Moi, Tituba, Sorcière…Noire de Salem

Maryse Condé published Moi, Tituba, Sorcière in 1986, and it brought her the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. The book has since appeared in English as I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.

The Tituba of the historical record was a West Indian slave who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and then forgotten in jail until a general amnesty for witches two years later. Condé's novel sets out to bring her out of that silence, inventing for her a childhood, an adolescence and an old age.

Schooled in the sorcery and ritual of obeah, Tituba is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her, and Condé makes of her what she has called a kind of female hero, an epic figure on the order of the legendary Nanny of the Maroons. The novel is written with a good deal of irony about the records it is working from, and it is one of the books that made Condé's reputation outside the French Caribbean.