ABSTRACT
With her eighth novel, Les Derniers Rois mages, Condé returns to her preoccupation with the idea of origin in the definition of identity. But she does so in ways that allow her to account for how this process is shaped by race and gender as forms of identity politics. DRM has one key feature which distinguishes it from the other four novels that I have considered thus far: its protagonist is male. The novel's protagonist is Spéro Jules-Juliette, a failed Guadeloupean painter now living in a small Southern American town, Charleston, and married for the last twenty-five years to an African-American woman, Debbie. The novel charts Spéro's musings on his life over the course of one Sunday 10th December, the date that commemorates the death of the family's founding ancestor, an African king exiled in Martinique at the end of the nineteenth century. Spéro recalls his attempts to trace his lineage back to this exiled African king with the aid of a text 'Les Cahiers de Djéré' purportedly written by his great-grandfather Djéré. By way of exploring the novel's particular treatment of ideas of origins and identity in this chapter, I will explore three significant narrative features of the text that have thus far not attracted any significant critical attention: first, the fact that the main character's claim to identity is based on a reputedly 'real' story written down by Spéro's great-grandfather Djéré and presented in the form of an unpublished text called 'Les Cahiers de Djéré' (and of which excerpts are presented in the novel); second, the fact that Spéro, the protagonist, is a commercially unsuccessful artist; third, the conception of politics in the text based on African-American identity politics. What I hope to demonstrate is that by placing the story of origins at its centre, the novel explores the relationship between literature, art, and identity politics as forms of representation that rely on the conflation of notions of 'politics' and 'artistic creation'. It is also through a reflection on these sets of relationships, I will argue, that the novel engages with the ways in which specific French and North American intellectual cultures create differing conditions of possibility for artistic practice and freedom.
