Maryse Conde - The Story of the Cannibal Woman

Rosélie never went out because she didn’t have any friends. In fact, even from an early age she never had any friends, cosseted by her jealous and possessive mother, and mixing with the family only because she had to. The conversations of her teenage cousins obsessed with their first kiss, or cousins now grown into womanhood obsessed with the performance or, alas, nonperformance in bed of their husbands and lovers, bored her. Ever since Simone Bazin des Roseraies, née Folle-Follette, had left Cape Town to follow her husband and consul to Somalia, she had no one but Dido to keep her company, and she treasured those moments. It’s only normal. The popular saying goes that a woman needs another woman to talk to. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and I didn’t invent the expression. But enough of that.

Simone and Rosélie first met at the French Cultural Center. The French Cultural Center was guarded like Fort Knox ever since its wine cellar and stock of foie gras had been raided one Christmas Eve. Despite its cafeteria, which, until that terrible raid, had served excellent wines and delicious sandwiches, the center was always deserted. Charlotte Gains-bourg and Mathieu Kassovitz were doing their best. But how could you rival Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could be seen strutting across every movie screen in Cape Town?

One evening Rosélie found herself sitting not far from the lovely, golden-skinned Simone, who positively glowed, during a showing of Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley . She had seen the film again and again in Paris, N’Dossou, and New York. She never missed a showing, not merely for its merits as a movie but because Euzhan Palcy’s miserere each time empowered her with the reality she did not possess. For an hour and a half she could stand up and shout to the disbelievers:

“Look! I’m tired of telling you. Guadeloupe and Martinique actually exist! People live and die there. They make babies who in turn reproduce. They claim to possess a culture unlike any other: Creole culture.”

Question: How do you recognize a compatriot? The Caribbean people have an instinct, like any other endangered species. That evening Simone was sitting with her children. As soon as the sepia-colored opening sequences started to roll the children began whispering in her ear. She likewise whispered her answers so as not to disturb the other spectators, pathetically trying to authenticate this far-off land that they had only seen depicted as fiction.

Kod yanm ka mawé yanm . Friendship binds those who are far from their shores.

From that day on, Rosélie and Simone became inseparable. Yet their personalities were strict opposites. Rosélie was attached to nothing, perhaps because nothing belonged to her. Simone was pathologically attached to those thousands of facets some people call traditions: Christmas carols, mandarin pips, and polka-dot dresses at New Year’s, coconut sorbet at four in the afternoon, codfish fritters, crab matoutou , and red snapper stew for lunch. She would go for miles to buy blood and pig’s intestines to make her black pudding. But above all, unlike Rosélie, she had an opinion on politics and just about everything else: underdevelopment, dictatorship, democracy, Kofi Annan, Muslim fundamentalism, homosexuality, terrorism, and the India-Pakistan conflict. Belonging to the same people as Aimé Césaire, the inspiration of Caribbean consciousness, she naturally had the right to teach everyone a thing or two. She dared make negative comments about Nelson Mandela, the untouchable. She believed his influence had not allowed the South African people to purge their frustration and be born again in a baptism of blood under the sun. See Fanon: “On Violence.”

“One day all hell’s going to break loose,” she liked to say, rubbing her hands as if overjoyed at the prospect. “It’ll explode like at Saint-Pierre. The whites will hurl themselves on the blacks, and the blacks on the whites.”

For those who might not understand the comparison, she was alluding to the eruption of the Montagne Pelée and the total destruction of the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Only one person escaped — a prisoner by the name of Cyparis…Oh, I’m sorry, that’s another story.

What upset Simone the most as a devoted mother of five was the government’s disregard for children. Didn’t they know they were the future of the nation?

The child is the future of man.

In her opinion, kindergartens and nursery schools should be under government control and not left to individuals, who were only intent on making a profit. Having investigated several of these places, she had seen for herself how these innocent children were left to macerate in filth, urine, and fecal matter. No intellectual stimulation. The lucky ones had a few cuddly toys, coloring crayons, and modeling clay. So at the end of December she begged Rosélie to play Santa Claus with her and accompany her on a toy distribution mission. Rosélie, who had the regrettable habit of being intimidated by anyone whose willpower was stronger than hers, gave in. One afternoon, then, they set off in the embassy’s Peugeot to empty their sack of toys at strategic points. The way they were received at Bambinos as well as Sweet Mickey’s as well as Tiny Tots’ Palace filled Rosélie with dismay. Worse than intruders, veritable undesirables! The directors scarcely poked their heads out of their offices while their assistants grabbed the packages in such an offhand way, it was to be feared the cumbersome objects would end up in the garbage.

Why, for goodness’ sake?

Simone hadn’t always been a homemaker. She had been a brilliant student at the School for Political Science in Paris and read all the classics of decolonization. So the explanation she provided was inspired by her readings of years gone by.

“We’re not white women. We are black. The whites, however, have brainwashed these people to such an extent that they not only loathe themselves but everything of the same color. What’s more, it’s the class struggle. Here we are in a luxury car. We don’t live in the townships. We’re bourgeois. They hate us for not living like them.”

Bourgeois? Speak for yourself. I live like a parasite. I don’t have a career. I don’t have any money or own any material or spiritual goods. I have neither a present nor a future.

Simone had a short memory; she hadn’t always been a bourgeois. She was born in one of the most destitute villages of Martinique. Her father was a cane worker who had been a regular customer at the company rum store. There was never any meat on the table. The family was lucky when the fig bananas were accompanied by a slice of codfish and a little olive oil. At the age of ten, though she had never worn anything else but sandals, her godmother, a bourgeois mulatto from Prêcheur, gave her a pair of shiny pumps that her third daughter had not quite worn out. At boarding school she washed and ironed the only two dresses she had, one for weekdays and the nice one for Sunday mass. Right up to graduation she “massacred” the French language, which made her classmates die laughing. When she met Antoine Bazin des Roseraies, a minor aristocrat, nothing more, an egghead and first in his class, she had not been impressed. He had won her over only after a persistent courtship. Then, like in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding , after a marriage of convenience, the buds of love had blossomed.

At the present time, Simone would have been perfectly happy with a faithful husband and a loving family, if her public life had not been a calvary. On the many occasions when she represented France at her husband’s side, she was systematically ignored and snubbed. Under her own roof, at her own receptions, the guests never spoke to her. At other people’s dinner parties she was relegated to the bottom of the table. Nobody would believe she had studied at the School for Political Science. At her children’s school they took her for the maid. Unlike Rosélie, she was feisty. With the help of her husband, albeit discreetly because of his function, she founded an association, the DNA, the Defense of the Negress Association, her handbook being a work by the Senegalese author Awa Thiam, La Parole aux Négresses , which she had read while at university. To those who balked at the word “Negress” and its colonial connotations, and who proposed periphrases such as “women of African origin,” “women of color,” “women of the South,” or even “women on the move,” Simone retorted that, on the contrary, it was good to shock.