Identities in Motion in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Abstract

This paper acknowledges the distinctiveness of the black creole’s identity, offering to Maryse Condé’s protagonist Tituba the possibility of coming to terms with her mongrel and hybrid identity. Via an active, constitutive voice, Tituba leaps into history, shattering all the racist and misogynist misconceptions that have defined the identity of black creole woman. Having survived the Salem witch trial, she returns to Barbados where she dies as a revolutionary archetype. My paper will be informed by interrelated notions of identity, language and the deterritorialization of minorities. Within the scope of this paper, the literary representation of Tituba’s identity denotes the process of ‘becoming’ that has been one of the most powerful catalysts in the Caribbean imagination. Besides, versatility is at the core of the black creole’s identity as evoked in Caribbean literature. The ‘subaltern’ can now speak for herself, and perhaps more importantly, can negotiate her identity poetically and not conceptually.