What Is Africa to Me? or Maryse Condé’s Love-Hate Relationship with “Ancestral Lands” Struggling with Budding Independence

In What Is Africa to Me?, Maryse Condé reflects on her troubled ten-year sojourn in West Africa against the backdrop of a love-hate relationship with Africa, the failures of the African nation-state, and disillusionment with the Pan-Africanist ideal. The paper examines the protagonist’s tribulations and the patriarchal colonization of her body by applying the conceptual tool of Othering from both postcolonial and feminist perspectives. It establishes that Condé and her host communities engage in reciprocal exclusion, which culminates in her sexual objectification at the hands of the new West African elite of both leftist and rightist persuasions. The paper concludes that her unresolved ambivalent relationship with Africa confirms her attachment to the continent.