Rewriting the Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers

Rewriting the Return to Africa

Rewriting the Return to Africa Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers Anne M. François

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data François, Anne M. Rewriting the return to Africa : voices of francophone Caribbean women writers / Anne M. François. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4826-6 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-4828-0 (ebk.) 1. Caribbean fiction (French)--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Guadeloupe fiction (French)--Women authors--History and criticism. 3. Return migration in literature. 4. Africa--In literature. 5. Caribbean Area--In literature. 6. Blacks--Race identity. 7. Cultural fusion in literature. I. Title. PQ3944.F73 2011 843'.91409928709729--dc22 2011012963

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction 1 2 3

xiii

Return to Africa and the Caribbean Toward a Creole Poetics Rethinking the Return

Conclusion

1 39 71 95

Bibliography

103

Index

109

v

Acknowledgments

I am blessed to have a wonderful cast of family members, close friends, and colleagues who supported me during the making of this book. I am thankful for a sabbatical leave at Eastern University and a Fulbright grant, which allowed me to pursue this project. I wish to thank my colleagues at Eastern University for their support and encouragement. Thanks to my colleagues and longtime friends Sylvie Kandé, Syl Cheney-Coker, Gérarde Danton, Danielle Georges, and Curtis Small for their ongoing support. I would like to thank my friends Madeleine DorvalMoller, Marie-Lourdes Jean-Louis, Wildie Ceccherini, Mary Ann Giorgio, and Elijah Pringle for their love. I am particularly thankful to Lexington Books’ anonymous reviewer, who provided useful suggestions and constructive criticism. A special thanks to Cécile Accilien, a friend, colleague, and scholar who tirelessly read and edited the manuscript, offering me constructive criticism and valuable suggestions at every stage of the writing process. Her commitment and time to this project are priceless. I am also grateful to Elmide Méléance for her proofreading skills. None of this would have been possible without the unfailing and unconditional support of my daughter, Carolyn Lieba François-Lazard, my niece, Regianie François, my parents, Molière and Elvécia François, and my brothers, Jean-Marie, Hervé, Jimmy, and Harold François, during this long and occasionally tedious process. I will always be grateful to them. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

vii

Preface

The first impulse of a transplanted population which is not sure of maintaining the old order of values in the transplanted locale is that of reversion. Reversion is the obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being. To revert is to consecrate permanence, to negate contact. Reversion will be recommended by those who favor single origins. —Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

Edouard Glissant’s statement reflects on the situation of the displaced French-Caribbean population of African descent whose ontological project focuses on the quest of origins through the metaphorical/physical/spiritual return to the motherland/fatherland of Africa. This idea of returning to the continent is explored in the literature and arts of those who share a history of colonialism and slavery. The quest for the motherland as well as for the fatherland is a recurrent theme in diasporic literature. It is well known that the cultural and literary movement of Négritude that developed between the 1930s and the 1960s drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past. The main proponents of the movement, most notably Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Gontran Damas, borrowed the concept of Africa as a nurturing motherland from previous cultural movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s), and put the return to Africa at the core of their writings. Three decades later, after African independence, three Guadeloupean women writers—Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam WarnerVieyra—challenged the idea of returning to Africa in their fiction. These three writers of the postcolonial era, who are to a large extent the heirs of Négritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their portrayal of Africa. In the women’s novels, the continent is not represented as a propiix

x

Preface

tious mother figure but rather as a disappointing father figure. Since this male figure fails the characters in their initial quest of origins, they have to look elsewhere for identity and happiness. In Rewriting The Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers, I examine the demystification of the theme of the return to Africa in the works of Maryse Condé (Heremakhonon 1976, Une saison à Rihata 1981), Simone Schwarz-Bart (Ti Jean L’Horizon 1979), and Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Juletane 1982). Interestingly, the theme of the return to the Caribbean appears in Ti Jean L’Horizon and is explored in Condé’s novels especially, Traversée de la mangrove (1989). The return to the motherland/ fatherland of Africa is just as problematic as the return to the homeland of Guadeloupe. I argue that these women writers’ subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa is tied to their gender. These writers are critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and of a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora’s relation to origins. Their shattering of the image of Mother Africa and subsequently of Father Africa highlights the complex relationship between Africa and the Diaspora. It also shifts the identity quest of the characters toward the Caribbean, which also emerges as the real problematic mother: a multi-faceted, fragmented figure that reflects the constitutive clash that occurred in the archipelago between Europe, Africa, and the Americas during and after the process of colonization. Subsequently the rediscovery of Caribbean history and culture is an alternative to the return to an illusory, unique, Africanderived identity. It also points to the possibility of negotiating a new hybrid identity as it is shown in Ti Jean L’Horizon. In analyzing the works of these women writers, I consider how each of them challenges the masculinist version of the return to an idealized figure of mother/father Africa while proposing other alternatives. The failed return forces their protagonists to continue their quest in another geographical or mental space. The detour by Africa obliges the main protagonist in Heremakhonon to return temporarily to Paris; Ti Jean, in Ti Jean L’Horizon, to Guadeloupe; and Juletane, the eponymous heroine in the novel Juletane, to take refuge in madness and writing. Ultimately, for the female subject, writing is a more suitable space in which to seek identity and happiness than the imagined continent of origin. Writing comes to replace the quest for the African Father and paves the way for a rehabilitation of the Caribbean as the place where the world first experienced creolization. From the 1980s on, theoretical concepts such as “Antillanité” and “Créolité” have sprung up to reflect on the complex aspects of French-Caribbean identity, culture, history and the Creole language. Through his concept of “Antillanité,” Glissant assigns an important place to Africa, but he opposes the idea of a pure origin and proposes the image of the “rhizome” to illustrate

Preface

xi

how “une poétique de la relation” [a poetics of relation] has occurred since the beginning and continues to function in the Caribbean or the Americas. Glissant is also concerned about the return to the Americas, in redefining the position of the people of African descent in the regions. With Eloge de la Créolité [In Praise of Creoleness] (1987), the founders of the Créolité movement propose a linguistic réflexion [thought] of the Creole language as a determining factor of Caribbean identity. The Creole language, with its diverse origins and the different elements that structure it, is a mirror of the Caribbean identity. One of the questions that arises is: “Where do we place the women’s voice within the dominated male Caribbean discourse?” The refusal of the myth of origins by Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra helps us to understand the transition between Négritude/Antillanité (whose theoretical link is the importance of Africa) and Créolité, which has no identitarian preference. Thus, the works of these three Guadeloupean novelists represent a crucial transition in the Caribbean discourse between Négritude and Antillanité/Créolité. They also bring to the forefront the importance of oral tradition in Caribbean culture and propose a Créolité with a difference (meaning a plural space of writing and identity). The women writers’ texts also emphasize the importance of Africa despite their refusal of the return. Rather, they propose errancy as an alternative to the quest of origins and the rediscovery of Creole folklore as a means of exploring the multiple facets or different aspects of a neglected or denigrated culture facing the French dominant one. In other words, their texts offer a more complex vision of Caribbean identity.

Introduction

In 2010, as the fiftieth anniversary of African independence(s) came to a close, it became appropriate to revisit the literary representation of the continent through this study. In the late 1970s, a decade after African independence(s), three Guadeloupean women writers, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, emerged with a new vision of origins and in the process, revised the myth of the return to Africa. This myth has a long history that goes back to the very beginning of the dispersal process that Africans went through during the slave trade. In the Francophone context, this myth fueled the literary production of the Négritude movement between the 1930s and the 1960s. Spearheaded by three poets and writers, Aimé Césaire (from Martinique), Léopold Sédar Senghor (from Senegal), and Léon Gontran Damas (from Guyane), Négritude had as a main objective the revalorization of Black history and civilization. This ideology, revolutionary in its time, had already generated criticisms by the 1960s, and its popularity started to wane with the independences won in the French African colonies. Three French-Caribbean women writers—Condé, Schwarzt-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra—took up, in the fictional mode, the task of demystifying Négritude where Francophone Caribbean male thinkers such as Jacques Stéphen Alexis and Frantz Fanon had left off. A significant common denominator in the works of these three women writers is their rejection of the traditional feminine representation of Africa and their subsequent preference for a masculine allegorization of the continent. Four novels published in the 1970s and the 1980s—Heremakhonon (1976) and Une saison à Rihata (1981) by Condé, Ti Jean L’Horizon by SchwarzBart in 1979, and Juletane by Warner-Vieyra in 1982—depict Africa as a disappointing father figure. These four texts constitute a precedent in that xiii

xiv

Introduction

they openly challenge the established male fictions of the return to Africa by constructing protagonists who fail in their quest for identity and happiness on the continent. Origins, exile, and errancy are constant preoccupations in these women writers’ works. Five years after the publication of her first novel, Heremakhonon (1976), Condé addresses the question of the return to Africa again in Une Saison à Rihata (1981). She then turns to the Caribbean to further explore the idea of the unfinished return in her novel, Traversée de la mangrove (1989). Like Condé, Schwarz-Bart explores the return to Africa and the Caribbean in Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979), and WarnerVieyra describes a failed quest of a Guadeloupean female character in Africa in Juletane (1982). Proposing an alternative (at times even corrosive) representation of Africa in a nationalistic era was a risky undertaking for these writers. Individually targeted at the time for what was considered an inadequate spirit of racial solidarity, these three Guadeloupean women writers have not been singled out as a specific group whose writings present legitimate and similar concerns about the diasporic quest. Rather, they are included in larger categories of critical works with the exception of Sam Haigh’s Mapping A Tradition: Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe (2000), an excellent study that examines the dominant literary tradition of the Gualoupean women writers from the early twentieth century to the present. Haigh, however, does not include the work of Myriam WarnerVieyra in his discussion. Warner-Vieyra’s text is an important work for my study, which focuses mostly on these three women writers who started writing at the onset of the post-colonial era by demystifying the return to the continent and challenging the Mother Africa trope. Additionally, these women writers should not be considered in a simplistic binary opposition to their male predecessors (Césaire, among others). I posit that their works and the new iconoclastic ideas they contain are essential to understanding the transition between Césaire and the Négritude movement on the one hand, and on the other hand, Glissant and Antillanité, 1 which in turn led to the Créolité 2 movement under the leadership of Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. If there is a theoretical link between Antillanité (which focuses on cultural ties between the Americas and the Caribbean archipelago) and Créolité (which proposes Creoleness as a way to explore Caribbean identity, culture, and language), there is, conversly, a gap between Négritude and Antillanité/Créolité in terms of reframing identity politics. I argue that the women writers occupy this place within Caribbean discourse and that their works represent what may be called a “Créolité with a différence.” Anticipating the writers of Créolité who in the late 1980s criticized the essentialism of Négritude, on which the concept of the return rests, these women writers challenged Africa as a privileged source of wholeness that could erase the pain of the Middle Passage and the stigma

Introduction

xv

of race, by providing a heroic, noble genealogy. Unlike the primarily male writers of the Négritude movement, Condé and Warner-Vieyra carefully “gendered” the notion of return by choosing female protagonists who made their way back to the motherland. Négritude male writers, as we know, seldom gave female characters a liberating role in their writings. Their female characters did not take a leading role in venturing into Africa in search of identity and happiness. If Césaire calls for the liberation of all mankind in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] (1939) the female experience is largely absent from it. The novels of Condé and Warner-Vieyra (the ones set on the continent) highlight the return of the Caribbean female character to Africa. These writers create female allegories of Caribbean resistance, an alternative literary type to the dominant Maroon, a self-centered male warrior constructed on the model of the slaves who escaped the plantation system by taking refuge in the mountains. Legendary figures of female marrons such as “Solitude” and “Queen Nanny” are known and portrayed in Caribbean literature. 3 In Hommage à la femme noire (1988) Simone Schwarz-Bart rediscovers and recognizes the historical importance of women who have fought on all fronts for liberation from slavery, cultural assimilation, and domination. Post-colonial literature, to which the texts of these three Guadeloupean writers belong, has revalorized the neglected female experience and agency, as well as the notion of migration. There is no valid theory that explains the dominant literary tradition of Guadeloupean women writers, which continues today with Gisèle Pineau. Pineau, an acclaimed writer who started writing in 1990’s, is concerned like her literary predecessors by new analyses and new understandings of Caribbean cultural identity, exile, migrations, and the meaning of home. Her work is closely related to that of the Creolists. Recent scholarship shows that migrations, displacements, and exiles are a constant component of human experience. So is, then, the return, their inverse, and complementary movement—be it implemented or not—to a mythical or remembered point of origin. Indeed, for the displaced ones, the return is a quest for a remembered past, a quest undertaken to reaffirm a lost identity due to the dispersal of slavery, migration, and erasure of history. As a schema of human thought shaped by cultural variations, the return can take literary, symbolic, spiritual, and physical forms. The themes of journey, heroism, trials, and reward, which characterize the return, have been consistently explored in major founding texts of human development and spirituality, such as The Odyssey and the Bible. In the African context, the concept of the return takes on an additional dimension for those who endured the Middle Passage, as well as for those who attempt to represent it. For the Black Diaspora, the desire to return physically or symbolically to Africa originates in the tragic odyssey lived by their ancestors during the Atlantic slave trade. For those who left Africa, the anguished desire to return to their roots became

xvi

Introduction

obsessive since the fifteenth century because of the impossibility of maintaining historical-cultural continuity: “La première pulsion d’une population transplantée, qui n’est pas sûre de maintenir au lieu de son transbord l’ancien ordre de ses valeurs, est le retour” [The first desire of a transplanted population unable to maintain the former order of its values is the return], states Martinican writer Edouard Glissant at the beginning of his collection of essays, entitled Le Discours Antillais (30), underscoring the impossibility of defining Caribbean identity without first dealing with the problematic of the return. For the diasporic subject, it can be an impulsive need to withdraw from the present scene of action in order to regain strength, to reconcile with oneself, and to come back stronger and more whole to the native homeland. This is clearly the case for the hero in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of Return to the Native Land]. It reveals the deep desire of the displaced Africans to recover their human dignity from centuries of European denigration, and to affirm pride in the values that were discarded or deemed unimportant by and in the West. Even today, the impulse to return remains within the Diaspora. AfricanAmerican artist Jim Harris narrates an account of his own experience of return to Africa in Coming Home to the Motherland: A Journey from SelfHate (2002). In his comments on the book, critic Kalamu ya Salaam observes: The theme of returning to Africa is deeply embedded in the African American psyche. From the founding of Liberia and Marcus Garvey’s Back-To-Africa movement . . . African Americans have longed to recover the inner seed of identity that is intimately bound to the Motherland. The very impulse within gospel, blues, jazz and R &B—as irrepressible as the soul of a people—lies at the heart of the desire to fulfill this inherent yearning. African Americans are currently witnessing unprecedented influence in the Motherland and gaining broader perspective on our journey as African people. In Coming Home to the Motherland one finds a richness and beauty as vast and inviting and heart warming as the continent itself. 4

It can be argued that for the Black Diaspora, the Caribbean is both the birthplace of the myth of the return to Africa and of its most serious challenge, a challenge posed by women writers. The Caribbean is historically the earliest and main destination of the European slave ships that knowingly carried a human cargo, and unknowingly carried also the deportees’ dream of return. Additionally, Caribbean plantations were the destination of the largest portion of the enslaved African deportees. Within the Caribbean, Haiti remains a major historical-literary reference point for the African Diaspora. Haiti greatly influenced the world order because of its successful slave revolution and its achievement of independence at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Less than a century after independence, Haitian intellectuals, proud

