Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem

In examining the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, by Maryse Condé, the most critical theme in the text is that of freedom and individual liberty. Freedom is developed through the predication of racial enslavement. However, individual liberties are explored through Condé’s use of I, Tituba to present women in various gendered and sexual spaces, as a result of their coerced migrations. The narrator and protagonist of the novel, Tituba, is a black female from Barbados, who was conceived via rape, thus introducing sexuality as a necessary and often volatile component of her identity formation. Tituba spends her life struggling with her own freedom, which is articulated through connections to her race, sexuality, and gender. Tituba’s body

Her perpetual travels provide a fitting context for such a presentation, as Tituba never remains in a fixed subject position that would allow her to rightly understand her condition. With Christopher, she has migrated back to Barbados and is once again experiencing a “freedom” from slavery, which is compromised by her sexual relationship with Christopher. Christopher is a unique character and influence in Tituba’s life. Her relationship with him is one when she was “free” from racial enslavement, but where she still filled an almost slave like role in his sexual possession of her, and in his determination to take advantage of Tituba’s powers to ensure his eternal existence. This can be compared and contrasted with the keywords essay on slavery with the identification of an eternal life through an individuals continued existence in the memories of others. In the keywords essay, Walter Johnson states that slavery can be effective most prevalently as a result of the, “forcible forgetting of the history of slavery.” This can be interpreted in through the context that slavery causes the most melancholic of responses if it's cruelty is forgotten. It is more important as a historical event to be remembered. Christopher hoped to gain power through eternal existence because he recognized the power of remembering, and he mislead Tituba in stating that there was no song about her. “Christopher was wrong or probably he wanted to hurt me- there is a song about Tituba!” (175). In Iphigene’s spreading of Tituba’s story through the slave colonies, a song was developed about Tituba, and thus about slavery and her role as a black woman. In tandem with Johnson’s definition, this is significant in finally recognizing Tituba as a free being in the recognition of her