African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p., This wild and entertaining novel, winner of the 1986 Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Conde brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, "' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her. Rich with postmodern irony, the novel even includes an encounter with Hester Prawn of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
472 p, The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants, black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve dramatize the vicissitudes of power.
