Maryse Condé

Tituba is the surviving name from contemporary sources of a black slave girl from Barbados who, in 1692, found herself in Salem, America. In this Puritan town, the colour of her skin strikes terror, and mob hysteria culminates in the infamous Salem witch trials. In an adventurous blend of fantasy and history, the Guadeloupean writer lets Tituba tell the story of the trials from a slave woman’s perspective. While the fate of the real Tituba is unknown, the novel’s heroine escapes the gallows and returns to her native Barbados. Romantic and filled with horror, serious and unserious, such is the now iconic novel by the French Academy Award-winning author.

Published by Maraton, 2022

Maryse Condé (* 1937) is one of the most prominent Antillean authors writing in French. She left her native Guadeloupe at sixteen to study in Paris. In the 1960s, she taught French in Guinea, Africa, and later lived in Ghana and Senegal. Since the early 1980s, she has lectured at leading American universities. She has published over twenty novels, in which she returns to the theme of the contradiction between personal experience and collective experience, the history of colonization, and questions of emancipation. She lives between the United States, Guadeloupe, and France.