For a novel about a pair of twins, the singular “life” of the title of Alternative Nobel winner Maryse Condé’s latest novel is by no means an accident. The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana plunges the reader into the viscera of the twins’ birth as the novel opens in utero, through the birth canal and out into the world, where the “décor of their lives” takes shape in the author’s native Guadeloupe.
Ivan and Ivana are born to Simone, a sugar cane worker and member of a choir dealing in melodies that “dated back to the time of slaves when the slaves were in irons”, and their childhood is one of mournful poverty and desolation, which pervades their environment. This is conveyed in passages of portentous lyricism, including this one about Simone and her mother returning from choir practice at night: “Stumbling over the rough stones as they felt their way home the women got the impression of pushing open the doors of hell and following their own hearse.”
Ivan and Ivana’s bond becomes susceptible to fissures as their outlook and views diverge, spelling doom. Towards the end of the novel, the pair will have a fateful confrontation in Paris that connects back to some 200 pages before, and their days on the Leeward Coast, “when the powerful rays of a cruel sun have not yet emerged, erasing every shadow and flattening every contour”.
But first they start out their lives in Guadeloupe in sight of the redolent sea, in a narrative pulsing with incestuous longing. “All things considered, I am you,” Ivan tells the beautiful and gifted Ivana, who has mastered the art of shutting her eyes to many things and so retains a sense of happiness and wonder.
Ivan, on the other hand becomes increasingly burdened by “the monstrousness of this world”. His feeling of exclusion deepens, and radicalisation – that great filler of voids – tightens its grip on him. Not even an almost utopian menage-a-trois can reverse the course of his life, and by extension, Ivana’s. From Guadeloupe to Mali and France, the devastation foretold by their grandmother will have its day.
Famous drummers
The narrative voice is a collective and elegiac “we” that sweeps across epochs, taking in slavery, colonialism, fundamentalism, islander psychology, migration and the pitfalls of ideology. Always, a deep insight into contradictions of race, class, religion and nation. “But is there such a thing as a national narrative?” the narrator asks. “Guadeloupe is an overseas department. Its only national narrative is that of France.”
The established world order comes up for questioning. When a Parisian named Harry expresses surprise at Ivan’s ignorance of Coluche, Ivan is quietly indignant: “Did Harry know the names of the famous drummers from Guadeloupe and Martinique?”
When Ivan and Ivana tell their aunt that they are off to Mali to stay with their father, the aunt asks why they are going among the “savages”, to which the twins’ response is that they are half Africans. “In their defence it must be said that they had heard little about the raids on the African coast,” the narrator offers. “Like most of their fellow islanders they believed that blacks were native inhabitants of the Caribbean.”
The self-reflexivity of the novel has the narrator pausing regularly to qualify or clarify a point or other for the benefit of the reader. A wise storyteller with an expansive eye on the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, and yet demurring, rejecting omniscience, admitting to knowing only what the communal “we” knows.
“We now begin a chapter of our story which is not reliable,” says the narrator on one page. On another: “We have very little information as to what happened next … so much hearsay and fabrication that it is impossible to get a clear picture.”
Oral tradition
Beating in the novel’s heart is orality, carrying with it the breath of histories, literatures and languages of Africa and the Caribbean. When a secretary fires off questionnaires from France to Guadeloupe and Mali, “The answers were few and far between, since both places belonged to oral tradition”.
In constantly drawing attention to its form as narrative constructed through a process of selection shaped by the communal voice, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana is clear as to its loyalties. “Mali occupies a proud place in history books,” the narrator declares; the kora’s voice accompanied heroic kings into battle; and as for Timbuktu, it is quite radiantly “a literary icon”. Condé makes clear, at every point: this is the story we are telling, the perspective in focus, the world we are centring – it is the subaltern that speaks.
On fundamentalism, the world seems divided into “the West and their lackeys, and the rest,” the novel argues. “Both camps are playing games of massacre and each is as savage and implacable as the other … Peace conferences open in Geneva and result in nothing and still the bombs keep coming.”
The truth is not only murky and complex, it is often elusive. All we have is interpretation.