Introduction

xvii

of their African heritage and their Francophone culture, theorized racial equality and set the pace for the continuing movement of Black consciousness that swept over the Black world in the first half of the twentieth century. Two prominent Haitian intellectuals, Anténor Firmin and Hannibal Price, wrote respectively De l‘égalité des races humaines (1885) and De la réhabilitation de la race noire (1900) in response to white supremacist theories promoted by Arthur de Gobineau in Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1852–1853). In the first part of the twentieth century, Jean Price-Mars, one of Haiti’s major intellectuals who opposed the first American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), wrote Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928), a manifesto of racial pride in national culture. In his text, he states: “Our only chance to be ourselves is to repudiate no part of our ancestral heritage. Well, for eight-tenths of us this heritage is the gift of Africa” (quoted in Conroy 17). In The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French (1975), critic Ellen Conroy Kennedy explains Price-Mars’ project as follows: “Price-Mars described the cultural riches of African civilizations, stressed their obvious continuities in native Haitian folklore and religion, and urged his countrymen not to turn their backs any longer in shame on a unique heritage” (18). PriceMars greatly influenced Jacques Roumain who wrote Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944), a “roman paysan” [peasant novel], that celebrates “l’âme nationale” (i.e., the Africanness of Haitian culture) from Price-Mars’ perspective, or “a larger ideological and moral vision of man faced with his destiny,” according to literary critic Michael Dash. 5 Critic Gérarde Magloire examines the important contribution of Price-Mars’ work to the cultural revalorization of Africa in Ambassadors at Dawn: Haitian Thinkers of 19th and 20th Centuries, The Example of Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) (2005). Following the efforts of Haitian intellectuals to rehabilitate the “Black race” and its African heritage, several poets, writers, and artists from the cultural, literary, and political movement of Indigenism 6 in Haiti, the Harlem Renaissance and Garveyism 7 in the United States, and Négritude in the Caribbean and Europe, promoted the idea of a cultural, spiritual, and physical return to Africa. For these various movements, the idealization of the African continent as the Motherland became a topos in rhetoric and artistic production, as literary critic Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi points out: The romantic desire for a return to an Africa of the origins, the longing for Africa as the motherland, has shaped the Caribbean imagery and its writing. As “le pays d’avant” [the country before], Africa takes on particular resonance for the Caribbean peoples, in the context of a double exile: exile from the original place and exile from the original culture. (1990:202)

xviii

Introduction

This longing to recover “the inner seed of identity that is intimately bound to the Motherland” 8 found echoes throughout the Diaspora as migratory movements fostered cultural and political exchanges among the Caribbean, Africa, France, and the United States. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born politician, traveled to the United States and formed his Back-to-Africa movement in the early 1920s. African American writers and poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Dubois, Countee Culleen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay also contributed to the reframing of the politics of identity. They sometimes traveled to Europe and provided the Négritude movement in France and Francophone regions with a new literary canon founded on Black consciousness and affirmation of identity through reconnection with the African past. They had a common goal: reconstructing a positive Black identity and resisting cultural and racial oppression. A literary salon held in Paris by two Martinican women intellectuals (the Nardal sisters) served as a meeting place for the Black Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals and artists at that time. In 1935, while studying in France, Césaire, Gontran-Damas, and Senghor founded a literary magazine L’Etudiant noir, which became the vehicule for the new neologism “négritude.” Magazines by other black writers and students circulating in Paris were raising racial and political consciousness and calling for resistance against French assimilation. 9 Critic Brent Hayes Edwards analyzes the global impact of these different movements of resistance and liberation in his text The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of the Black Internationalism (2003). The works of Caribbean Négritude writers show that their resistance to colonialism and cultural alienation grew from their rediscovery of Africa. The Négritude movement, whose leaders found confirmation of the importance of Africa in texts such as Histoire de la civilisation africaine (1936) by German ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), became engaged in the quest to redefine Black/African history and identity. As Christopher Miller points out, Négritude kept some of the essentialist perception of Africa promoted by Frobenius (1990:17). Condé herself protests against assimilationist ideas adopted by the Négritude movement as she vehemently questions the European origins of the negro myth and its ambiguous implications. She insinuates that the Négritude movement seems to perpetuate European values in its attempts to revalorize this myth: Mais de quel refus s’agit-il. . . . Puisque c’est l’Europe qui a fabriqué de toutes pièces le mythe nègre, revendiquer ce mythe, s’en glorifier comme l’expression de sa personnalité ne revient-il pas à accepter l’Europe et sa culture dans leurs pires errements. Refus? . . . Je ne vois qu’acception extrême. [What kind of refutation is that? Since Europe invented the myth of the negro. Does not

Introduction

xix

the idea of claiming it and making it one’s own suggest an acceptance of European culture and its most misguided? I do not see any refutation at all, but only full acceptance.] 10

Césaire, a prominent poet, writer, essayist, and politician of the movement, has reflected in his own work on the complexity of such a quest. It should be noted that his position on the relationship between Africa and the Diaspora has fluctuated throughout the years. When in the 1930s Césaire first met Senegalese intellectual and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor in Paris, he immediately identified with him: “Quand j’ai rencontré Senghor, je me suis dit Africain” [When I met Senghor, I became African]. Through exchanges and readings, both became aware of the necessity of denouncing the fallacy of the myth of Africa’s primitiveness. In 1942, three years after the first publication of Le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire, editor of the journal Tropiques (1941–1943), which he founded after his return to Martinique, wrote the following introduction for a short text by Leo Frobenius, “Que signifie pour nous l’Afrique?” [What Does Africa Mean to Us?]: Nous sommes à la croisée. Croisée de race et de cultures. Il est évident que toutes nos réactions conscientes sont déterminées par la culture européenne. . . . Mais il coule dans nos veines un sang qui exige de nous une attitude originale en face de la vie. Sous peine d’échec, répétons-nous . . . nous devons répondre, le poète plus que tout autre, à la dynamique spéciale de notre complexe réalité biologique. En remontant l’une de nos lignes de forces nous rencontrons, cette chose immense, l’Afrique. [We are at the junction of race and cultures. It is true that our conscious reactions are determined by European culture. . . . But there runs in our veins a blood that demands of us an original attitude in life. At the risk of failing, we must, the poet more than anyone else, respond to the special dynamism of our biological reality. In going back to one of our strong holds, we meet this huge thing: Africa.] (62)

In those comments, Césaire describes the relationship of the Diaspora to Africa with biological metaphors (“un sang” [a blood]) and situates Africa (“cette chose immense” [this huge thing]) at the genesis of Black identity. In identifying past places of historical resistance as anchors of this identity, Césaire came to consider Haiti as a metaphor for Africa. At the end of his play La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) (Act I, Scene 6), the Cesairian hero equates Haiti with Africa in his complaint: “Pauvre Afrique! Je veux dire pauvre Haiti. C’est la même chose d’ailleurs” [Poor Africa! I mean poor Haiti. It is the same thing anyway] (49). According to his biographers, Césaire stuttered until his stay in Haiti in 1944, which literally and metaphorically liberated his words. Césaire’s existential position changed a bit as he, like many Black intellectuals of his time, adopted a Marxist point of view that privileged the notion of class over that of race. When he joined the French Communist

xx

Introduction

Party, he conceived Négritude as a culture, distancing himself from its racial ideology, but still keeping Africa as a point of reference: “Ma négritude a un sol,” he states, “c’est un fait qu’il y a une culture noire, c’est historique, il n’y a rien de biologique là-dedans” [My negritude has a soil; it is a fact that there is a black culture. It is historical and there is nothing biological in it] (quoted in Delas 17). Critics of Négritude, such as Frantz Fanon (who also adopted a Marxist perspective), questioned the validity of race as an organizing principle in the struggle against exploitation. In Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) Fanon criticized Sartre’s essentialist perception regarding the Négritude movement’s premises: Ainsi lorsque Sartre écrit: ‘Le noir, par le simple approfondissement de sa mémoire d’ancien esclave, affirme que la douleur est le lot des hommes et qu’elle n’en est pas moins imméritée’, se rend-il compte de ce que cela peut signifier pour un Hova, un Maure, un Targui, un Peuhl ou Bantou du Congo ou de la Côte d’Ivoire ? . . . Comment prétendre à la saisie d’une essence quand de tels faits nous requièrent ? La vérité est que la race nègre est dispersée, qu’elle ne possède plus d’unité. [When Sartre writes, “The black, through the simple depth of his past slave memory, affirms that suffering is part of the human condition and that is the way it is,” does he realize what that means for a Hova, a Moor, a Targui, a Fulani, or Bantou from the Congo or Ivory Coast? . . . How do you claim to understand this kind of essence when one is concerned by these facts? The truth is that the black race is dispersed, it is not united.] (140)

Fanon eventually turned his energies toward the dissolution of the colonial system that oppressed a number of non-Western countries. He made his own return to Africa as a theorist and social activist. Until his untimely death in 1961, Fanon was busy fighting French colonialism in the Algerian war and collecting his thoughts for new books, most notably Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth], and was not primarily preoccupied by the serious crisis in Communist ideology that occurred in Central Europe in the late 1950s. Jacques Roumain, the founder of the Communist Party in Haiti, died long before him. Unlike Césaire, who broke with the French Communist Party in 1956 in reaction to the Russian invasion of Hungary, it is probable that neither Roumain nor Fanon had the time to ponder the limitations of Marxist theories on the question of race at length. By contrast, Césaire, in his letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez, the Secretary General of the French Communist Party, states: “What I wish is that Marxism and communism were made to serve black peoples, and not black people to serve Marxism and communism, that the doctrine and the movement were made for men and not men for the doctrine and the movement” (quoted in Conroy 65). Cé-

Introduction

xxi

saire’s break with Marxist universalism led him to reassert his African specificity. Up until 1961, he still claimed: “Je suis un poète africain” [I am an African poet]. 11 While developing these ideas, Négritude writers Aimé Césaire, Guy Tirolien, and Joseph Zobel, among others, came to portray present Africa quite consistently as the maternal figure from which the Black Diaspora had been severed due to the Middle Passage. Africa is implicitly compared to a female womb in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in the following lines: Je force la membrane vitelline qui me sépare de moi-même, Je force les grandes eaux qui me ceinturent de sang [I break the vital membrane that separates me from myself. I break the huge waters that cover me with blood]

According to literary critic Abiola Irele, the membrane vitelline “serves as a protection for the fetus in the mother’s womb; the imagery of a willed rebirth of the poet to his essential self” (1994:91). Images of the poet’s rebirth are indeed recurrent throughout the Cahier. Irele goes on to explain the second line, “Je force les grandes eaux . . . sang” as “referring to the water in which the fetus floats in the womb and which is released at the onset of labor; ‘this breaking of water’ is associated with blood, which accompanies the delivery of the baby” (91). Africa, for the poet, represents the original womb from which he is reborn in order to access his true identity. A uterine space, Africa is also the afterlife at the end of the hero’s journey. In Césaire’s play, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963), when King Christophe is about to die, he invokes the image of Mother Africa for his final and metaphorical return to the continent: “Afrique! Aide-moi à rentrer, porte-moi comme un vieil enfant dans tes bras et puis tu me délivreras dans tes bras et puis tu me dévêtiras, tu me laveras” [Africa! Help me to come back, carry me in your arms like an old child. Then you will free me from your arms, undress and wash me]. In a slightly less elliptical way, Guy Tirolien, a Négritude poet from Guadeloupe, equates the continent with an indolent and proud woman in his poem L’âme du noir pays: L’âme du noir pays où dorment les anciens vit et parle ce soir en la force inquiète de tes reins creux en l’indolente allure d’une démarche fière qui laisse quand tu vas traîner après tes pas le fauve appel des nuits que dilate et emplit l’immense pulsation des tam-tams en fièvre. . . . [The soul of the black country where the elders sleep lives and speaks

xxii

Introduction

tonight through the anxious strength of your hollow back through the indolent speed of your proud walk that lingers when you go dragging after your footsteps the wild call of the nights that is dilated and filled with the huge pulsation of the feverish sounds of the tams tams. . . .](quoted in Senghor 87–88).

Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founding fathers of Négritude, also contributed to the female allegorization of Africa. The opening stanza of his famous poem, “Femme noire” [Black Woman], illustrates this equivalence between woman and the Promised Land: Femme nue, femme noire Vêtue de ta couleur qui est vie, de ta forme qui est beauté! J’ai grandi à ton ombre; la douceur de tes mains bandait mes yeux. Et voici qu’au coeur de l’Eté et de Midi, je te découvre, Terre promise, du haut d’un haut col calciné Et ta beauté me foudroie en plein coeur, comme l’éclair d’un aigle. [Naked woman, black woman Clothed in your color, which is life, and your shape, which is beauty! I grew up in your shade; the caress of your hands covered my eyes. I discover you in the heart of Summer and Midi, Promised Land, from the top of a burnt hill And your beauty strikes me right in my heart, like the speed of an eagle.] (1964:16) (emphasis mine)

The female allegorization of Africa was influenced by the gender of the major writers of the Négritude movement who were mostly males. For these heterosexual males, allegorizing Africa as a woman and a mother specifically represented the best strategy to re-empower themselves by evoking what they had lost: the place of origin and a body of land. It also enabled them to explore a whole array of emotions, most notably the desire to recover the protection of the womb, the sanctity of the pure origin. It crystallized their attraction to a familiar source of tenderness, eroticism, fertility, and inspiration. With this allegory, Africa appears as the female entity that was violated by European colonial “penetration.” In turn, the worship of the womancontinent rests on the idea that it is possible to go back to the original self and recover it in spite of history. Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, who also “re-discovered” Africa, work on these tensions from a female perspective in the four previously mentioned novels—Heremakhonon and Une sai-

Introduction

xxiii

son à Rihata by Condé, Ti Jean L’Horizon by Schwarz-Bart, and Juletane by Warner-Vieyra. The novels selected for this study first and foremost explore the dual crossing from the Caribbean to Africa and vice-versa at length, and bear witness to the emergence of a new fragmented identity in the Diaspora. In doing so, the three women writers break away from the myth of the return to Mother Africa in a gender-specific way. They represent the continent not as a propitious mother figure, but as a disappointing father figure. They also shift away from the previous generation of female writers, who were preoccupied by the question of racial inferiority and its cultural and psychological consequences. Such preoccupation is found, for example, in the work of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1960), Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Amour, Colère, Folie (1968), and Jacqueline Manicon’s Mon examen de blanc (1972). Unlike their predecessors, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra focus more on the question of blackness than the lactification complex. 12 As they share common linguistic and sociohistorical backgrounds, they are also concerned with the question of language in their works. The quest for racial and cultural identity is very much linked to the use of language in Francophone Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature in general. In 1946, as stronger criticisms of hegemonic empires and colonialism emerged, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana became French Overseas Departments, a status they maintained even as African colonies achieved independence. As a result, French remains the dominant language of these territories while Creole retains an inferior status. These FrenchCaribbean women who write in French problematize the question of language; they understand the weight it carries in shaping ideology, allegory, and literature. In an article she wrote for Présence Africaine in 1975, Condé voiced her concerns about the disintegration of oral culture and the Creole language in the island: Pendant ce temps, que devient la littérature orale et généralement parlant la civilisation du bossale? Parce qu’en dépit des stéréotypes qu’elle véhicule elle est en langue créole et que la langue créole est devenue l’ennemi numéro un. . . . L’abolition de l’esclavage ne s’accompagne donc pas d’une libération au sens veritable. [What happens to oral literature and generally speaking the bossal civilization? Despite the stereotypes associated with it, it exists in the Creole language while the Creole language has become the number-one enemy. . . . The abolition of slavery does not mean total freedom.] (190–91)

