Maryse Condé has always travelled with a different compass. A compass that points almost invariably due south. The leading Caribbean writer of her generation has, over the course of a writing career spanning 50 years, situated her stories, characters, and histories in islands and territories that have been scarred by colonial plunder and racial prejudice.
The recipient of many awards, including the Alternative Nobel Prize, Condé remains clear-sighted about the opportunistic corruption of many postcolonial regimes but never loses sight of the resourcefulness, creativity and complex humanity of her literary creations, which resist the condescending compassion of the white man’s tears.
In what she claims will be her last book, The Gospel According to the New World, translated by Richard Philcox, Condé recasts the New Testament as a tale from the Global South. Born in a shed on a Caribbean island, Pascal is abandoned at birth by his mother and is raised by foster parents, Eulalie and Jean-Pierre Ballandra. As he grows into adulthood, Pascal begins to be perceived as different, accredited with healing the sick and raising the dead. He even gathers together a group of 12 disciples – an unlikely coalition of the dispossessed and the disaffected – who while away their time to no great purpose in island bars.
At one stage, he goes missing and returns two months later with a new mission, “his favourite subjects of conversation were slavery and colonisation and countries and societies that have been totally ignored or marginalised”. Pascal is a reluctant Messiah, however. He drinks. The worship of his followers irritates him. When his teachings are quoted back to him, the only thing that strikes him is their banality.
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He travels to Paraguay and Brazil, in search of his elusive and charismatic birth father, Corazón Tejara. There, Pascal learns that no legacy goes uncontested, some viewing his father as a figure of unalloyed good and others treating him as yet another incarnation of colonial paternalism. Judas Eluthère, one-time disciple turned corporate lackey and political opportunist, is the dark evangelist anticipating Pascal’s Passion, even if it is climate rather than politics that prove Pascal’s undoing in the end.
Condé's latest, compelling novel does not preach but it does instruct – on what happens when we flip hemispheres and show that gospel truths are always plural.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
