Logo image
Back
Maryse Condé’s Translations Translated: On the British-Guadeloupian South Africa of Story of the Cannibal Woman
Book chapter   Open access

Maryse Condé’s Translations Translated: On the British-Guadeloupian South Africa of Story of the Cannibal Woman

Jan Steyn
TRANSLATING THE POSTCOLONIAL IN MULTILINGUAL CONTEXTS , pp.97-111
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
2017
DOI: 10.4000/books.pulm.12500
url
https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.12500View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

As a Guadeloupian, i. e. post-colonial but non-South-African writer, belonging to no South African cultural or linguistic group, Maryse Condé is in some ways better equipped than local writers to figure post-apartheid South Africa and its place in the world. While Condé throughout her oeuvre gives a scathing critique of the touristic gaze, Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003)—her novel set in South Africa featuring a Guadeloupian woman dealing with the death of her British husband—itself has at times a rather touristic feel. The 2015 Man-Booker International Award shortlist, featuring Condé as one of the ten finalists, was announced at the University of Cape Town in South Africa on the same campus where, and at the same time when, the RhodesMustFall movement was protesting the university’s continuing colonial legacy. In this 2015 political moment, Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale, together with her first work, also set in Africa, Hérémakhonon (1976), resonate particularly well—better perhaps than it might have done had it delivered a more ‘faithful’ rendering of 2003 Cape Town. The meaning of the post-colonial and the post-apartheid is often conflated by Condé, but in ways conducive to and echoed by contemporary South African politics, especially at a youth and student level.
 Linguistics

Details

Metrics

18 Record Views
Logo image