The author suggests that the Francophone Caribbean individual, though no longer a slave, remains nevertheless a prisoner of the French language. The future of the Creole language and culture is threatened by the dominant French language. Writers such as Frankétienne express the need to free themselves from the restraints of the French language in order to reconnect with

xxiv

Introduction

the oral culture. In these writers’ works, rewriting Caribbean folklore becomes an act of cultural resistance to the dominant French language. Condé’s writing, although replete with this linguistic preoccupation, differs from Schwarz-Bart’s in that it shows less creolism. For each novel in this study, I show how language affects the protagonist’s experience in a different way. In Heremakhonon, Condé re-stages the return through a female protagonist who experiences difficulties in carrying out her identity quest in Africa. In Une saison à Rihata, Condé portrays a second female character who also goes to Africa in search of identity. In Traversée de la mangrove, Condé’s male protagonist, whose origin is unclear, fails in his attempt to reroot himself in his native island of Guadeloupe. Schwarz-Bart rewrites a foundational folktale, emphasizing the return to Creole culture and language through the journey of Ti Jean, her male protagonist. As for Warner-Vieyra, she questions the cultural and literary legibility of a woman’s text caught in an (almost) forced return. As the protagonist, Juletane is trapped in the family compound in Africa; the reader wonders how to read the language of madness inscribed in her diary. A narrative within a narrative, Juletane’s story is framed by Hélène’s story. How can a woman’s story of cultural identity and return be legible in a cultural context that is primarily defined by men? This task is particularly difficult, as literary critic Françoise Lionnet points out: In the case of feminine centered narratives, the forces at work in the field of postcolonial discourse assume a different character, reflecting the need to generate definitions different from a preexistent, overarching, masculine discourse which, particularly in a colonial context, had historically arrogated to itself the primary role of defining parameters of signification, appropriation, and cultural inscription. As far as a feminine Caribbean discourse is concerned, the task of delineating a specific discursive space becomes doubly difficult, since the discourse must take into account issues of gender and culture, as well as the double subjection by which colonialism exacerbates for women the repressive hierarchies of its authoritarian patriarchal structures. (1995:62)

It is important to remember that these women writers emerged on the literary scene after the African independences had been achieved. This revolutionary period was conducive to Black women’s literary activities, as attested by the emergence of a great number of new voices from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Furthermore, discourses and fictional works that criticized the past or the new reality of Africa were not welcome in the prevailing nationalist climate. Literary critic Irène Assiba d’Almeida suggests that these new “female voices have sprung up to revive the role women have traditionally played as producers of orature, but these voices now tell their ‘modern stories’ through the medium of the written word” (1994:6). As a result, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, who dwelled on the com-

Introduction

xxv

plexities of the relationship between Africa and its Diaspora and who questioned the meaning of the return, faced a great deal of criticism. Since its first publication, Condé’s Heremakhonon has been the subject of controversy because of its alleged negative portrayals of Africa and the Caribbean. In an interview with Ann Armstrong Scarboro, Condé remarked: “The Guadeloupeans and the Martinicans did not like the picture of their society. The Africans objected to the image of Africa. The Marxists did not like the denunciation of the evils of so-called African Socialism. The militants objected to Véronica, the central character, as a negative heroine, and the feminists hated her because she looked for her liberation through men” (205). The criticisms were all the harsher since the portrayal of Africa rested on the author’s first-hand knowledge of contemporary African realities. For Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, unlike Césaire and earlier Négritude writers, the return was more than a dreamed journey. They made a conscious and physical attempt to return to the Motherland and challenged the myth through their own experience. 13 Born in Guadeloupe two or three years apart, all three lived and worked in Africa. Condé lived in different African countries (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal) from 1960 to 1972. Her own return to Africa is full of political significance. Condé became politically conscious while living in Africa, where she made several Marxist friends who converted her to Marxism. Her enthusiasm for this exciting period soon vanished as she uncovered the realities behind the ideologies. Her disappointment with Marxism is revealed in Heremakhonon through Véronica’s criticism of her African friend’s attachment to hard-line Marxism. Condé, who was at first a great admirer of Guinean president Sékou Touré, an advocate of Pan-Africanism, soon became disillusioned by his dictatorial regime, which brutally repressed the teachers’ and students’ strike in 1962. Heremakhonon depicts these troubling political events, which Condé witnessed while living in Guinea. Schwarz-Bart, who did not share Condé’s traumatic experience, studied and lived in Senegal during the same period. Warner-Vieyra moved to Senegal in the 1960s, and still lives there. Overall, the writers’ experience of Africa seems to have resulted in disenchantment with the Motherland, which translated into a pessimistic representation of the return in their fiction. The three women whose work I discuss in this study “gender” the visions of “Homecoming” presented by the male writers of the Négritude movement, and later by the male writers of Créolité. They question the meanings of gender in the stories of return while also exposing the material consequences of patriarchy’s strictures in women’s lives. They challenge men’s authority to define and limit women’s experiences and aspirations. As Senegalese woman writer Mariama Bâ states: “We [women] no longer accept the nostalgic praise to the African mother whom, in his anxiety, man confuses with Mother Africa.” 14 By questioning the male prerogative of creating feminine

xxvi

Introduction

allegories of Africa, Bâ, as well as the women writers of this study, denounce the way male writers have mythologized the “feminine,” a process that does not ultimately serve the interests of women. Feminine traits are neither rewarded nor validated. In such myths, idealized mothers and Mother Africa are simply used to sustain masculine cultural economies. Such mythological speculations need to be examined. Moreover, what is a better strategy for the women writers to establish their own voices than questioning the ideologies of the founding fathers of Négritude, in other words “killing the father”? The women writers’ rejection of the return as an important phase in identity formation also prepared the terrain for a new phase of Caribbean discourse in literature. The works I examine in this study participate in the newer discourse on Caribbean identity and culture elaborated in Glissant’s formulations of Antillanité and métissage, 15 which offer a more complex vision of identity and which reject the myth of origin. Glissant, who saw the dangers of fostering the illusion of a vertical identity encapsulated in the metaphor of the African genealogical tree, cautions, “Le Retour est l’obsession de l’Un: il ne faut pas changer l’être. Revenir, c’est consacrer la permanence, la non-relation” [The return is the obsession of the One; the individual must not be transformed. To return is to hold permanence and non-relation as sacred] (30). According to Glissant’s theory of Relation, one needs to come to terms with the loss of origin to be able to enter into Relation, a constant process of creolization because “le renoncement aux pures valeurs d’origines ouvre sur un sens inédit de la mise en rapports” [the rejection of pure values of origins opens the way to a new understanding of relationships] (29). For him, constructing Africa as a redemptive figure for the Black Diaspora distracts the mind from the specific tensions around the notions of departure and return. The texts I examine, like those of Glissant and writers of the Créolité movement, favor a concept of fragmented identity that recognizes and values the multiple sites of the Diaspora. The women writers’ novels complicate the newer discourse by interrogating the meanings of gender that continue to inform the new visions of Caribbean identity and culture. In his analysis of the Caribbean malaise resulting from historical dispossession and cultural alienation, Glissant proposes a new quest for Antillean identity, one that differs from Césaire’s. Glissant’s concept of Antillanité is not composed of the exclusive Africa-Caribbean interface and finds its best metaphor in the “rhizome.” In his Poétique de la Relation (1990), Glissant states that “toute identité s’étend dans un rapport à l’autre” [any identity is connected through relationship with another] (246). He borrowed the term “rhizome” from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (Mille plateaux 1980) to conceive his theorical concept of “identité relationnelle,” which he compares to the rhizome plant, emphasizing its many roots that multiply below ground. Inspired by Glissant’s work, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Rafaël

Introduction

xxvii

Confiant developed the Créolité literary movement in the late 1980s. It promotes the ideas of multilingualism and multiculturalism and sets a new trend in Francophone literature and thought. It is important to note that Créolité asserts the authenticity of a Creole identity, whereas Glissant’s theory proposes métissage as an open, initial, creative space where identity formations take place, and creolization “as it carries in itself the adventure of multilingualism along with the extraordinary explosion of cultures” (29). To make its point, the Créolité movement, for which the “mangrove” plant is a key trope, emphasizes the presence of various cultural components in Caribbean identity, while denying Africa the dominant place it held in the Negritudian conception. It also draws attention to the literary potential of the dialogue between the Creole and French languages, a path that Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé had previously started to explore. Focused on Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, my study examines how each author questions a specific aspect of the return to Africa: the problematic gendering inherent in allegories of Africa (Condé), the rediscovery of Caribbean culture and language (Schwarz-Bart), and the creation of female subjectivity through writing (Warner-Vieyra). My objective is to demonstrate how their reevaluation of the return even problematizes the relationship of the Diaspora with Africa. Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove suggests that the idea of a “retour au pays natal” [return to the native land] as a strategy for rebuilding a strong sense of identity is shifting in the postcolonial era and is being replaced by nomadism or migration as a possible creative site. Unlike the Cesairian hero who returns and settles in his native land, the Condean hero or heroine keeps exploring other geographical spaces and cultures. A desire for transculturation or border-crossing runs throughout these women’s texts. They push the limits of Caribbean literature with regard to Black migrations in the Diaspora, as well as the resulting male-female relations. The first chapter of this study proposes that while Négritude writers constructed Africa as a mother figure, Maryse Condé imagined it as a father figure. I analyze the socio-political, cultural, and psychological implications of Africa, the metaphorical (absent) father in her novel Heremakhonon. What is at stake for the Francophone Caribbean protagonist who fails to find him? In my discussion of Heremakhonon, I also examine the tensions between family, society, and identity resulting from the protagonist’s alienation. The character associates her family experiences with her geographical spaces (Africa, France, and the Caribbean), which, in turn, are represented allegorically as parental figures. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytical theory of object relations and her concept of “good breast” and “bad breast,” 16 I analyze the allegorized figures of these places associated with the protagonist’s childhood experience.

xxviii

Introduction

In addition to examining the role of Father Africa in Heremakhonon and Une saison à Rihata, I also examine the ways Condé’s novel, Traversée de la mangrove, problematizes the return to the native island and the role and place of the writer in Caribbean society. According to critic Leah Hewitt, this novel “bears witness to [Condé’s] attempt to disrupt or trouble comfortable normative positions, whether they be ideological or aesthetic” (1993:79). Returning to the Caribbean motherland and Creole roots for Condé seems as problematic as returning to Africa. Unlike Schwarz-Bart, who is anchored in Caribbean space, Condé seems to be more concerned with the idea of drifting away to different shores. The symbolic nature of the mangrove in Traversée de la mangrove, with its multiple roots pointed in many directions, evokes the image of the Condean subject crossing and re-crossing different spaces, and stresses its unsettling ontological crisis. Of course, in Heremakhonon, political elements overlap psychological ones. In her foreword to the latest edition of the novel (1988), Condé writes: “[Véronica] s’aperçoit que le passé ne sert de rien quand le présent a nom malnutrition, dictature, bourgeoisies corrompues et parasitaires” [Véronica realizes that the past does not mean much when the present offers malnutrition, dictatorships, and a corrupt, parasitic bourgois class] (13).These social and political mores seem to have contributed to the protagonist’s failure in her attempt to return to the continent. Condé uses elements of her own experience in Paris and various African countries in Heremakhonon to explore meanings of gender, culture, and identity. I look at the political basis of Heremakhonon and Une saison à Rihata to demonstrate how the personal and the political are intertwined in Condé’s fiction. In chapter 2, I show that the failure of the return to Africa led Simone Schwarz-Bart to reexamine Caribbean history in Ti Jean L’Horizon. But, as Barbara Webb points out in Myth and History in the Caribbean, history is intertwined with mythic discourse and “the quest [of origin] takes place within the conceptual framework of a dialectic relationship between myth and history” (1985:4). The process of interrogating and rewriting Caribbean history through myths, well-illustrated by Simone Schwarz-Bart’s endeavor in Ti Jean L’Horizon, is also explored in earlier Caribbean works such as El Reino de este mundo (1949), by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, in which the inclusion of magic realism, history, and fiction is used to retell the history of the Haitian revolution in the early nineteenth century. Schwarz-Bart’s works draw our attention to the transition from the rediscovery of African history by Négritude writers to the recentering on local Caribbean history by the second generation of writers such as herself and Condé. In this chapter, I examine how the protagonist’s failure to find genealogy or legitimacy in Africa leads him or her to reconsider his or her Caribbean cultural heritage in order to rediscover himself or herself. To use Glissant’s term, the Détour 17 through Africa comes to replace the return to Africa, a constant and unset-

Introduction

xxix

tling movement of va-et-vient [going and coming] as opposed to the reassuring or imagined completion of the return. The practice of Détour reorients the Caribbean desire to return to Africa and helps it come to terms with the new land: En Martinique, où la population transbordée s’est constituée en peuple sans que pourtant la prise en compte de la terre nouvelle ait pu être effectuée, la communauté a tenté d’exorciser le Retour impossible par ce que j’appelle une pratique du Détour. [In Martinique the transplanted population constitutes a people not aware of the importance of the new land. The community tried to exorcise the impossible Return by what I call a practice of Detour.] (Glissant 31–32)

Unlike the Condean hero or heroine who continues to wander, SchwarzBart’s protagonist celebrates Creole culture and finds a happy return to the native island. The use of the Creole language and its integration into works of literature is another example of Détour. According to Glissant, linguistic Détour functions as a type of camouflage, a ruse to transcend psychic or linguistic oppression exerted by the French language linked to colonization. Unlike Caribbean Négritude writers who rarely used creolisms as part of their literary language, Schwarz-Bart, like Condé, incorporates into her fiction local expressions, proverbs, and cultural references in praise of Creole culture and language. This is particularly noticeable in her novel Ti Jean L’Horizon, which explores the richness of Caribbean folklore in the oral tradition. In the third chapter, which focuses on Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s novel Juletane, I argue that the failure of the return leads to the reaffirmation of self through writing. The heroine’s rejection of polygamy, a central element in some African cultures, and her childless status prevent her from reconnecting spiritually and emotionally with the continent. Her sad experience reflects the antagonistic relationship and the respective cultural misunderstandings that can exist between Africa and its Diaspora. Africa, however, remains the source of inspiration, for it compels the seeker of identity, Juletane, to write in order to recreate a suitable space for herself. The heroine regards her journal as a comfortable and intimate place to tell her story. In other words, the emergence of her creative self replaces her failure to reconnect spiritually with Africa. For Juletane, writing becomes the territory she knows well because it is born out of her own experience. As literary critic Simon Gikandi puts it: “To write is to claim a text of one’s own; textuality is an instrument of territorial possession; because the other confers on us an identity that alienates us from ourselves, narrative is crucial to the discovery of our selfhood” (1992:10). My study examines the difficult journey of the main protagonists to Africa, and demonstrates that it is as problematic as the Caribbean homecoming in the women writers’ fiction.

xxx

Introduction

Although important anthologies focus on intertextuality, metaphors, and the role of women writers in Caribbean literature, they are not specifically devoted to the works of these three Guadeloupean women writers. For example, the voluminous collection of essays entitled Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, mostly examines the works of Anglophone Caribbean women and contains only three essays on Condé and Schwarzt-Bart. The first essay, by Vèvè Clark, proposes that intertextuality, in Condé’s novel Heremakhonon, functions as a literacy project through which the author shares with her readers her knowledge of African, African American, or Caribbean meta-narratives such as La Danse sur le volcan (1957), Sundjata (1960), and Song of Solomon (1977). It also proposes that “Diaspora literacy”—the understanding of Diasporic literature and art—involves intellectual activities as well as social and political involvement. Two other essays in the collection analyze metaphors of exile in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979). Despite the existence of recent critical works on Francophone Caribbean women writers, as well as several articles on individual women writers, there is still a gap, which this study intends to fill. I have undertaken to study three Guadeloupean women writers—Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra— who started to write in the post-independence era, in order to examine how each of them questions specific aspects of the return to Africa idealized by the previous generation of Négritude male writers. In addition, I examine their transitional place in the development of French-Caribbean discourse and their influence in the reconceptualization of Caribbean identity. Critics who have examined the theme of return in these women writers’ works tend to focus on the figure of Africa the mother. 18 To do so is to ignore how the textual and psychological reversal of Mother Africa into a father figure further complicates the relationship between Africa and the Diaspora. The father figure allegory liberates the writers to explore other dynamics such as gender and sex discrimination, womanhood, motherhood, and wifehood. Previous studies that established a general view of Francophone women writers include: Maryse Condé’s La Parole des femmes: Essai sur les romancières des Antilles de langue française (1979); Françoise Lionnet’s Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (1995); Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (1996), edited by Mary Jean Green et al.; Myriam Chancy’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997); Renée Larrier’s Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (2000); Sam Haigh’s Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe (2000); Simone James Alexander’s Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001); Jeannie Suk’s Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing (2001); and Kathleen Gyssels’s Sages Sorcières? (2001). This last text is a comparative

