Fulbright Chronicles, Volume 3, Number 2 (2024)
Author
Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé who was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Occidental College in 1985.
Despite having announced that she would not write anymore, Guadeloupean best-selling and Nobel Prize laureate Maryse Condé, who recently passed away at age 90, had one last inspiring story to tell—to her reader’s delight. In The Gospel According to the New World, her innovative rewriting of the Gospels, Condé offers, through the figure of a new, wandering Jesus, not only a reflection on the complexity of our contemporary world, but also on the humility of our human condition.
In her innovative rewriting of the Gospels, Condé offers not only a reflection on the complexity of our contemporary world, but also on the humility of our human condition
This is the story of Pascal, born on Easter Sunday to a wealthy Brazilian father and a lower-class young girl who is forced to give birth alone on the straw floor of a shack, abandoning her newborn to the donkey. The Christian, mixed-race, and barren couple – a black man and a white woman – who finds him, interprets his existence as a divine miracle, convinced that he is a new Jesus sent to Earth to “make it more tolerant and more at peace” (180).
Strange and quirky parallels between Pascal and Jesus multiply, casting doubt in the minds of both the characters and the readers. Is he really the New Son of God–-and if so, “which god” (62) in a world of religious and cultural plurality. Is he actually destined for an extraordinary mission? Or is it only his parents’ whim, his lover’s, and friends’ fantasies—a popular “deceptive hope to fill an existential void?
Interspersed throughout the novel are echoes of the Gospels that will make readers smile and wonder until the very last pages. These conscious intertextual literary games are often ironically pointed out by the narrator. For instance, Judas Eluthère, Pascal’s former friend who betrayed him for money and prestige, gives him “an affectionate yet hypocritical kiss. . .[t]he kiss of Judas, in other words!” (173).
Sometimes, the characters themselves identify the links between their own situations and famous biblical scenes while often simultaneously demystifying these episodes. Pascal expects his last meal before his departure to “go down in history and be embellished with foreign terms such as la última cena that would go on to inspire some of our greatest painters” (89). However, “[n]othing extraordinary occurred during the meal and no memorable pronouncements were made.
A new Christ in spite of himself, Pascal wanders from country to country, town to town, searching for answers he cannot find and for his mysterious missing father, “wondering to himself, Father, why have you forsaken me?” (93). He is aided in his quest by his Uncle Espíritu, who plays the role of a hunchbacked Holy Spirit in this odd Trinity. Everywhere Pascal goes, he unleashes passions: adoration or hatred. Some write new gospels about him and create new churches. Others trap him, betray him, and seek to imprison him. He might well not pride himself on this Christ part assigned to him, but he is nonetheless troubled. Annoyed and sometimes furious against the honors he receives, he will nevertheless attempt to live up to the expectations placed on his shoulders. Even though his conscious efforts do not really succeed and his questions remain mostly unanswered, Pascal still produces along the way, unintentionally, what people will later call miracles.
Maryse Condé takes her readers on a journey through numerous destinations such as Martinique, Haiti, Brazil, and New York; offering them powerful and informative descriptions throughout Pascal’s bittersweet meanderings and tragic-comic adventures. Pascal is humble, kind-hearted and innocent, but life experience makes him less naïve: in the course of his travels, it becomes increasingly clear that the magnitude of the task-–changing the world–-exceeds his human condition. God Himself seems powerless when it comes to all the racism, sexism, neocolonial liberalism, injustice, and poverty that are omnipresent wherever Pascal goes; even (and especially) in places that pretend otherwise.
Paradoxically, thanks to its rather passive, unsuccessful and hesitant protagonist, the Gospel According to the New World delivers a message that is all the more impactful. The novel brings us back to a necessary human humility: no one can achieve anything on his or her own. Maybe the greatest thing we can accomplish in our lifetime is simply to love and be loved.
Maryse Condé. The Gospel According to the New World. New York: World Edition, 2023. 248 pages. $18.99. Translated by Richard Philcox
Biography
Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco recently returned from her Fulbright at Miami University in Ohio. She is a first-year Ph.D. student at University Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where she focuses on contemporary rewritings of the Flood in novels of climate fiction in Spanish, English, and French. Her research interests include environmental humanities; contemporary rewritings of the Flood, and the Apocalypse in an age of climate emergency; decolonial thinking; technology and the environment; and the imaginaries of the ecological transition. She can be contacted at noemie.mil-homens@fulbrightmail.org