Autobiography and Reading in Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: Contes vrais de mon enfance

The process of calling into question the relationship between self, community and writing that I identified as a key preoccupation in the testimonial text, MTSNS, is elaborated further in Condé account of her childhood, Le Cœur à rire et à pletirer: Contes vrais de mon enfance. ¹ Published in 1999, when Condé was 62, LCRP is structured around a series of vignettes that depict her experiences from birth to age sixteen. While to date the text has attracted relatively little critical attention, the interviews and critical readings that have centred on the text have all tended, to varying extents, to assign it the status of 'autobiography'. LCRP's autobiographical status is defined in terms of a coincidence of form and function. In line with this, a number of critics have read LCRP as paradigmatic of 'postcolonial' Caribbean autobiographical writing on the basis of its use of specific literary practices such as the blurring of fact and fiction and intertextual references along with its nonlinear narrative structure as a means of giving expression to a distinctive Caribbean subjectivity. ²