Introduction

xxxi

study of the theme of the bad mother in selected works of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshal, and Maryse Condé. In her book, Gyssels makes the link between Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American women writers in order to demonstrate that despite their different geographical and socio-historical backgrounds, they share similar concerns regarding the woman’s place and function in a globalized patriarchal world. She also emphasizes the similarities in their common vision, which “consiste à revoir et à réexaminer, à corriger et à répliquer ce que les confrères blancs et noirs ont écrit à propos de la femme noire” [is to revise and reexamine what their white and black male counterparts wrote about the black woman] (xii). Of Suffocated Hearts and Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (2003) studies the portrayal of female characters suffering from mental illnesses in African and Caribbean women’s novels. The work “draws on the psychoanalytical, philosophical and literary domains of contemporary theory to formulate an innovative discursive frame in which to study the francophone authors’ thematic use of madness” (x). Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own (2006), edited by Sarah E. Barbour and Gerise Herndon, is a series of essays that examines the theoretical and political framework of Condé’s fiction in its questioning of the problems of identity, culture, language, history, and memory, among others. Dawn Fulton’s Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism (2010) examines the theoretical and creative work of Condé. These studies engage in issues of race, class, gender, identity, politics, language, and culture, and examine how post-colonial women’s texts wrestle with these various and fundamental complexities. Drawing from the critical and theoretical work previously aforementioned, my study examines the difficult journey of the main protagonists to Africa, and demonstrates that it is as problematic as the Caribbean homecoming in the women writers’ fiction. These women writers work through and within the male literary tradition to establish their own space and their own voice. Is the gender of the writers under consideration in this study linked to their marginalization in French-Caribbean literary movements? Condé has interrogated the women writers’ situation in the Caribbean: Whenever women speak out, they displease, shock, or disturb. Their writings imply that before thinking of a political revolution, West Indian society needs a psychological one. What they hope for and desire conflicts with men’s ambitions and dreams. Why, they ask, fight against discrimination in the world when it exists at home, among ourselves? (1993:131)

Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, who focus on gender issues in their writings, do not consider themselves feminists. My reading of the women writers’ works is that of a feminist, and I argue that the transformation of

xxxii

Introduction

the metaphorical figure of Africa (originally constructed as a mother figure) into a father figure, along with their questioning of polygamy, motherhood, and gender roles, could be read as a feminist stance against patriarchy. Although different in many aspects, the works of Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra are rooted in struggles for cultural expression and identity that are not defined by fixed representation. Their re-visiting of the return to Africa brings to light linguistic, psychological, political, and cultural conflicts that the Diaspora must face in search of self. They do not offer prescribed solutions to the anxieties associated with an unknown origin and caution instead against romanticizing the notion of such origins. The question one may ask is: would the return to origins be questionable if the continent was economically and politically stable? NOTES 1. Glissant explains Antillanité as the space and identity resulting from “the weaving of cultural ties between the Caribbean Archipelago and the Americas” in Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 2. In 1989, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant published a manifesto, Eloge de la Créolité, in which they proclaimed Creoleness as the new cultural and linguistic movement in the French Caribbean. 3. For more information on maroon women, see André Schwarz-Bart’s La mûlatresse Solitude (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1967); Karla Gotlieb, The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the Windward Jamaican Maroons (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); Kenneth Bilby and Filomena Chioma Steady, “Black Women and Survival: A Maroon Case,” in Filomena Steady, ed., The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1981). 4. Kalamu ya Salaam, Review of Coming Home to the Motherland: A Journey from Self Hate, by Jim Harris (6 September 2002), www.topica.com/lists/e-drum. 5. Michael Dash, introduction to Jacques Roumain’s Governors of the Dew (London: Heinemann, 1978), 13. 6. This cultural movement, which emerged in the 1920s, called for the celebration of Haitian culture with an emphasis on its African component. 7. Garveyism was a short-lived Black Nationalist movement led by Marcus Garvey, a native of Jamaica who earned tremendous political power in the United States in the early 1920s. He founded a Pan-Africanist organization, the UNIA, and developed a political and economic concept of liberation for Black people by promoting their return to Africa. The U.S. government eventually deported him to his native country. 8. Kalamu ya Salaam, Review of Coming Home to the Motherland: A Journey from Self Hate, by Jim Harris (6 September 2002), www.topica.com/lists/e-drum. 9. Revue indigène, La Revue du monde noir and Légitime Défense. The latter was banned by the French authority because of its radical stance against French colonialism. 10. Maryse Condé, “Pourquoi la négritude? Négritude ou révolution,” in Goré, ed. Négritude Africaine, Négritude Caraïbe, 150–54 (153). See also Maryse Condé, “Négritude césairienne, Négritude senghorienne,” Revue de literature comparée 3 (1974): 409–19. 11. Aimé Césaire, interview with J. Steiger, Afrique 5 (1961): 20. 12. Sam Haigh, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe (England: Maney Publishing, 1998), 55.

Introduction

xxxiii

13. There were also some male writers who traveled and lived in Africa before these women writers did, but the theme of return is either absent or not problematized in their texts. René Maran, for example, who in the preface of Batouala (1921) critiqued colonialism, was a representative of the French government in West Africa. So was Guy Tirolien, a Guadeloupean writer and poet who wrote the nostalgic poem “L’âme du noir pays” (1954) in reference to Africa. 14. Quoted in Unheard Words, ed. Mineke Schipper, trans. Barbara Potter Fasting (London: Allison & Busby, 1985), 50. 15. Métissage, once a biological concept associated to racial mixing in racial theory, was stigmatized. It is nowadays applied to the domain of literature, theory, arts, and culture. In Glissant’s works, it calls attention into redefining the complex and mixed nature of identities, cultures, and languages. 16. See Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth, 1932); Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works, 1921–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 17. In Le Discours Antillais, Glissant defines Détour as a response to the impossibility of the Return; in other words, a refusal of essentialism or authenticity. 18. See Simone James Alexander, Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). See also Susheila Nasta, ed., Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

Chapter One

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

The point is that male writers in the Caribbean have a tradition of debate; women need to develop one consciously now. —Carole Boyce Davies 1 Whatever our view of what we do, we are made by the forces of people moving about the world. —Gayatri Spivak, Death of Discipline, 2004

Tales of exile, migration, and displacement are characteristics of Maryse Condé’s work. Most of her characters are in constant motion, crossing continents, from the Americas to Europe and Africa, searching for a real or imagined self. A postcolonial awareness is present in her enactment of departures and failed returns in different geographical settings and landscapes. In this chapter, I focus on Condé’s questioning of the search for genealogy through the return to Africa, the motherland/fatherland in Heremakhonon and Une saison à Rihata, and to the Caribbean, the mother/homeland in Traversée de la mangrove. This focus on origins situates her work within the dominant French-Caribbean tradition of Black male fiction. Yet, that tradition cannot support her narrative because she is concerned with issues such as the representation of women’s experience and the complex socio-cultural identity of the postcolonial subject, among others. Condé consequently vowed to take another direction as she contends: Nous sommes prisonniers de structures érigées par la génération précédente et qu’on prétend nous faire respecter. Or, il faut les briser. La libération de l’écrivain négro africain, homme ou femme, passe par là. Il n’est pas d’identité culturelle immutable. Toute identité culturelle dépend de facteurs sociauxéconomiques. Même toute identité est liée en partie à la classe sociale. [We are prisoners within structures erected by the previous generation to which they claim we must conform. These structures must be demolished now. Liberation for the black African writer, man or woman, follows just such a 1

2

Chapter 1 course. Fixed cultural identity does not exist. Cutural identity depends upon economic factors. Indeed, all identity is tied in part to social class distinctions.] (Quoted from Vèvè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon,” 305)

The rewriting and the gendering of the real, metaphoric, or imaginary return to Africa, as well as the return to the Caribbean, are central to these concerns. Among the issues I analyze in this chapter are the implications of Condé’s counterdiscourse to a Panafricanist perspective of the return and her distance from the established models of French-Caribbean literature. I also consider the manner in which her position complicates the notion of return regarding race, class, gender, identity, history, and politics. With her first novel, Heremakhonon, set in an unnamed African country, Condé subverts the notion of the return to a mythical motherland as previously constructed by Négritude writers and the Panafricanist movement. Instead, she proposes the concept of an ambiguous fatherland. Indeed, her main protagonist, Véronica Mercier, is a young Guadeloupean philosophy professor who, after studying and living in Paris for a while, goes to an unnamed African country in search of her roots through her ancestors with a glorious past (55). Upon settling in that country, the protagonist falls in love with Ibrahim Sory, the Defense Minister, whom she sees as a “real” African because of his royal lineage untainted by slavery. Yet, Véronica refuses to be politically engaged in Africa or integrated into the culture. Véronica’s paradoxical position expresses Condé’s rejection of the myth of origins and political and racial affiliation with Africa. Despite the impossibility of imagining Africa as the “home” of the Diaspora—an idea already put forth in her first novel—Africa will nevertheless remain the place where her characters still dream of healing their tormented souls. After writing Heremakhonon in 1976, Condé revisited the same question in Une saison à Rihata (1981), a novel named after Césaire’s play Une saison au Congo (1966). In this narrative, the Guadeloupean protagonist Marie-Hélène is married to Zek, a bank assistant of noble descent in Rihata, a small West African town. There are some similarities as well as differences between Marie-Hélène’s journey to Africa and that of Véronica’s. She, like Véronica, searches for the noble African past through an African man. But she does not have a clear agenda for her presence in Africa. Unlike Véronica, who is unmarried and childless, she has six daughters. Trapped by motherhood, which defines her, she has fewer options to free herself from patriarchal strictures. She embodies “the archetypal and idealized black mother-lover.” 2 Furthermore, she finds herself caught in political fights in that unnamed country. She remains distant as she reflects with sarcasm on the political shortcomings in Rihata: “Ce socialisme à l’africaine n’était qu’un leurre permettant une poignée d’hommes d’ursuper le pouvoir”(32). However, in their search for origins both heroines face

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

3

cultural obstacles and witness political corruption and abuses in the respective African countries in which they live. Like Véronica, Marie-Hélène considers herself an outsider who rejects the present and whose fascination with the past makes her situation unbearable. The characters close to her (her husband and her nephew, Christophe) are also trapped and frozen in the past. This obsession with either the personal or the historical past is a recurring theme in Condé’s fiction. For instance, her novels Les derniers rois mages (1992) and Desirada (1997) depict the main protagonists’ unsuccessful search for their genealogies in Africa. With her bestselling novels Ségou: Les murailles de terre and La terre en miettes (1984–1985), a reconstruction of an African saga from the ancient Bambara Empire of Mali, Condé came to be recognized as an international writer. For her and many of her heroes and heroines, Africa remains an important cultural reference. The journey back home to Africa remains problematic for Condé, who continues to explore the question of origins and identity in Traversée de la mangrove (1989), a novel set in Guadeloupe. In this narrative, Condé depicts the return home of the protagonist Francis Sancher, who fails in his attempt to reroot himself in Guadeloupe. With this novel, Condé establishes a parallel between the impossibility of a return either to Africa, considered the fatherland, or to Guadeloupe, the native land. Instead of home and return, the author proposes errancy as her characters constantly migrate from one continent to the other, always in search of themselves. The idea of return to a point of origin is outdated, meaning that the Cesairian “model of departure, exile, and return is now followed by yet another departure, another exile, perhaps to a new elsewhere,” according to Jeannie Suk (160). For Condé, errancy is a way of living and creating. Rootedness is not crucial to identity formation, as she maintains: “C’est l’errance qui amène la créativité. L’enracinement est très mauvais au fond. Il faut absolument être errant, multiple au dehors et au dedans. Nomade” [Errance inspires creativity. Rootedness is not at all beneficial. It is necessary to be a nomad, multiple inside and out] (Pfaff 46). Here, Condé expresses her own personal choice of living and working in different countries. The exploration of different landscapes contributes to her personal and intellectual development as a writer who constantly crosses different geographical and cultural borders. Condé also makes a similar move, crossing into different literary genres. As a prolific writer, she produces works ranging from novels to children’s literature, short stories, essays, literary and cultural criticism, as well as plays. It has long been an ideological practice in the Western tradition to endow a territory with feminine qualities and to call it a mother-nation or motherland. The nation is sometimes allegorized by a female figure representing beauty, nurturance, and fertility, as in the case of Marianne, the symbol of France. Behind this symbolism lies the assumption that the mother’s presumed role is to nurture and protect her children. In the African context, the

4

Chapter 1

nation is similarly cast as a female figure. The literary critic Elleke Boehmer explains the link between gender and nationalism in her groundbreaking research on the various ways African female imagery is manipulated into nationhood by patriarchal symbolic systems. She notes that before Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, fell from grace, she was also given the title of “Mother of the Nation” (1992:3). However, if the nation is essentially represented as female in the political context, “in literature it is the male figure that is cast as the author and subject of the nation—as faithful soldier, citizen-hero or statesman,” adds Boehmer (6). This continuing tradition of the gendered construction of the African nation as a mother by Négritude writers is a practice filled with contradictions. Although female imagery is used to represent the continent, Black womens’ voices remain silenced and underepresented. Castigated in their role of second-class citizens, Black women are not often encouraged to identify with a liberation struggle. And when they do, they are seldom recognized and heralded for their efforts and sacrifices. Suzanne Césaire, the cofounder of the journal Tropiques, and the Nardal sisters are good examples of women intellectuals who remained in the shadow while their male counterparts became international cultural icons. As a worldwide practice, male dominance in political and social struggles is a fact. Feminist theorists Irène d’Almeida and Filomena C. Steady believe that Black women in general suffer a double alienation, first as a result of colonization, and secondly at the hands of their male counterparts, who silence them within and outside the world, literary and otherwise. The pervasive female imagery of Africa has long been used in different political circles in the Diaspora. The metaphor of the Mother continent blossomed as seeds of nationalism arose in some colonized countries after World War I. Educated male writers, who were the leaders in the struggle for liberation, were implicated in this revolutionary process. Boehmer suggests that a writer’s choice to be a nationalist “was to be much more a worthy writer . . . and by implication, to be much more male” (9). As part of a liberation ideology, the image of Mother Africa is used as a potent symbol in achieving political goals or reclaiming the historical and cultural past. Boehmer further notes, “In 1998, when making a call to Africans to stand together not on the basis of colour but on that of Africanness, Jesse Jackson adopted this grand trope urging African people everywhere to ‘identify with Africa as a mother continent’” (4). This particular image of Africa, inscribed into a nationalist discourse addressing the issue of roots, liberation, and selfgovernance, conjures up the necessity to safeguard her sanctity against European and American imperialism. This image of the African continent as a mother remains to this day a staple of rhetoric and aesthetic vision in the Diaspora. Its representation is rooted in a diasporic tradition created by politicians, artists, writers, and popular culture. A great number of diasporic writers have used the same

