The Story of the Cannibal Woman by Maryse Condé

and mixing with the family only because she had to. The conversations of her teenage cousins obsessed with their first kiss, or cousins now grown into womanhood obsessed with the performance or, alas, nonperformance in bed of their husbands and lovers, bored her. Ever since Simone Bazin des Roseraies, née Folle-Follette, had left Cape Town to follow her husband and consul to Somalia, she had no one but Dido to keep her company, and she treasured those moments. It’s only normal. The popular saying goes that a woman needs another woman to talk to. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and I didn’t invent the expression. But enough of that.
    Simone and Rosélie first met at the French Cultural Center. The French Cultural Center was guarded like Fort Knox ever since its wine cellar and stock of foie gras had been raided one Christmas Eve. Despite its cafeteria, which, until that terrible raid, had served excellent wines and delicious sandwiches, the center was always deserted. Charlotte Gains-bourg and Mathieu Kassovitz were doing their best. But how could you rival Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could be seen strutting across every movie screen in Cape Town?
    One evening Rosélie found herself sitting not far from the lovely, golden-skinned Simone, who positively glowed, during a showing of Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley . She had seen the film again and again in Paris, N’Dossou, and New York. She never missed a showing, not merely for its merits as a movie but because Euzhan Palcy’s miserere each time empowered her with the reality she did not possess. For an hour and a half she could stand up and shout to the disbelievers:
    â€œLook! I’m tired of telling you. Guadeloupe and Martinique actually exist! People live and die there. They make babies who in turn reproduce. They claim to possess a culture unlike any other: Creole culture.”
    Question: How do you recognize a compatriot? The Caribbean people have an instinct, like any other endangered species. That evening Simone was sitting with her children. As soon as the sepia-colored opening sequences started to roll the children began whispering in her ear. She likewise whispered her answers so as not to disturb the other spectators, pathetically trying to authenticate this far-off land that they had only seen depicted as fiction.
    Kod yanm ka mawé yanm . Friendship binds those who are far from their shores.
    From that day on, Rosélie and Simone became inseparable. Yet their personalities were strict opposites. Rosélie was attached to nothing, perhaps because nothing belonged to her. Simone was pathologically attached to those thousands of facets some people call traditions: Christmas carols, mandarin pips, and polka-dot dresses at New Year’s, coconut sorbet at four in the afternoon, codfish fritters, crab matoutou , and red snapper stew for lunch. She would go for miles to buy blood and pig’s intestines to make her black pudding. But above all, unlike Rosélie, she had an opinion on politics and just about everything else: underdevelopment, dictatorship, democracy, Kofi Annan, Muslim fundamentalism, homosexuality, terrorism, and the India-Pakistan conflict. Belonging to the same people as Aimé Césaire, the inspiration of Caribbean consciousness, she naturally had the right to teach everyone a thing or two. She dared make negative comments about Nelson Mandela, the untouchable. She believed his influence had not allowed the South African people to purge their frustration and be born again in a baptism of blood under the sun. See Fanon: “On Violence.”
    â€œOne day all hell’s going to break loose,” she liked to say, rubbing her hands as if overjoyed at the prospect. “It’ll explode like at Saint-Pierre. The whites will hurl themselves on the blacks, and the blacks on the whites.”
    For those who might not understand the comparison, she was alluding to the eruption of