Stephen Gray
I, TITUBA by Maryse Cond (Faber &Faber)
THE ABYSSINIAN by Jean-Christophe Rufin (Picador)
As one of their first books dated 2000, Faber have reissued one of Maryse Cond’s novels in their Caribbean Series, chosen by Caryl Phillips. The short title is I, Tituba, although this had previously been followed by the subtitle Black Witch of Salem, and it is very far beyond the “Ah know exac’ly what I got ta tell ya” school.
Those of a certain age will pick up Cond’s reference to that never-ending matric setbook, Arthur Miller’s play about the goodwives of Massachusetts, their dour, adulterous husbands dressed black-as-the-Bible, and their wretched witchhunt for the Satanists in their midst. All that was meant to sensitise us to the dangers of prejudice and censorship, and warn us off apartheid practice. But it never did, because Miller never got to the real issue: Tituba, who was a black African, who was useful only to confess what her bosses wished.
Her actual deposition to the Salem interrogators is the core of this deeply probing novel. About this Cond invents the likely life: a Caribbean plantation slave abused into lying, killing and eventual revolt. At the recent Time of the Writer festival in Durban, Cond discussed her now famous mouthpiece, with her translator husband Richard Philcox beside her. She admitted she was convinced that, deep down, not much had changed in Puritan America as far as narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy and, well, just your basic racism goes. The novel demonstrates this, movingly and memorably, for it has found the crucial voice of the dispersed and historically silenced, whose story even Miller overlooked.
Set in the same last decade of the 18th century is another wonderful historical novel, with another kind of rich take on neglected testimonies – Jean-Christophe Rufin’s The Abyssinian, also elegantly translated from French into English (by Willard Wood), where it will surely also become a bestselling favourite.
Rufin is a humanitarian worker with Doctors without Frontiers, so his spectacular epic concerns just the kind of mission one imagines he lives for. From Cairo his diplomats run into Ethiopia, harried by the Turks and the Arabs, to rescue the grand Christian negus from his skin complaint. Their success is a big tick for the adventurers of King Louis XIV, not to mention their rather dicey know-how.
This is rich recreation for quality white folks – the shimmering parlours of Egypt, the astonishing Ethiopian hoo-ha, the gilded dross of those cheap Frankish courts. Here beautiful young women actually do wait around in cloisters for their beloveds to return, years and years later, and keep their mouths shut.
Here also foodstuffs are routinely tested on slaves for poison. The negus himself has a courtyard of subjects perpetually and loudly complaining, just to remind him of his duties. Which he ignores.
It is a sumptuously arrogant show, redeemed by its slight satirical edge. And in this one you know exac’ly what you’re being tole, ol’ style.