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

5

symbol in their works. Writers from the Black Nationalist movements of Indigenism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Cuban Negrissimo movement, and Négritude all embraced Africa and asserted the cultural affiliation between the “Mother continent” and the Diaspora. Furthermore, the first generations of French-Caribbean writers in the beginning of the twentieth century do not represent negative images of Africa in their works. Although problematic in its portrayal of the protagonists and derogatory in its portrayal of African society, the preface of the novel Batouala (1921), by Martinican writer René Maran, is nevertheless a critique of colonialism. Whether portrayed positively or negatively, Africa remains a main cultural reference for many writers in the Diaspora. The continent also serves as a comforting image for some writers in exile from their homeland. 3 The African continent is commonly allegorized as a nurturing female figure to which the wounded Black Diaspora goes instinctively for healing. Africa is imagined as the healing mother in the poem “Nuit de Sine,” written by the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor when he went into exil in France in the 1930s. African and African American women writers, such as Buchi Emecheta and Alice Walker, have followed suit in dwelling on the same imagery in their writings. For Guadeloupean writer Daniel Maximin, Africa can be missed as an absent mother or humored as a lost little girl: “L’Afrique est la mère absente de mon enfance. Mais nous la traitons comme une petite fille à qui montrer son chemin, et qu’il faut aider à traverser” [Africa is the absent mother from my childhood. But we treat her like a little girl who needs help in finding the right path to follow and to cross] (1981:100). This stereotypical image of the African continent as a lost female child in need of guidance reflects how the West views Africa: a feminized weak landscape unable to think for herself and unable to survive on her own during the colonial and post-colonial era. In the 1970s, a decade after most African nations achieved their independence, Condé (as one of the new emerging female Caribbean voices) broke with the literary tradition of the female allegorization of Africa against the iconic representation of comforting Mother Africa found in the imaginary landscape of the Négritude writers. What are the current implications of the textual and psychological transformation of Africa into an absent, disappointing father figure? Condé subverts the Mother Africa image to create a new textual space in fiction, which differs from a normative male discourse and opens new possibilities in lieu of the return. Unlike the male writers of Négritude, Condé’s fiction focuses on issues linked to identity, gender, culture, and language with an ironic distance toward both race solidarity and class analysis. One of the questions that arises is the following: is Condé’s negative representation of Africa a strategy to create a new debate regarding identity politics, or is it a reinforcement of old stereotypes such as those found in Western arts and literature, stereotypes

6

Chapter 1

that Césaire, Fanon, and many others denounce and reject in their writings? Christopher Miller suggests that “Condé’s negativism requires closer scrutiny and the internalized stereotype is in reality the object of critical irony on Condé’s part” (1996:176). He highlights the fact that Véronica’s negative attitude toward Africa should be weighed by critics, especially when Condé herself tries to explain her protagonist’s position: “Quand Véronica dit: The Dark Continent, c’est sur un ton moqueur, ironique. On a toujours parlé de l’Afrique comme du Dark continent. Donc, elle reprend le cliché; il faut savoir lire et ne pas tout prendre au premier degré” [Véronica is being ironic in using the cliché of Africa as The Dark continent. One must know how to read between the lines and not to judge a narrative based on its primary textual content.] 4 Despite the author’s explanation of her use of irony in her novel Heremakhonon, critics have directed harsh comments against her for distancing herself from an affirmation of Black African pride associated with a previous generation of writers during the colonial era. 5 Alain Baudot, perhaps, understands Condé’s position when he writes: “Elle sait que les mots nous piègent, que nos meilleures intentions se retournent contre nous et que chacun de nos gestes, fût-il le plus personnel, a déjà reçu sa signification avant même d’être esquissé” [She knows that words trap us, that our best intentions turn against us, and every one of our gestures, be it deeply personal, is already interpreted even before raised] (1982:30). After defending her protagonist’s position, Condé appears to defend her own as a writer in the foreword of Heremakhonon. She suggests that the lashings she received from critics might originate from some misunderstanding and admits to having suffered from that. She stipulates that for her the real is the imaginary and dismisses the accusation that she failed to take into account the real. One might argue that the author’s use of irony can sometimes display a double edge in terms of exposing historical facts or old clichés. In her first day at the university where she is hired to teach philosophy, Véronica, the protagonist, is asked to present the origins of the Antilles to her African students. She imagines her description in the following manner: “Les négriers quittent à nouveau la baie Biafra. Tant de sangs sur l’oeil glauque de la mer! Et les requins joyeux, ancêtres du Ku Klux Klan. On va bouffer du nègre!” (43). Véronica’s use of a digestive metaphor to refer to the Klan may be seen as a way of imagining Black history spanning from Africa to the Americas. It could also mean that Véronica, who expects to teach Western philosophy, does not seem convinced of the importance of talking of the Middle Passage, especially when she does not want to display any type of racial solidarity. Feeling ambivalent toward the noble ancestors she is looking for, she refuses to express any sentiment of solidarity for them. She thinks they should be blamed for falling victims to slavery and racial oppression. The reader might think she is on the side of the colonial oppressors.

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

7

Condé may have a point in reminding us readers and critics to be cautious in our reading practices and interpretations. Véronica does not seem complicit in vilifying racial stereotypes, as it may appear. However, she may be running the risk of being called a racist because of her French-Caribbeannes and her irreverent attitude toward Africa. Facing the African Other, she instinctively imitates the pervasive colonial gaze while being conscious of it. She repeatedly summons herself to be careful about stereotypes in several instances. Condé also makes the point of exposing sexual stereotypes regarding Black women in Heremakhonon. When Pierre-Gilles, a French homosexual living in Africa, makes sexual advances to Véronica, she answers sarcastically by exposing the stereotypes of Black women’s exaggerated sexual appetites. In a way she tries to deconstruct the image of the semantically Black female as an oversexualized Other. Her musings on various stereotypes destabilize and question them as social, racial, and sexual constructs. Condé also makes a critique of the Western anthropological gaze on Africa as the cannibalistic Other, a European invention. However, her negative portrayal of Africa is based partly on her own experience living there. It also serves to rebuff the romanticized image of Africa projected by the Négritude writers. Condé understands the importance of Aimé Césaire’s work (Pfaff 1993:50) and of the Négritude movement for the process of identity reconstruction, but decides to distance herself from the movement’s ideology by unveiling gruesome past and present African realities. Her treatment of the return to Africa is both a critique of identity politics and an interrogation of the parental authority of Africa in the Diaspora. While she does not contest the importance of Africa for its Diaspora, she nevertheless problematizes the relationship by portraying the old continent without reverence. Condé, who lived in Africa between 1960 and 1972, witnessed the continent making a difficult transition from colonial subjugation into a new, independent but uncertain period. She witnessed the African struggle for liberation after years of colonialism. With the demise of colonialism, the newly independent African nations had to take new directions. The old ways of governing these countries had been long destroyed by European colonialism, and self-government would prove to be difficult due to the problems associated with multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures. At first, many in the Diaspora, including Condé herself, were enthusiastic about African independence and its future possibilities, including the building of a new society with hopes of democracy. But the idea of returning to an African nation, in order to reconstruct the self, was doomed to fail because the newly independent nations were preoccupied with their own internal turmoil. Condé explains: It was naïve, simplistic and overly idealistic to assume that African countries, just liberated from the yoke of colonization, and facing so many problems and subject to so many pressures from the imperialist powers, could provide the

8

Chapter 1 model we were looking for. We expected to be welcomed by the Africans with open arms and seen as long-lost brothers and sisters. We expected them to help us in our struggles while theirs were still raging. But this was not possible. 6

The risks taken by Condé to confront and tear apart the iconic representation of Mother Africa allows her to establish her own space and contribute to the emergence of a contesting female voice on the literary scene. For Condé, the Black experience does not necessarily originate in the hold of the slaveship (les négriers). Rather, it involves the past and the present, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and the father and the mother as heroes and heroines who attempt to redefine themselves with great difficulty in the world in which they live. The protagonists’ constant crossing of different continents and lands, as well as their fragmented stories, attest to the importance of errancy in the author’s fiction. Condé agrees when critic Francoise Pfaff asks her the following question: “Many of your characters seem to be doomed to wandering and wishing to be where they are not. Is this constant search for the Promised Land the distinguishing feature of human beings? Since this Promised Land does not exist, should we see this search as life’s ultimate chimera?” 7 Marie-Hélène goes to Africa with the hope of finding herself, but once she realizes that her goal is unattainable, she then projects another impossible dream: the return to Guadeloupe. Condé complicates the search for origins in Africa as well as the imagined return to the native land. Neither Marie-Hélène nor Véronica fulfills her desire in finding identity and happiness in the land of ancestors. They do not return to Guadeloupe at the end of the narrative. Véronica goes back to Paris while Marie-Hélène remains emotionally and psychologically displaced in Africa. Condé makes the groundbreaking proposition that neither the mythical nor the present Africa can bring succor to her main characters. Véronica and Marie-Hélène, who are born in the Diaspora, suffer from not knowing who their ancestors are. In their search for genealogy, they turn to Africa. Yet, their hope of inner reconciliation is not satisfied in the end. A DISAPPOINTING FATHER FIGURE Condé always presents herself as an unconventional writer. Reflecting on her literary career, she declared in Le Monde in 2000: “Je me suis mise à parler pour moi. Je me suis sentie libérée jusqu’à tourner en dérision des choses considérées sacrées” [I started to talk for myself. I felt so liberated to the point of making fun of things considered sacred]. 8 She assumes that her role as a writer is to “disturb” her readers (Pfaff 1990:77). She goes as far as proclaiming her affinities with Anglophone Caribbean writer V. S. Naipaul, who, like her, rejects Négritude’s ideology and who makes it a habit of

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

9

provoking readers by his racist attitude. Her refusal of “la loi des Pères” [the law of the Fathers] 9 causes her to be labeled “The Recalcitrant Daughter” 10 or “Maryse Condé, l’inconvenante.” 11 In the post-colonial framework of revisiting the theme of the return to Africa, Condé resists homogenization in two ways. Her fiction depicts the dangers of espousing an ideology that glorifies the African past. Furthermore, she realizes that the new African nations have not properly dealt with the questions of race, class, and gender. She also raises questions about the assumptions of racial solidarity and shows how class stratifications and gender restrictions function in some African societies. She is the first FrenchCaribbean woman writer to shatter the Pan African image of Mother Africa and to propose the Caribbean islands as the real, though problematic, Mother. It can be argued that the metaphor of the womb in diasporic literature is a symbolic reminder of the Middle Passage experience. The eponymous hero in Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979) by Simone Schwarz-Bart makes the reverse oneiric voyage from Guadeloupe to Africa inside a cow’s womb. In Contradictory Omens, the Barbadian poet and critic Edward Kamau Brathwaite asserts that the “unity” in the Black Diaspora “is submarine” (64). For the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, the sea is historically and metaphorically linked to the Middle Passage experience in his poem “The Sea Is History.” In Heremakhonon, the maternal imagery is semantically linked to the key words “mer” (sea) and “mère” (mother). Maternal and maritime imagery is recurrent in Condé’s fiction. 12 Many of her characters are fascinated with uterine images. They fantasize about Africa as a pre-natal harmonious space from which they have been historically separated and to which they dream of returning. In Traversée de la mangrove, the sea is personified and imagined as a comforting mother figure. The character Léocadie Thimothée is attracted to the sea despite her fear of it: Je ne savais pas nager. Aussi je me tenais loin de la mer qui me hélait de sa voix de femme folle: Approche-toi près, tout près. Arrache tes vêtements. Plonge. Laisse-moi te rouler, te serrer, frotter ton corps de mes algues. Tu ne sais pas c’est de moi que tu es née? Tu ne sais pas que tu me portes en toi? Sans moi, ta vie n’existerait pas. (140)

Here, the uterine image of the sea is a symbolic metaphor for the Middle Passage experience, illustrating the character’s obsession with this historical past and the question of origins. This kind of imagery illustrates the protagonist’s desire to claim an ontological space where to belong. Véronica’s mistake has been to look only on the father’s side, while searching for her ancestors, “des nègres avec aïeux” [negroes with ancestors] (55). Such an archetypal quest is also found in another of Condé’s novels, Les derniers rois mages (1992). In this narrative, the African American char-

10

Chapter 1

acter, Debbie, who is married to the French-Caribbean Spero, reveres the memory of her husband’s noble ancestor (presumably the last of the Dahomey kings in West Africa exiled by the French in 1894). In an interview I conducted with her in 2000, Condé disagreed with my claim that Africa is represented as a father figure in Heremakhonon, because the narrative, she said, contains “fetal and uterine images.” I do not contest that Véronica’s initial desire was to return to an idealized image of Africa the Motherland, which she associates with maternal imagery. Yet, she views Africa through Ibrahim Sory, her African lover. Her main purpose is to find in Africa an “authentic Negro,” one not stamped by slavery, in order to cure her alienation and her desire is to be much more like Ibrahim Sory, an African noble male. In other words, she wants to submit herself to him with the hope of finding herself. Critic Simone James Alexander also notices Véronica’s fascination with the African masculine figure: “Apart from functioning as a mythical home space, Mother Africa is equated with the phallus. For her, Africa is a phallocentric world “where the phallus is the law of the land” (2001:103). For Véronica, who fantasizes about a potent and unspoiled symbol of Africa, the handsome Ibrahim Sory is a clear representation of the continent. Indeed, she burdens him with the task of providing the therapy she needs in order to reconcile with herself and others. Véronica affirms: “Cet homme-là, c’est le remède que je suis venue chercher” (95). While not underestimating the author’s conception of Africa allegorized as a female, 13 I question her resistance to this possible interpretation. Could it be that Véronica’s disappointment with her father, the “marabout mandingue” [mandigo marabout], or Ibrahim Sory, her “nègre avec aïeux” [negro with ancestors], in some way parallels the author’s disenchantment with her African experience, leading the heroine to recognize that “her ancestors misled her” (225), and the author to a discursive erasure of the notion of “ancêtres” [ancestors], a word that does not have a feminine form in French? Fleeing Guadeloupe to find her [male] ancestors does not solve Véronica’s identity problems. Indeed, in Africa she continues to experience the same internal exile, which deeply affected her on the island. The protagonist’s self-imposed mission consists of finding a cure for the illegitimacy of the Diaspora, constituted in her mind by way of an African allegiance. With complete faith in Négritude’s ideology, Véronica espouses its universalist perception of a united Black world and assumes Africa as the legitimate ground for the “wretched of the earth” to reroot themselves. Her persistent malaise results in her self-deprecation as the illegitimate child of Father Africa, which makes her unworthy of Africa’s noble sons. Her obsession with the African past and the “negroes with ancestors” expresses her desire to erase the sin of an illegitimate diasporic origin.

