ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, the author’s rangy revision of the titular figure (whose historical record is limited to trial testimony). The piece is a feminist, postcolonial, and ecologically oriented satire that recuperates the traumatic history of non-white, non-Christian women through the radical agency Condé uses to restore Tituba’s narrative voice. By illuminating the means by which “fiction and history are inherently interdependent” in the odyssey of Tituba’s Caribbean and Puritan experience, Condé produces a compelling counter-narrative that confronts and challenges the white imperialist fictions that have created the “witch” antagonist in the ruling imaginary. Moreover, she does so from a place of geographical leverage at the interstices of empire and through the insurgent power of the unmediated ecos on the margins of civilization. By actualizing Tituba’s magic (through her connectivity to herbs, plants, animals, curios, and ritual) and essentializing (even deifying) the fluidic vision of Tituba’s multiracial hybridity, I, Tituba honors and enlivens non-Western metaphysics. With great humor and mischief, Condé insists upon a full subjectivity for the abjected and indicts at least as much the stultifying and flattening status quo of the current moment as the madness of 1690s Salem.
