guadeloupe to “In Africa” (Mali) and then “Out of Africa,” to France, ending with “Affaires d’Utérus: On n’en sort pas” and a final “Epilogue.” Often nations and borders impede Ivana and Ivan from realizing their dreams, hopes and aspirations; yet, on the other hand, local communities provide them with meaningful work and instruction for how to understand the world. Ivana works in an orphanage in Mali and Ivan, for a short time, finds joy in tutoring children at a mosque in Paris. As her characters interact with local communities in Guadeloupe, Africa, and then France, Condé highlights the “glocal” tensions that arise in our era. A term that emerged in the 1990s, glocal describes how global sociocultural and economic networks influence local political policies, moral codes, and social interaction. It is a term “related [to] notions of hybridity, fusion, creolization, and mixture” and often evokes ideas of insecurity in individuals and communities that arise from a sense of loss (of identity, tradition, language, etc.) in their local lives (Roudometof 2015, 776). Loss of these social attributes cause communities to feel that they are at the mercy of outside forces over which they have no control. In Le fabuleux et triste destin, the author intertwines her protagonists’ personal stories with larger ones that reveal how the tension between local and global forces have influenced the Caribbean. She explains how “the Antilles for centuries” have depended on France for their livelihood causing immense “irreversible traumas” for inhabitants (Condé 2017, 67). These traumas are enmeshed in “capitalism and slavery” (a direct reference to the book by Eric Williams originally published in the 1960s)¹⁰ and have since contributed to the “suspicion of globalization” (65).

Knowledge Is Power and Ignorance Can Never Bring Bliss

In the new millennium, Condé’s male migrants embark on journeys without clear set goals that lead them often to failure and even death. One of her underlying messages is that young people pay with failure because they are ignorant about their pasts and origins. Not knowing the origins of one’s identity hinders moving forward in the future. In Les belles ténébreuses, although seemingly a cosmopolitan millennial, Kassem is made from the negative affirmations that define him. Searching for his identity, he is “embarrassed by his ignorance” about the world (186). He professes knowing the great authors of the French canon, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Molière and La Fontaine, but, nevertheless, is ultimately swayed by Ramzi’s misinterpretations of only one book, the Qur’an. Eventually, Kassem discovers that he cannot live in perpetual movement without a place to call home. Les belles ténébreuses describes a planet that is beautiful in its potential yet, as Ramzi tells him, without power, money and knowledge, Kassem will never be allowed to “tie his star to a wagon” (293). He has made the wrong choices that leave him stuck. Lamenting the fact that he didn’t pursue a university education after high school, but instead chose to chase money, leads him to remark that the path he has followed has led him to mediocrity: “Pressé de mener une vie mediocre!” (277) [In a hurry to live a mediocre life].

In Le fabuleux et triste destin, Ivan and Ivana are categorized as “[t]hese adolescents who never have been to the countries of their ancestors. They do not know them … they lived in happy self-satisfied ignorance” (278). Both Ivan and Ivana “didn’t know the origins of the people of Guadeloupe. They all were ignorant about the fact that all Caribbean people had been brought from Africa in slave ships” (107). The twins, like Kassem, pay for their ignorance; for Ivan this ignorance poses particular hurdles that ultimately condemn him to a future full of evil acts. As philosopher Georges Bataille (1990) remarks, “Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future” (15). Not knowing his past means that Ivan cannot plan his future and perhaps the good that he could do for himself and others. Ultimately, Ivan embodies the name given to him by his father: “Celui qui marche sans savoir où il pose ses pieds” (121) [he who walks without knowing where to place his feet] (121). Ivana, on the other hand, recognizes her ignorance more often and then tries to remedy it in order to make a future for herself. She excels in school, takes up volunteer work in an orphanage once she realizes she must live for a while in Mali and, eventually, dedicates herself in France to advancing in her studies to be a policewoman. In Mali, she is known for “son amour pour tout ce qui l’entourait” (117) [her love for all that surrounds her]. However, for all her love for others, and what she learns along the way in her travels, she cannot save her brother or herself.