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

11

As a novelist, Condé sketches out the idea of illegitimacy in Heremakhonon. It is a motif she previously examined in her essay “La civilisation du bossale” (1978). Looking at oral tradition, and, more specifically, at “Ti Jean,” a popular Caribbean folkltale, she states: Cependant le trait le plus important des contes de Ti Jean est l’apparition d’un nouveau thème: celui de la bâtardise. Le père est perdu, il faut le retrouver. Le père est inconnu, il importe de découvrir son nom. Et cet inconnu, cet absent correspond dans l’inconscient de l’esclave à l’ignorance de son origine. [The most important aspect of the Ti Jean folktales is the discovery of a new theme: that of illegitimacy. The father is lost, he must be found. The father is unknown, it is important to find out who he is. And this absent father surfaces in the subconscious of the slave as the unknown source of origins.] (42)

Condé considers the protagonist’s journey as an initial step in the process of self-discovery. However, she shifts away from portraying the typical male hero looking for the ancestral father in folk culture and chooses instead a female heroine, Véronica, who constructs Africa as a male figure from whom she hopes to get the recognition and legitimacy she wants from the masculine figures in her life. A year later, after Condé published her essay, Simone Schwarz-Bart rewrote the folktale in the form of a novel, Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979), which describes the eponymous hero’s journey in search of the African father. There are other indications in Heremakhonon that suggest that Véronica’s quest concerns the primeval father (Africa). For her, Africa takes on some of the traits of her father, whom she calls “marabout mandingue.” She gives him this nickname because he reminds her of the picture of a Western African man seen in a textbook. A “marabout” is a holy man in Islamic theology and “mandingue” [Mande] is derived from the people of the region. A marabout could also be a healer. Véronica’s quest is to find a marabout to cure her “illness.” She identifies Ibrahim Sory, her lover, with her father and finds startling similarities between the two of them. They have the same authoritarian voice and physical attributes. The only difference for Véronica is that Ibrahim Sory is a noble African (not tainted by slavery) and her father is not. Even Ibrahim Sory’s laughter irritates Véronica because it sounds like her father’s (73). Her irritation with Ibrahim Sory results from her love-hate relationship with the African continent. On the one hand, she imagines it as her glorious lover, unspoiled by Europe and untainted by slavery and colonialism (119). On the other hand, she resents Africa’s ridiculous gains as the result of its participation in the slave trade. She gives the impression of having no interest in learning about Africa. Before going there, she can only associate the continent of origin with nothingness. When she returns to France after her stay in Africa, she knows that the narrative she will produce will be disap-

12

Chapter 1

pointing to her audience. Her way of looking at The Dark Continent Africa is mediated through colonial meaning (90). She decries Africa being subjected to the European gaze while she identifies with the European tourist who sees it as an exotic Other and further reduces it to nothingness (52). Consequently, her ignorance of Africa and her refusal to learn the local language put her in an ambiguous situation. Not interested in the Africa of her present day, she carries in her mind stereotypical images found in textbooks (20). Frustrated and confused, Véronica expresses her own disappointment with Africa: “Protected by a temporal, linguistic, and cultural distance, Véronica resolutely situates herself on the sidelines of contemporary of African politics, positing this world as opaque and impenetrable” (Fulton 25). Furthermore, she also becomes aware of her despair in wanting to break her own cycles of alienation. Consequently, she chooses not to invest herself in Africa because she realizes that she must go back to France, her point of departure. Despite her desire to remain distant, Véronica soon realizes that she cannot permanently ignore the political situation around her. Some of her close African friends are deeply involved in the revolutionary struggle against the repressive political regime that controls their lives. Although she criticizes the political corruption and abuses in that unnamed African country, she refuses to be politically involved for fear of losing her objectivity (139). In some ways, Véronica’s objectivity allows her to maintain her quest and her idealization of Africa. She continues to remain passive even when the government—in which Ibrahim Sory is now the Minister of Defense—arrests and kills her favorite student, Biram III (135). She finds herself torn between her obsession with Ibrahim Sory and her loyalty to her student. She wants so much to hold onto her initial idea of Ibrahim Sory as the noble African with ancestors that she cannot possibly associate him with the corrupt image of an assassin. Besides, she does not seem concerned about Ibrahim’s bad reputation. Her fascination, with him as the embodiment of idealized origins and an object of desire that is both cultural and sexual, blinds her to the reality of his cruelty and corruption (as the assassin of Biram III). Similarly, it parallels Négritude writers’ fascination with an idealized Mother Africa that blinds them from the realities of contemporary Africa as located in history, change, and politics. In Véronica’s words, it is “les prismes de mes désirs et de mes rêves” [the prisms of my desires and dreams] that blind her from seeing the reality surrounding her in the first place. In other words, merely reversing the gendered subjects of the narrative does not change the gender dynamics of the texts in fundamental ways. It does, however, expose the relevance of the text’s gender meanings underlying the gender economy that had been obscured in the texts of Négritude. Condé examines the meanings of power relations between men and women in Heremakhonon. The dynamics of gender, maintained in the traditional family model, colonial domination, or neocolonialism, are incorporated in

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

13

the narrative. Véronica observes that the community is split by gender. Men are mostly in positions of power. They are presidents, government ministers, doctors, and rulers of their families, while women are relegated to their assigned stereotypical roles: mothers, whores, and domestics. She describes with irony the way women are mythified by males as she observes Saliou’s pregnant wife setting the table for dinner only for two (Véronica and Saliou). The wife is confined to the domestic space and does not sit at the table to eat with them and to take part in the conversation: “La gazelle noire célébrée par le poète. Enceinte, ce qui ne la dépare pas. Le couvert est mis pour deux. Ils ont raison: la femme à la cuisine” (22). In this passage, Condé criticizes the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s celebration of the African woman in his famous poem “Femme noire” [Black Woman], as she is voiceless and is relegated mainly to subordinate roles in some African societies. Furthermore, she makes a critique of Négritude as “a sexualized discourse of black liberation” (Haigh 65). The male subject aspires to achieve great dreams of liberation while the female remains in his shadow and experiences difficulties in assuming her role as an agent of change. In analyzing this poem, Christopher Miller writes: “In the days of colonialism and anti-colonialism, it was thought that certain forms of liberation had to precede others: first racial liberation, then, eventually, perhaps, gender liberation. Rarely stated explicitly, but highly influential, this thesis is often at work within the history of African literature” (259). As Condé interrogates the woman’s place in this patriarchal society, she seems to suggest that Véronica’s lack of dialogue and interior monologue are signs of her displacement in this patriarchal system. Ibrahim Sory, who wants to control Véronica’s sense of independence, expresses his desire to put her back in the domestic sphere—a woman’s place—where she allegedly belongs. She criticizes him as he reprimands her for her voluntary work at a health clinic while exposing the feminization process to which a woman is subjected. She rejects the domestic ideology of the patriarchal system and gender socialization which strictly define the woman’s role and place in society. In terms of gender dynamics, Véronica and Ibrahim Sory do not understand each other. Threatened by her freedom of choice, Ibrahim wants to control her and dictate what she ought to do with her time. In trying to do so, he articulates how male power and dominance can affect a woman’s freedom and voice. This can lead to the perpetuation of fixed gender roles as the patriarchal system instills its values and norms in some African societies. Despite Véronica’s disappointment with her father and Ibrahim, she remains loyal to both of them. Her desperate need to define her identity in relation to the male figure turns obsessively sexual. In her search for genealogy, sex appears to be the only efficient communication between her and Ibrahim Sory. She exclaims: “La femme est un champ, l’homme est son laboureur. Laboure-moi, donc, laboureur. Je le comprends, à chaque fois

14

Chapter 1

davantage, l’amour avec lui est un jeu, un divertissement, un sport” (103). She willingly accepts herself as a sexual object and does not care, in spite of the perception of such a demeaning situation. There is a discrepancy between her behavior and the level of intelligence expected from a philosophy professor. She reflects on her degrading status of being objectified with a bittersweet sense of humor and sees herself as an exotic plant: “Je suis un arum. . . . Car la plante comme moi est exotique” (131). With IbrahimAfrica, Véronica loses any sense of self-esteem and consents to subordinate herself to male desire. Her attitude reinforces the idea that the woman’s place in such a system is to please the father first, then the (male) lover. Ashamed of her gender because her father would have preferred her to be a boy, she flees from him in an attempt to get the attention and legitimation that would make her feel whole. She is the ironic spectator of her own degradation. She takes pleasure in the disturbing image she presents to those around her as she defends it. Her relationship with Ibrahim Sory reminds her of her first love affair with the young mulatto back in Guadeloupe. To the people who call her Marilisse (a negative connotation for a whore or kept woman), her response is surprisingly defensive: “J’aimais. C’est tout. . . . Que les féministes me lapident si elles veulent” (39). Rather than taking a feminist stance regarding women’s issues, she shroudly challenges the definition of “Marilisse” and claims a sentimental position through her allegiance to Ibrahim Sory, her lover. Véronica’s words echo Condé’s distant attitude toward the feminist movement. The author has constantly maintained a neutral position about feminism and remains skeptical about any ideology. To Françoise Pfaff, who asks her if she was a feminist, she answers: On m’a demandé cela cent fois et je ne sais même pas ce que cela veut dire exactement, alors je ne pense pas l’être. Si tu poses la question aux USA, on te dira sûrement non. . . . Ce n’est pas parce qu’on est femme qu’on écrit de bons livres et qu’on a des choses essentielles à dire. Attention, danger! . . . Pour moi, un écrivain est un écrivain, femme ou homme. C’est un individu qui s’exprime. [I have been asked that a hundred times and I do not know what that means exactly. I do not think I am a feminist. If you ask the question in the United States, they will surely say not. . . . It is not because one is a woman that one writes good books and has important things to say. Warning, danger! For me, a writer is a writer, whether it is a woman or a man. It is a person who expresses himself/herself.] (80)

The Francophone Caribbean women writers whose works I examine in this study do not ally themselves to the radical, critical trends in the feminist movement. Several women writers from the Diaspora have the tendency to dissociate themselves from the feminist movement though their texts have a

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

15

clear feminist perspective. There have been ongoing debates in academic circles on some Black women and other women of color who position and distance themselves from the feminist movement. 14 Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, in her essay Recreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (1974), remarks: “Many African female writers like to declare that they’re not feminists, as if it were a crime” (11). Other women writers avoid being labeled feminists and call themselves “womanists,” 15 a term coined by Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). For others, the fear of being associated with the term “westoxication” 16 forces them to censor themselves. As of today, we know that the feminist movement is divided between itself and has had a bad rap over the last three decades. Many critics and supporters of feminism believe that the movement is dead and is losing ground. Contrary to all these speculations, feminism is alive, well, and useful as long as women’s rights need to be defended. There is not an established feminist movement in the Antilles in regards to Francophone Caribbean women’s literature, although literary critic Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert reports that varieties of local feminisms are making an impact. She also notes that a number of Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean women writers from past and present have taken “active roles in feminist and political struggles.” 17 The feminist movement in Haiti lost three prominent leaders in the devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010. Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcellin, and Anne Marie Coriolan were social and political activists working at raising awareness about various women’s issues in Haiti. Each of them left a legacy for future generations of leaders who will continue the fight against gender oppression and inequality. It is well noted that many women writers and critics from the so-called Third World and Western countries do not like to be called feminists for various and complex reasons. They realize that women’s lives from different parts of the world are complex in terms of history, culture, society, language, economy, and politics and that a Western ideological movement cannot fairly represent them. Western feminism has been accused of being ethnocentric, biased, or indifferent toward issues of race in its analysis of women’s conditions. Some critics avoid using the terms “Western feminism” and prefer to be under the umbrella of “Black feminism,” but both terms still pose a problem as critic Cécile Accilien explains: “The term ‘Western’ is problematic because, ‘Western feminism’ is itself a fractured concept, with factions such as radical, liberal, Marxist, and socialist, to name a few. . . . Like ‘Western feminism,’ the term ‘Black feminism’ is also problematic, because critics who choose this term do not agree on what it represents.” 18 A list of other terms has been created and is being used in lieu of feminism: “Negrofeminism,” by Obiama Nnaemeka, “womanism,” by Alice Walker, “Africana womanism,” by Clenora Hudson-Weems,” and “Motherism,” by Catherine Acholonulu. Accilien mentions the names of

16

Chapter 1

Caribbean critics who “problematize the difficulty of theorizing gender and feminism in the Caribbean context.” 19 Although Condé refrains from theorizing, gender issues are relevant in her fiction. Condé does not seem concerned about gender differences in writing when it comes to artistic expression. She gives the impression of ignoring the specificity of female writing, which focuses on gender issues and sexual differences. Yet, Condé’s fiction yields elements that make her readers acutely aware of the gender dynamics at work in the narrative: the return of female French-Caribbean characters in search of the African father. The author seems to contradict herself with the following statement, which draws attention to the gender consciousness inscribed in her fiction: A certains moments je m’imagine que je suis tel personnage et je parle par sa voix. C’est pour ça que ça m’a été plus facile de me mettre dans la peau des femmes parce qu’on peut s’incarner dans une autre femme qui est très différente de soi par l’expérience mais qui a en commun avec vous ce fait d’être femme au monde. [Sometime I imagine myself being a certain character through whom I speak. That is why it has been easier for me to associate myself with women’s situations because I can indentify with another woman who is different from me by experience but still shares with me the same characteristic of being a woman in the world.] 20

The point is not whether or not Condé claims feminism, but what a feminist reading of her text can yield—a reading that examines the meanings and power relations of gender in her fiction. Condé’s provocative Heremakhonon depicts a lethal Father Africa, a quasi-nonexistent Caribbean motherland which remains “un pâle reflet de l’astre paternal” [a pale reflection of the paternal star], and a pathetic young intellectual woman from the Diaspora in search of her roots. Marie-Hélène’s in Une saison à Rihata is trapped in a socio-cultural space dominated by patriarchal control and condescension. Surrounded by her large brood and confined in a colonial house, she continues to live in external and internal exile in Africa. Both novels, situated in the lineage of Caribbean fiction on the issues of race, gender, cultural alienation, identity, and politics, are remarkable literary statements on the dangers of the discourse of origins. POLITICS/LOVE/FRIENDSHIP The problem with Véronica is that most of her actions are dictated by her love for Ibrahim and her fascination with him. As she draws a clear line between the personal and the political, she categorically refuses to mix love, friendship, and politics in the process of her identity quest. Although she

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

17

cares about the friendship she shares with her African friends, she hesitates to challenge the politician Ibrahim Sory for fear of disturbing their love relationship. Like Marie-Hélène, she is not interested in the politics of their country. As a result, she maintains her decision not to define her political position and take sides. Her impartiality, however, is particularly unsettling because she gives the impression of having a clear understanding of the unstable political realities and the neo-colonialist conditions of the African country described in the narrative. Despite her understanding of the dictatorial family’s repression of the people, Véronica is still plagued by uncertainties. Her constant self-analysis and self-criticism point to her own bad conscience about her political disengagement. She manages to be away every time an important event takes place in the country. For instance, Véronica, who teaches philosophy at the school, is neither aware of the preparation for a huge students’ strike in the country, nor does she know that her favorite student, Biram III, is one of the organizers. She further demonstrates her indifference by not listening to her friend Saliou when he speaks (33). Véronica is both geographically and internally exiled. For her, Africa is split into a real and imagined entity, depending upon the circumstances: her description of the everydayness (the details of the lives of her African friends), and her own fantasy of Africa. Frozen in the past, she is unable to take interest in the present reality of the continent: “J’ignore ce qui se passe dans ce pays . . . Est-ce le présent, est-ce le passé” (76, 181). In addition to her confusion of the past and the present, her lack of political engagement and cultural involvement in the country translates also into her lack of communication first with her friends, then with Ibrahim Sory, whose relationship with her revolves only around sex. Véronica experiences difficulty in communicating verbally. Every time she tries to explain to Ibrahim Sory and her friends the reason for her trip to Africa she fails. She has feelings of shame about her diasporic origin. When she finally expresses the reasons for her journey to Africa to Ibrahim Sory, he dismisses them as unworthy of attention. He denies the importance of her quest and declares that Africa has urgent problems and no time for an emotional crisis such as hers. In the narrative, Véronica does not speak directly; she simply utters or often uses hypothetical sentences. Her elliptical phrases express her alienation from her surroundings, and her unwillingness to change her attitude towards Africa. As an emissary of the Diaspora, she fails to communicate with Africa. Christopher Miller notes: One peculiarity of Heremakhonon that has not escaped the attention of critics is the fact that the narrator, unlike all the other characters in the novel, is never directly quoted. On the level of explicitly represented actions, everyone speaks but her; meanwhile she alone thinks, and her internal reflections constitute the dominant point of view. The dialogues are asymmetrical, in that other charac-

18

Chapter 1 ters speak within quotation marks but Véronica’s “replies” are exclusively given in free-direct or free-indirect discourse. Can this lack of direct intervention and engagement be thought of as an impotent silence on Véronica’s part, as a refusal of dialogism? (1996:175)

Another explanation for Véronica’s muted voice also lies in Condé’s recognition of her heroine as “une femme paumée” (13). Véronica presents the characteristics and the malaise of a female subject in a political and cultural system that is exclusively male-dominated, designed to maintain masculine interests. The lingering of gender issues and longstanding patriarchy are part of the cultural environment. We find the same pattern with regard to MarieHélène’s ordeal and lack of communication in Une saison à Rihata. She also has difficulties in articulating her reasons for being in Africa throughout the narrative. She finds herself fulfilling the role of the mother and the lover. She is the mother of five children to Zek her husband. Additionally, she bears another child as a result of a love affair with Madou her brother-in-law. Although she plots endlessly to escape her situation via an imagined return to Guadeloupe, she remains voiceless, psychologically and internally exiled. Her return to the continent is marred by unfulfilled desires, resentment and unhappiness As for Véronica, the distance between her and her African lover is irreconcilable due to cultural and socio-political factors. She realizes that, in spite of their common origin, Ibrahim Sory and she have different conceptions of life, love, and politics. Her disappointment shows when she realizes that the “glorious past” she is searching for through Ibrahim, a politician involved in political scams, murders, and corruption, is not so noble (240–41). The African father, to whom Véronica wants to return, rejects her. Since Ibrahim Sory cannot satisfy Véronica’s desire to find herself, she starts seeing him as a disappointing father figure: “Je n’ai trouvé qu’un homme avec aïeux qui les garde jalousement pour lui seul, qui ne songe pas à les partager avec moi” (193). As her attempts to salvage an identity through African nobility fails, Véronica realizes that she needs to see her world from another perspective. AMBIVALENT MOTHER The quest for origins and the African motherland, which characterizes the Négritude movement, is replaced in Heremakhonon by a frustrated quest for the father. But this failure has no closure. On the contrary, it opens into a new quest, that of origins in the Caribbean motherland. This occurs in Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove (1989), in which she depicts the return of a male character to the Caribbean motherland. The protagonist Francis Sancher comes to Guadeloupe with the hope of finding traces of his dead patriarch.

