ABSTRACT
In her introduction to La vie sans fards (2012), Maryse Conde’s second autobiographical volume, which is dedicated primarily to the years she spent in West Africa, the Guadeloupean author (b. 1937) distinguishes her motivations for writing from the idealizing ones most often attributed to the conventional enterprise of recounting a life. That Africa “occupied a considerable place in my life and in my imagination” was certain (16).1 Though she cannot explain exactly what it was she was looking for there, over the course of the narrative she does relate what she found. In preparing the reader, she proclaims her passion for “unvarnished” truth-telling, as she stakes a claim for her singularity while also invoking a more abstract, albeit gendered, universality. This is a tall order. Generally, autobiography is the space where models of exemplarity (the best of a group) and exceptionalism (different from the rest) cancel each other out. Elidingjeluding any political or social markers of racial or ethnic identity in favor of other modes of identification, Conde explicitly aligns herself with the first modern declaration of selfhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les confessions, and thus inscribes herself squarely into the French Enlightenment and Romantic traditions: “I want to display to my kind a woman in every way true to nature, and the woman I portray shall be myself” (12).2
