Words, wounds and pre-oedipal oneness: Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer

This essay reads Maryse Condé’’s 1999 récit d’enfance, Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer, as a “generational text”; a text that is both about the unresolved and ambivalent feelings aroused by writing about the dead mother, and also about this loss as the site and source of (literary) generation. Le Cœur defiantly rewrites the classic narrative of Antillean matrifocality, and yet, although the mother’s death is relegated to a single line, maternal loss suffuses the entire narrative. Moreover, the text is a reflection on language, writing and literature more generally, and can be read as an exploration of the painful transition from pre-oedipal to symbolic. Words in this text are destructive entities that wound and distort all relationships, but especially the relationship with the mother, igniting a sustained yearning to return to the security of the pre-linguistic pre-oedipal.