ABSTRACT
The preoccupations of negritude have continued, in varying forms, to remain central to Antillean writing, and it is thus perhaps unsurprising that in her first attempts at the dominant Antillean genre, the novel, Maryse Conde should choose to engage with this ‘founding discourse’. During the witch trials in Salem, Tituba is imprisoned, and once they are over she is sold to a Jewish trader, Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo. When he finally dies, and frees her, she boards a ship bound for Barbados and is able, at last, to make her way home. Tituba is a text which refuses to remove vestiges of the oral tradition, or to choose between fact and fiction. Rather than emphasising, as does the writer of slave narrative, her attempts to remain faithful to Tituba’s story, Maryse Conde instead readily admits that her text is at least part invention, that it is a ‘fictionalised’ history.