One Is Not Born with an Identity, One Is Defined by Others

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born a woman, one becomes one,”¹¹ looms large not only for the women in Condé’s novels, but also for others in different contexts. The driving questions Condé asks pertaining to identity formation, which also involves gender, class and race politics, focus on encouraging readers to think about spaces—physical, psychological, and political—and how these shape both young men and women. A question that surfaces repeatedly in both novels is: How does one evolve into an identity?

From the beginning pages of Les belles ténébreuses, Kassem’s bi-racial heritage makes his life difficult. This compromised sense of self also contributes to his uncertainty about his sexual orientation. He finds that he is attracted to women as well as to the charismatic Ramzi, who infantilizes and manipulates him as he shapes him with his power. When he is mistakenly identified by police as a Muslim terrorist because of his darker skin color and “Arabic-sounding name,” Kassem’s life spins out of control; he is thrown in jail and accused of the terrorist bombing (21). While incarcerated, he innocently explains to his jailors that his “Muslim” sounding name is thanks to his “father, an authentic Guadeloupean Frenchman” who gave all his children first names “beginning with K” (21). But in the post-9/11 era, where the world is policed by hypervigilant, antiterrorism forces of security, explaining one’s identity as simply multiculturally undefined, is virtually impossible. Once liberated from jail, without work and possibilities in the African country, labeled by his dark skin and Arab sounding name, Kassem’s only means of help is the association of Muslims headed up by Ramzi An-Nawawi. Immediately upon his arrival in Ramzi’s institute for wayward men seeking a cause, the young Guadeloupean is fit into his new identity as a Muslim although he hasn’t converted. This new identity is literally fabricated from the outset by the very clothes that Ramzi gives him to wear: a silk caftan and a pair of sandals. Kassem notes that he “felt like an identity usurper,” yet is not strong enough to stand up to what has been imposed on him (33).

In Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana, while Condé’s story emerges with the birth of the twins, the author focuses particularly on Ivan and how he is bound to the evil that ultimately defines his identity and eventually takes his life. The author concentrates on examining whether it is the environment or the innate qualities of people that lead them to do acts of evil. Condé maps out Ivan’s downfall focusing on how evil reveals itself predominately through personal trauma. This trauma experienced on the individual level echoes in Condé’s larger project of exposing the past trauma of slavery as contributing to present-day instability among populations of color. The trauma encountered in these environments sets Ivan on a specific track from which he cannot extrapolate himself. The author leaves us wondering whether consciously or unconsciously Ivan, whose choices never bring positive ends, wills a cyclic trauma on himself, described by Jacques Lacan as “a particular destiny” that “demands insistently that [a] debt be paid … desire keeps coming back, keeps returning and situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business” (Lacan cited in Ruti 2009, 1115).

Condé articulates well how terror, betrayal and disaster contribute to shaping environments that only bring pain for her characters. Ivan’s gravitation to terror, betrayal and disaster, force him on a destiny-path that generates “a tapestry of pain” (Ruti 2009, 1114). The environments he encounters either cause him trauma or force him to commit his own acts of evil. The incessant repetition of trauma ultimately affects his mental state, his judgment, and eventually annihilates Ivan’s existence. The accumulation of encounters with forceful manipulators leads to Ivan’s radicalization. Condé makes a point about twenty-first-century, global networks that feed terrorism and how these affiliations hold power over individuals, leaving little possibility of escape. In an interview, remarking on radicalism in the Caribbean, she asserts: “Terrorism is not usually associated with the Caribbean … there are young people in Guadeloupe who are being seduced by terrorists. They are so desperate … Terror is a possibility for survival. I didn’t make this up; it exists. Therefore, my Ivan can become a terrorist” (Jordens n.p.). Ivan’s path to radicalization traces a path from Africa to France where his participation in networks of drug dealers and jihadists pursue the young protagonist, ultimately generating the violence that kills him and his sister. What he views as Ivana’s betrayal of his love (when she begins seeing other men), also contributes to his ultimate downfall. Condé suggests that evil acts emerge from the unfulfilled love the twins can never share. In an interview with Peter Jordans, the author elaborates on the questions of morality and separation that are evident in her novel. She asks her readers to consider the possibility of unfulfilled sibling love as a catalyst for evil which, in turn, engenders violence and terrorism: “And the children don’t understand why they have to leave the warm and peaceful space where they have stayed for so long, lying against one another, seeing nothing, while occasionally recognizing the soft and singing voice of the person who carried them, their mother Simone. No longer are they allowed to be together, truly one. They have to accept the separation” (Jordens 2019, n.p.).