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

19

The village community in Rivière au Sel is fascinated by his presence because of his unknown origins. Francis Sancher refrains from giving any information about himself during his first encounter with Moïse, the local mailman (33). The protagonist’s double name Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez (apparently Spanish or French) and his foreign accent point to his strangeness in Rivière au Sel, where everyone speaks Creole. The novel opens with the discovery of Francis Sancher’s dead body in the woods. During the wake that takes place in a single night, the collective narrative voice of the village cannot put together the puzzle of his past. Each character, nineteen of them, who might have known Francis Sancher, occupies his or her own narrative space in a chapter in which he or she gives a different version of the protagonist’s story. The villagers’ script is unsatisfying and frustrating. The multiple narratives are so disconnected that at the end of the novel the reader, like the villagers, still does not know much about this traveler who searched for his roots, not in Africa (although he spent time there), but in Guadeloupe: “Devant ce bouleversement, des interrogations superstitieuses naissaient en leur esprit. Qui était-il en réalité cet homme qui avait choisi de mourir parmi eux?” (208). Francis Sancher is buried with his secret. The failure of the community to recover his story explains Condé’s intention to distance herself from the pervasive masculinist prescriptiveness found in Francophone Caribbean literature. In essence, Condé breaks with the continuity of the masculinist representation of the collectivity, shared by the Négritude and the Créolité movements. The veiled mystery surrounding Francis Sancher’s past points to Condé’s refusal of the discourse of origins. She portrays Véronica and Marie-Hélène, who, unable to recognize themselves as Caribbean, search for African roots and ancestors while Francis Sancher searches for his past in Guadeloupe, where he believes his béké ancestor (a white Créole) lived before. His quest for genealogy differs from Véronica’s and Marie-Hélène’s. Both of the female characters left the Caribbean to look for their African ancestors while Sancher, whose racial identity is difficult to guess, looks for his white ancestor in the Caribbean. Condé uses the figure of the mangrove with many roots as a metaphor for Francis Sancher’s fragmented genealogies. The image of the mangrove conforms to Glissant’s theory of “identité relationnelle,” an identity which has no fixed roots. But Condé further complicates it by making Francis Sancher’s project of returning to his roots a failure. When Vilma, one of his mistresses, learns about the Creole novel Traversée de la mangrove, which Francis Sancher is having difficulty writing, she exclaims: “On ne traverse pas la mangrove. On s’empale sur les racines des palétuviers. On s’enterre et on étouffe dans la boue saumâtre” (192). The symbol of the mangrove fails to provide Francis Sancher the liberation he is searching for in his Guadeloupean past, since he dies in the homeland “in the mud like a dog” (16). In her text Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonialism, critic Dawn Fulton argues that

20

Chapter 1

the author uses the theme of death to expose “the desire for transparency as an absurdly narcissist project” (59). Clinging to the nostalgic past is dangerous, as Condé warns. Quoting from her own novel Les derniers rois mages, she states: “Il ne faut pas vivre avec le passé mais le mettre à mort sinon c’est lui qui tue” [One should not get fixated with the past but get rid of it, otherwise it kills you] (Pfaff 139–40). Condé does not propose to make a tabula rasa of the past since it informs the present. She does, however, problematize the idea of looking for identity uniquely through the African or the Caribbean past. In rejecting an idealized past or a unique source of identity, Condé proposes to explore the quest for cultural identity from multiple perspectives. Her rewriting of the motifs of home and return gives new layers of meaning to her fiction. Home is represented as a suffocating environment from which one must flee in order to start one’s journey to self-discovery. Just like Césaire in his Cahier, almost every character in Traversée de la mangrove dreams of “un autre ailleurs” [another elsewhere.] Aristide, one of the narrators, who dislikes Francis Sancher because of his love affair with his halfsister Mira, expresses his anxious desire to leave Guadeloupe. His two brothers left before him to go to France to alleviate their economic hardships. The homeland is a fractured space for him. He dreams of putting a geographical distance between him and the island. Likewise, reflecting upon her first departure from Guadeloupe, Véronica confesses that her initial desire in fleeing the island was to put distance between herself and the whole community, including her parents. Leaving or returning home in Condé’s fiction, however, does not solve the Antillean identity crisis but, rather, complicates it. Véronica’s renewed departures and arrivals from France to Africa and back to Paris reflect her constant state of internal exile and the anxieties associated with her sense of rootlessness which lead her to errancy. In Traversée de la mangrove, Francis Sancher’s intensive travels also reveal his state of anxiety and his habit of drifting between shores. Like Véronica, he is internally and geographically exiled. Migration or geographical displacement is a characteristic of the Caribbean identitarian errancy. In Rivière au Sel, Francis Sancher meets Dominican and Haitian migrant workers living in Guadeloupe. The Caribbean population is descended from people belonging to different nations, cultures, and languages who migrated to the islands and other lands as well, such as Europe, America, Asia, etc. To stress the multiple cultural aspects and diverse ethnicities of Guadeloupe, Traversée de la mangrove also portrays descendants of East Asian and Chinese indentured workers who came to the island after 1848, following the abolition of slavery. Francis Sancher embodies the complexities of the Caribbean cultural and racial identity. The reader registers the

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

21

hybrid nature of his identity through his portrayal as a descendent of a béké ancestor (a white Creole) and presumably a Hispanophone speaking little Creole with a Spanish accent. For Condé, homecoming is a complicated affair. Through the movingly told tales of nineteen characters, Traversée de la mangrove displays the difficulty of anchoring oneself in the Creole world. Despite Francis Sancher’s minimal efforts to integrate himself into the community of Rivière au sel, he remains an outsider. Although apparently rich, he is treated more or less like the Dominicans and the Haitians, whom the peasant community dislikes for fear of losing their jobs to them: “Les gens de Rivière au Sel détestent les étrangers” (212). Sancher’s presence and death in the narrative reveal Rivière au Sel as a divisive, sequestered, and closed-minded community. With the portrayal of Francis, an inaccessible male character who barely speaks Creole, Condé seems to underline an internal problem of communication within the Diaspora. Sancher drops bits and pieces of stories about his life, but does not say much about his past. When pressed by the villagers to talk about his stay in Cuba, he flatly refuses, stipulating that there are no affinities between him and them. He assumes that they are incapable of understanding the kind of stories that would make them think critically about their world. In her essay, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Condé reminds us that “the dream of a united black world was shattered” (1993:125) because of the false promises of the independence era, and that it is relevant to represent the realities of this world. For instance, she models Traversée de la mangrove on Jacques Roumain’s novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (1946), which is considered the ultimate novel about the return to the Caribbean motherland. In contrast to Manuel, Roumain’s protagonist, cast as a “messianic” hero who comes back from Cuba to his Haitian village to save his community, Condé portrays Francis Sancher as an anti-hero and outcast. Compared to Manuel, Francis Sancher fails miserably in his attempt to leave behind any long-lasting legacy. He is criticized by the villagers for his lack of paternal responsibilities and refusal to integrate himself fully into the community. It is no mere coincidence that his unsuccessful search for genealogy runs parallel to his failure to write his novel, Traversée de la mangrove. He admits being “senile” (221) for his lack of success in producing an artistic oeuvre that he so desires. The unfinished novel is a “mise en abyme” of his unsettling situation. Sancher faces two failures: the unsuccessful search of his origins and his inability to forge his identity as a writer. In the scheme of identity quest, Africa the ancestral motherland is not represented as a significant presence in Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove. Francis Sancher has visited the continent in his extensive travels. One of the narrators at Francis’ wake observes that Guadeloupeans have other destinations besides Africa (112). Africa is not central to the characters’ preoccupation. The search for genealogy is shifted from the obsession with a mother-

22

Chapter 1

land/fatherland of Africa to the Caribbean as mother/homeland. Francis’ purpose in returning to Guadeloupe is to establish a lost connection with the native land just like the Cesairian hero. For him, Guadeloupe is the land where he wishes to die in peace, not Africa the motherland, where old Médouze (a descendant of slaves working in the sugarcane plantations in Martinique) dreams of returning after his death in Joseph Zobel’s La rue casenègres (1950). In her representation of the physical or metaphorical return to Guadeloupe, Condé stresses the role of the neglected mother in the process of identity reconstruction. The portrayal of geographical spaces (motherland and fatherland) as members of a metaphorical family significant for one’s identity is perceptible in Heremakhonon. As we know, Véronica initially identifies with male figures. But as her quest for the father becomes unimportant, she gives the impression of distancing herself from the masculine figure in favor of female ones in order to imagine her return to Guadeloupe: Je commence à comprendre mon erreur. Si je voulais faire la paix avec moi, c’est-à-dire avec eux, c’est-à-dire avec nous, c’est chez moi que je devais retourner dans ma poussière d’îles (dixit le général) ballotée aux quatres coins de l’océan par Betsy, Flora et autres femelles.(110)

The question is: to what kind of Caribbean motherland can Véronica return? In her fiction, Condé elaborates a system of allegory that reevaluates the portrayal of the African-Caribbean family. This construction displays the functional and dysfunctional relationships at work in it. As this process unfolds, frictions within the family become apparent. Tensions between family, society, and how they affect identity in Heremakhonon point to the family as the place where unhappy identity is initially formed. In the context of fictional representation, the novel breaks with the utopian view of a homogeneous Black world, and with the conventions of Caribbean society, according to which physical and psychological abuses are rarely exposed. It is taboo to talk about such social problems. The silence sourrounding this kind of situation gives the community the appearance of a united family. These social issues, however, are clearly played out in Condé’s fiction. The author criticizes the Caribbean male’s irresponsibility toward his family, recognizing that it is partly due to the old plantation system, which robbed him of his manhood and denied him the agency that could have reinforced his sense of responsibility. Simone Schwarz-Bart also illustrates the same social problem in Pluie et Vent sur Telumée Miracle (1972). Lacking male support, Schwarz-Bartian female characters show resilience when they find themselves facing economic, social, and cultural upheavals. According to Véronica in Héremakhonon, the assertiveness of some Caribbean women is due to men’s absence and lack of responsibility in the families

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

23

(101). In the narrative, Condé also stresses another kind of illegitimacy, different from the one imagined by Véronica in her search for noble genealogy. This is a social problem illustrated in Traversée de la mangrove and other Caribbean novels, whereby many male characters refuse their paternal responsibilities while fathering illegitimate children. The fatherless children are stigmatized and marginalized in Caribbean societies. They become the sole responsibilities of the mothers, who must assume the difficult task of raising them. In regard to Francis Sancher’s irresponsible behavior, the villagers recall with contempt that he never cared for the numerous children he fathered. (187) While she criticizes the lack of male responsibility within the family, Condé also questions the myth of the nurturing or sacrificial Caribbean mother or grandmother popular in literature; for example, in Joseph Zobel’s La rue case-nègres (1950). She represents the dark side of the Caribbean mother throughout her fiction. The revisited Caribbean mother is portrayed as abusive or indifferent in Heremakhonon (1976), Une saison à Rihata (1981), Moi Tituba . . . Sorcière . . . Noire (1986), Le Coeur à rire ou à pleurer: Contes vrais de mon enfance (1999). In Traversée de la mangrove, Francis Sancher, who avoids talking about the mystery surrounding his “life,” confesses to an inhabitant in Rivière au Sel his mother’s inability to love him (138). His statement about his lack of maternal love echoes Véronica’s, and, like her, he has not seen his mother for a long time. Loulou Lameaulnes, another character in Traversée de la mangrove, is puzzled by his mother’s indifference and tries to find a justification that would satisfy him (123). In Desirada (1997), another of Condé’s novels, the protagonist Marie Noëlle is alienated by her mother’s abandonment and lack of love (128). Marie-Hélène, who regrets not loving her mother before she dies, does not have a good relationship with her daughters. She does not show any affection to her last daughter whose birth reminds her of her illicit affair with her brother-in-law Madou (Rihata 167). There is no affection between mothers and daughters. Their relationship is destabilized from the start in Condé’s fiction, as critic Kathleen Gyssels points out in her theoretical text Sages Sorcières?: “La matriarche noire, icône de soumission et de dévotion, cède la place à cette figure redoutable qu’est la mauvaise mère” [The black matriarch, an iconic figure of submission and devotion is replaced by this image of the bad mother] (xiii). The archetypal grandmother is also subject to demystification in Condé’s fiction. She is not the head of the Caribbean matriarchal household depicted in Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), in which the heroic character, “Reine Sans Nom,” replaces the absent biological mother and/or the absent father in times of crisis. It is important to note that Condé’s portrayal of abusive or indifferent mothers is also inspired by real-life situations. In an interview 21 I conducted with her, she stated how surprised she was to discover the discrepancies that

24

Chapter 1

exist between real life and the myth of the nurturing Caribbean mother. She told me about known cases of abusive mothers in Guadeloupe, where some women would give away their female children to their male partners to be raped in order to keep them. She quickly assured me that she does not want to make generalizations and that there are certainly conscientious, caring, and devoted mothers. She also noticed that the Antillean woman is like any other woman. If she is not guaranteed a number of things, she could turn out to be a thoughtless and uncaring mother. Other Caribbean writers, such as Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid, have explored the complex and unresolved relations between mothers and daughters, and between motherlands (and sometimes métropoles) and daughters of the land as well. 22 Both Heremakhonon and Une saison à Rihata succinctly explore the negative mother-daughter relationship, a recurrent theme in Condé’s fiction. In the narrative, Véronica constantly refers to her own childhood experience to understand her present condition. Why is she so alienated? Marie-Hélène feels guilty for not loving her mother who died of resignation and unhappiness. Marie-Hélène, in turn does not love her daughters either. She resembles more or less many Condéan female characters that are unable to show love to their children. Here I must state that I am mostly interested in exploring Véronica’s childhood, and I will use psychoanalytic theory to assess what the bad mother-daughter theme reveals about her relationship with the Caribbean culture and her motherland. Furthermore, Africa, the absent father, seems similar to the Caribbean father, who fails to provide her with a sense of identity. Melanie Klein’s theory of object relations, “a post-Freudian division (or school) of psychoanalysis, centers on the infantile stage of psychosexual development, which Freud has already labeled the pre-Oedipal stage” (Tate 194). Unlike Freud, who focuses on the Oedipal stage (in which the child identifies with the father), Klein ignores the role of the father in her theory and proposes instead that the child identifies first with the mother. In Heremakhonon, the protagonist dreams of returning to the mother, as the identification with the father proves impossible. Equating the image of the mother with Guadeloupe, Véronica desires to go back symbolically to her mother’s womb (141). She perceives Guadeloupe as the uterine milieu where she could possibly recover an otherwise lost plenitude. She also imagines it as a psychological and initial rebirth that might provide her with some comfort and help her to solve her ontological crisis. Likewise, Marie-Hélene equates the mother with the island. She fantasizes about the uterine space as a distant symbolic place of comfort: “Retourner à la Guadeloupe ne signifiait guère . . . que retourner vers sa mère. L’île et la mère étaient la même chose, utérus clos dans lequel blottir sa souffrance, yeux fermés, apaisé par la pulsation du sang” (Rihata, 77).

