I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

"That’s a beautiful way to put it. I love that. Condé is a Guadeloupian writer, and this novel was published in 1986 in French, and translated into English in 1992—by her husband, actually, Richard Philcox. This book is so cool. As you said, some readers—especially New Englanders—will know Tituba from The Crucible and a number of children’s books that circulate in North America. I had one I loved as a kid by Ann Lane Petry, a Black writer from Connecticut, called Tituba of Salem Village. Tituba was a Bajan figure, an enslaved woman who appears in dotted lines in the archive of the Salem witch trials, as a vector of unreason or irrationalism, of Voodoo practices or alternative medicine. Condé doesn’t only write historical novels , but this is a beautiful historical novel that takes up archival gaps, the spaces between what we can and can’t know about historical figures, particularly those that weren’t from white wealthy families. She does a kind of imaginative reanimation of the figure of Tituba and explores deeply the power that this figure held. Some recuperative critics will go back to this archive and say: ‘What are you talking about? She was just a normal black woman living amongst white girls. She didn’t infect them. She didn’t cast spells.’ But Condé’s take is a little different. She revives Tituba to locate an incredibly powerful spirit that is rageful—rightly rageful—that has experienced sexual violence, experienced enslavement, whose body is traded on a literal market. And because of these experiences, she’s vested with this power that comes from her relationship with her own ancestral matrilineal inheritance. “Condé is challenging what we categorize as science, what counts as knowledge” She speaks to her own dead mother in the novel, she speaks to her child. And there’s a really interesting meditation on women’s knowledge: practices like herbal medicine, midwifery, meditation, massage… Condé is challenging what we categorize as science, what counts as knowledge, through what we now understand to be effective, integrated indigenous and sometimes non-Western health practices. What comes out in this novel is both a kind of crazy archival surrealism, but also a serious theory of what a more cohesive and generous practice of care might look like. It’s almost as though she’s brought back as a kind of balm or healing figure—not just the character Tituba, but the novel itself—as a means of suturing a history back together, a surgical practice of recuperation. And, also, it’s just a lot of fun. It’s really funny, and there’s tons of, like, vengeful explosive dramatics. There are sarcastic takes on unsympathetic, snivelling white characters… It’s just a joy to read and a joy to teach. My students often really, really love this. We frequently work on writing curses and spells afterwards. A way of thinking about how language can call something into being, the way music, for example, can literally bring a crowd to its feet. No, it’s a great point. There’s the sense that with postcolonial lit we need to be prepared to, like, put on our big girl pants and get ready for something really serious and political. When we encounter postcolonial criticism, there’s so much serious work to be done. But it’s also the case that many postcolonial critics have existed in what W.B. Dubois calls ‘double consciousness’—we might call it, more casually, nowadays: ‘code switching’. To be in that space already is to inhabit a pretty great register of satire, of irony, of gallows humour. One of the greatest pleasures of being a critic of postcolonial literature is how very funny and joyous a lot of it is. I don’t mean to make light of the profoundly political and philosophical work that many of these writers are doing. We also see this impulse in less traditionally studious places, like on Instagram: ‘Black girl magic’, ‘brown joy,’ ‘queer flourishing.’ These are things that are happening in the poetics of anti-colonialism. If you’re going to critique power, you also need to be holding hands and dancing with the people you love. Pleasure is in these books. There’s certainly pain, political pain. But also a profound sense of community and attachment. And fun and hilarity. Plus righteous rage quickens the heart, so that part is good too. Totally. All of these writers that we’ve been talking about so far are multilingual. Like, not just in multiple colonial languages, but also oftentimes multiple local languages, and dialect and pidgin and hybrid languages. So they’re very fun to watch on the page."