Corrupted sexuality for Ivan and Kassem is a significant component in Condé’s narratives. With respect to Ivan, because of his sexual attraction to his sister, is it easier to condemn him? This is a question that dangles in the last few pages of Condé’s narrative as Ivan dies from the wounds endured in the terrorist attacks. Evil arises out of the failed fulfillment of desire; the lack Ivan feels in his life because he cannot (should not) sexually have his sister. He has been “robbed of something unfathomably precious” that cannot be countered (Ruti 2009, 1117). Disaster is the result. The good in Ivana is not enough to take care of the evil in the world that causes Ivan’s downfall.

Condé’s novels are at once personal and universal. She entreats us to reflect on the human condition in our “world-in-motion” and the tensions among time, space and gender that frame the actions of young people who must live in it. Condé’s writing describes the challenging spaces of young people living in the margins, suffering the socioeconomic and political disjunctures of global capitalism. As a commentary on our current era, her works give us pause about the viability of a positive Tout-Monde. Her pessimistic assessment of this world compels us to reconsider the parameters of Glissant’s conception of Relation as offering the possibility to radically remap what has been engrained in the status quo of history determined by the victorious. Glissant himself recognized in Philosophie de la relation that relation is not always able to counter “les sublimations, qui ornent volontiers les dominations contre lesquelles nous résistons” (2009, 38) [the sublimations, which willingly adorn the dominations against which we resist]. He raises the possibility that a universal Tout-Monde, creolized and equal, may remain forever elusive (1997, 37–38). Yet, Glissant also suggests that writers like Maryse Condé will help us navigate and perhaps better understand this very problematic, unequal world. It is to them that we must listen: “Écoutons le cri du monde. Passons outre les obligations et les petitesses de chaque jour, faisons cortège à ces écrivains et à ces artistes dérivés loin de chez eux, consentons qu’ils nous apportent beaucoup, nous aidant à tisser ce réseau … dans le Tout-Monde” (1997, 251). [Let’s listen to the cry of the world. Let us go beyond the obligations and smallness of each day, let us give procession to these writers and artists pushed far from home, let us consent that they bring us a lot, helping us to weave this network … in the Tout-Monde].

Notes

• 1. This is a term developed by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large.

• 2. All translations in this essay are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

• 3. As explained in Being and Time (NY: Harper-Collins, 1962) by Martin Heidegger as well as in the phenomenological philosophy and writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

• 4. Glissant bases his rhizomatic philosophy on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical work Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Editions de Minuit, 1980) wherein they explain the importance of not being rooted, but rather traveling along multiple paths and trajectories. Glissant began exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s concept in Caribbean Discourse (1981) and then expanded on its theme in Poetics of Relation (1990). See also Jarrod Hayes, Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree (2016).

• 5. Italicized words in English in the original.

• 6. See: Livret de pratique Vaudou marassa jumeaux: mini guide de pratique vaudou by Magali Tranchant, alias Mambo Marie Laveau (2019).

• 7. In his overall conception of the Tout-Monde and Relational philosophy, Glissant is faulted for having paid little attention to gender.

• 8. Glissant is drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “lines of flight” as described in Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie.

• 9. The character from Compère Général Soleil (General Sun, My Brother, 1955) by the famous Haitian author Jacques-Stephen Alexis. The story follows a young man of peasant origin named Hilarius Hilarion, who is thrown into prison after an attempted robbery, where he is influenced and politicized by communist organizer Pierre Roumel. Condé’s character, Kassem, closely resembles Hilarion’s trajectory.

• 10. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery ([1944] 1994).

• 11. As she writes in Le deuxième sexe (1949).