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

25

Condé constructs the maternal womb as a metaphor for comfort and protection for the Caribbean character dealing with an ontological crisis. As they wander in the world, her displaced characters tentatively look back for comfort to their birthplace (les lieux de la mère [mother’s spaces]). In Heremakhonon, every time Véronica faces a social or psychological obstacle during her stay in Africa, she resorts to the mother’s womb as a protective space against the external world. Her desire to take refuge inside the mother’s womb is also indicative of her fear of recognizing that her quest in Africa is in vain and her presence an oddity. Frustrated with her elusive lover and the harsh face of the African society into which she has been thrust, Véronica expresses nostalgia for the Caribbean motherland (the geographical entity) she left behind. She fantasizes about Guadeloupe and goes as far as casting doubt on her whole project of searching for genealogy in Africa. As stated before, Véronica associates her experience in geographical spaces with members of the family (Africa the father, Guadeloupe the mother). Klein’s theory helps us to understand how, just as the child sees the breast as her mother, Véronica experiences the part (her mother) as the whole (Guadeloupe). It also helps us to understand how ambivalence towards the motherland generates in Véronica both the desire to leave it for a more satisfying object (the fatherland) and the desire to return metaphorically to it, once she is able to acknowledge and appreciate fragmented genealogies. From a psychological point of view, the infant, animated by inner oral instincts from birth, identifies the mother with the breast, which he or she sucks and bites. Sometimes gratifying, sometimes frustrating, the breast generates ambivalent feelings in the child, who develops “impulses to destroy the very person who is the object of all his [or her] desires and who in his [or her] mind is linked up with everything he [or she] experiences—good and bad alike” (Klein, Love 58). The depth of Véronica’s psychological difficulties regarding her family is perceptible throughout the narrative. Her plight started at the time of her birth, when she was subjected to a kind of cultural terror, and was already perceived as inadequate because of her gender. Born on a day of carnival 23 with the sounds of drums and loud music, her mother delivered her amidst the noises coming from outside the house: “Moi je poussais mon premier cri de terreur et de révolte. Ils n’étaient pas très contents. Ils avaient souhaité un garçon” (38). The parents’ rejection of her subsists throughout her childhood. Her mother, a distant and vain woman, does not show any affection towards her. Like Condé’s other characters, Véronica suffers from her mother’s indifference: “Ma mère, j’imagine, a le visage ridé. Elle ne m’a jamais beaucoup aimée. Qu’importe, c’est ma mère” (38). An enigmatic presence, strong and weak at the same time, the mother favors the idea of faking weakness as a sign of femininity. Véronica comes to understand that the higher the social milieu, the more women like her mother pretend to be the

26

Chapter 1

weaker sex. She notices that the wife of certain “Dr. Carzavel” goes from bedrest to church services as her daily activities (101). For Véronica, this strategy of feigning weakness is part of several other aspects of the Caribbean female role model she dislikes and rejects. Paradoxically, however, she imitates her mother and plays the role of the “weaker sex” in her relationship with Ibrahim Sory, who represents for her a father figure. Unhealthy family relationships hurt the heroine’s sense of self and cause Véronica to develop an inferiority complex since her childhood. She is painfully aware that her parents’ preference, for her two sisters because of their light skin, psychologically damages her self-esteem. She realizes that she can only challenge their prejudice by adopting a rebellious attitude and rejecting their bourgeois values (48). Her sisters, Aida and Jada, who do not support her, do not love her either. Affected by a Cinderella syndrome, she feels hated by everyone in the family, taking comfort only in the love of Mabo Julie, her nanny, a warm and caring substitute for her biological mother. She recalls good memories of her childhood with this nanny. She fell in love with the mulatto boy the year Mabo Julie died. (64). The sixteenth year of her life marks her with death, love and her first break from her social milieu. Her parents send her into exile in France when they find out about her first love affair with the mulatto boy. Deprived of the two people who love her, Véronica becomes more alienated and frustrated. Condé’s protagonists display frustrations because of their strained relationships with their family and their home spaces. Véronica wants to disassociate herself from her parents and from the surrounding society. She expresses strong feeling of hatred towards them because they instill in her a sense of shame and an inferiority complex. Her arrival at the airport in the unnamed African country prompts her to recall her first departure from home to Paris. She realizes that the conflicts and misunderstandings between them started from childbirth up to the age of sixteen when they forced her to leave the island. The psychological and spatial distance between her and her parents is emphasized by their lack of communication and the length of time (nine years) that separates her from them. Death, abandonment, or rejection by the parents of Condé’s protagonists leads them to a nightmarish quest for identity, happiness, and peace. Their constant departures and arrivals are indications of their need for a welcome “home” and another “family.” Unable to find love or happiness within her own family in Guadeloupe, Véronica leaves with hopes of finding it in an “imagined” community in Africa. Condé’s explanation of the title of her first novel, Heremakhonon. En attendant le bonheur, is symbolically significant in terms of Véronica’s failure to find identity and happiness. “Heremakhonon” means “while waiting for happiness” (4). “Heremakhonon” is also the name of Ibrahim Sory’s villa, which means “Welcome House.” It is where Véronica goes to take refuge from the noises of the city or to avoid the political turmoil that disturbs the life of the

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

27

people. Ironically, Véronica does not reach the happiness she is looking for in that community. Many of Condé’s characters, from Christophe, MarieHélène’s nephew in Une Saison à Rihata (1981), to Francis Sancher in Traversée de la mangrove (1989), pursue similar goals of finding another community or a family during their journey. For instance, Francis Sancher, who travels and works in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Africa, and South America, finally ends up in Guadeloupe in search of a place where he can die in peace. The narrative comes full circle because Francis Sancher is believed to have his origins in Guadeloupe. As for Véronica, her tense relationship with Guadeloupe affects her negatively and is similar to the one she has with her mother. Véronica’s mother becomes a metaphor for the motherland. Both the biological mother and the land symbolize cultural alienation for Véronica. Guadeloupe, like the rest of the DOM [départements d’outre-mer], “est marquée, en son commencement par la grande illusion de l’assimilation idéale” [Guadeloupe is marked since the beginning by the grand illusion of ideal assimilation]. 24 Véronica, who opposes her mother’s assimilationist ideas, attempts to distance herself from her as well from the island. The mother as the primary caregiver becomes thus the inaccessible object to whom the heroine directs her anger for being what Melanie Klein calls the malevolent breast” (23), the internalized image of the bad mother. Véronica expresses irritation with her mother: “Ma mère ne m’a jamais beaucoup impressionnée. Elle n’était que le reflet de l’astre paternel” (48). This metaphor of “a moon around the paternal planet” is a perfect illustration of the consequences of a masculine economy in which the feminine is devalued, or valued only in relation to the male. Woman-woman relations (starting with the mother/daughter) are problematic. Véronica equally hates her maternal grandmother. When she goes on family vacations she refuses to get close to her grandmother and imagines killing her in a dream (183). The compulsive hatred of the maternal object explains Véronica’s desertion of Guadeloupe the motherland. Referring to the work of social feminists Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and Jean Baker Miller, Jane Bryce-Okunlola supports the idea that the motherdaughter bond is essential in “relational contexts” and that connectedness, rather than separation, fosters female maturity and identity (1992:220). Véronica’s instability and ontological crisis are reinforced by her lack of connection to her mother and her motherland. Furthermore, Véronica’s desperate quest to find love and identity in Africa is also caused by her lack of spiritual connection to France, which considered “la mère patrie” [the motherland]. France is officially the motherland of many French Caribbeans, specifically the citizens from DOM (the French Overseas Departments) who remain in an ambiguous political, economic, and cultural situation, as if they were on welfare. Although Véronica appreciates and knows the French culture well, she “does not identify France as the

28

Chapter 1

home of the ideal other.” 25 France is a distant “mère patrie” that has given French status to Guadeloupeans since 1946, but treats them as second-class citizens who complain about being economically, culturally, and politically dependent. France and Guadeloupe have strained relations since various nationalists movements from the island fail every time to gain political autonomy from the mother nation. A Freudian reading suggests the need for Véronica to revisit or re-experience the repressed material in order to work through it. In Literature and Psychoanalysis, Peter Brooks states that “repetition is a return in a text, a doubling back: a return to origins or a return of the repressed” (50). There is a pattern of returns throughout the narrative, which illustrates the depth of Véronica’s neurosis associated with her childhood experiences. Véronica is unable to get rid of the specter of her family. Her psychological demons, whom she labels “la meute familiale” [familial pack], follow her around. In addition to her repressed childhood, she finds in Africa what she desperately wants to escape on her island: class problems, social injustice, poverty, political and gender oppression. Even her family’s lifestyle and that of Ibrahim Sory are similar. Véronica is shocked to discover the images of her hated childhood within Ibrahim Sory’s family. She becomes literally sick upon discovering in Ibrahim’s sister’s villa the same French furnishings and home decorations her family back home prefers (115). Like her family, they have bourgeois pretensions, import post–French Revolution (Directoire style) furniture from France, and send their children to expensive boarding schools in Europe. She realizes that the Africans she thought were uncontaminated by Europe are as alienated and assimilated as her own parents. All her senses are alerted when she finds herself in this uncanny familiar environment that she tried to escape back home in Guadeloupe. The sound of classical piano, the smell of gladioli flowers, the colors of the satin-stitch curtains cause her to recall more repressed childhood memories and thus make her feel nauseated (116). Her childhood, which is an abject memory to her, weighs heavily on her adult life. Condé uses the term “indigestion” to depict Véronica’s traumatic childhood experience (81). Feeling trapped she remains a prisoner who has difficulties escaping from her psychological confinement. Previous disappointments, associated with the return to African shores, force Véronica to look back toward the Caribbean, and to imagine her return “vers la hideur désertée de [ses] plaies” [looking at the deep wounds] (Cahier du retour au pays natal 22) in order to face the mother. In the end Véronica comes to terms with everything she hates in her motherland in order to find some solution in a psychological sense. However, she displays the same love-hate relationship for the Caribbean that she had developed for Africa. When she needs comfort, she experiences Guadeloupe as the good Caribbean motherland, which she imagines as a uterine safe place. On the other hand, she entertains an adversarial relationship with the Caribbean

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

29

motherland for its perpetuation of colonial values, such as a preference for light skin color. The mother in particular contributes to the alienation of her offspring. Véronica stops splitting the image of Caribbean motherland between good and bad when she recognizes its ambivalent nature and identifies with it (134). She is, however, a rebellious daughter who refuses to conform to the middle-class family values she denounces. Her father calls her a whore and a leftist intellectual because she rejects her family’s aspiration to gain higher social status and privileges. She describes her sisters as “good daughters” and recalls with sarcasm her family’s bourgeois obsession into marrying into high-class society where one sister marries a doctor and the other one a lawyer (23). Does Véronica’s denunciation of internal contradictions in Caribbean society constitute an example of political engagement? Her family’s insistence on its bourgeois values and racial pride exasperates her to the point of nausea. I conclude that Véronica indicts herself in her denunciation of her motherland racial neurosis because she is, after all, a product of it, and her real desire in going to Africa is to look for another kind of racial nobility. Unable to negotiate the different elements that constitute her complex heritage, she has difficulties in valuing her racial and cultural identity. COLOR NEUROSIS Véronica’s conflicts are due to her inferiority complex in regard to race and skin color. This is a common issue faced by other characters in Condé’s fiction. Véronica goes to Africa because, as a daughter of descendants of slaves, she considers herself illegitimate, and imagines Africa as the land of salvation. Her racial neurosis originates in Guadeloupe, where she is the victim of internalized racism, a vestige of colonialism. In Heremakhonon and Traversée de la mangrove, Condé shows how class and skin color stratify the native island and other societies in the Caribbean. Pigmentocracy, which plagues Guadeloupe, is the major cause of racial prejudice and separatism. “Light” pigmentation and “good hair” continue to be overvalued as in the old plantation system. Véronica states that the French prefer the Martinican women because they have lighter skin and are allegedly more beautiful (20). As a result of that, these women benefit from social advancement and increased socio-economic status. Light skin color preference creates a constant malaise within the community of Rivière au Sel in Traversée de la mangrove, as well as in Véronica’s social milieu. 26 Véronica’s mother shows preference for her other two daughters, who have lighter skin. Her shame stems from her family’s apparent inferiority when compared to the exclusive social circle of mulattos. She discovers that her parents suffer from internalized racism despite their apparent adoption of the discourse of Négritude,

30

Chapter 1

which had revalorized blackness. Feeling ashamed of their color despite their wealth and education, her parents desperately want to imitate the mulatto class, whose light skin color is highly valued in the Caribbean. At the age of eight, Véronica becomes aware of the inferiority complex she inherited from her family and wants desperately to resemble a girl with light skin and curly hair. Later, she became painfully aware of her parents’ hypocrisy when they forbid her relationship with a mulatto boy while they secretly want to emulate the mulatto class. Class and race issues simmer in Heremakhonon. The class and race context of the narrative articulate the racial boundaries and racism in the Guadeloupean community. The mulatto class, exhibiting negrophobia and a sense of superiority, does not mix socially with the black bourgeoisie class. They live in separate spheres. Marriage or romantic relationship is prohibited between them. We recall that Véronica’s parents send her to Paris because they do not approve her love affair with a mulatto boy. A high level of animosity exists between the two groups as it is examined in Heremakhonon. Condé criticizes the persistent manifestation of a colonial mind and the island’s class divisions along color lines. She tells Françoise Pfaff about her own family’s racial prejudice in Guadeloupe: Mes parents ne voulaient fréquenter personne que des Noirs. Ils étaient racistes à leur façon. Je l’ai dit, les mulâtres pour eux, c’étaient des bâtards; les Blancs, c’étaient des ennemis. Les autres nègres qui n’avaient pas “réussi” c’étaient des ratés. Donc, ils ne fréquentaient que des Noirs, et encore, un petit groupe de Noirs.” [My parents only had relationships with blacks. For them, the mulattos were bastards and the whites the enemies. The other negroes who did not succeed were outcasts. So, they only had relationships with a selected class of blacks.] (14)

As Condé notes, her parents maintained an explicit distinction between two social categories of Guadeloupeans (Noirs and nègres) [blacks and negroes], and despised the latter. Class division as well as color line division greatly contribute to the inferiority complex of the people and exacerbate social problems in the Caribbean. The same racial antagonisms, which Condé experienced as a child on the island, are well represented in Heremakhonon. Like Condé’s parents, Véronica also maintains her own distinction between Noirs and nègres and expresses her desire for racial pride, but of another type: “Je suis venue chercher une terre non peuplée de nègres—même, ah, surtout pas spirituals—mais de Noirs” (89). For Véronica, the Guadeloupeans, including herself, remain les nègres, Negroes (illegitimate or branded children of Africa), whereas the Africans are les Noirs (free Blacks, not branded). She only associates with men who project a sense of freedom, either through their bold attitude, or their social functions. For her, freedom is linked to the idea of African

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

31

nobility (the antithesis of slavery) or maleness. No “average” Guadeloupean man (or Black) is good enough for Véronica, who declares that she can only love men who are free (63). In her standard of freedom, her three lovers (a mulatto, a white, and a Black African) represent three faces of “a free man,” because either of their skin color or their social status. Her first lover, JeanMarie, comes from the privileged mulatto class; Jean-Michel, the Frenchman, is automatically granted social privileges because of his whiteness; Ibrahim Sory, who comes from a rich and aristocratic African family, occupies a high rank in the government. Interestingly, all three men represent the main ethnic components of the Caribbean: white, mulatto, and black. However, Véronica’s access to them is barred by her own prejudice and by the gaze of others. The gaze, 27 to which the female colonized subject is often exposed, takes another dimension in Heremakhonon. Véronica becomes victim of the gaze of her own people, who remind her that she steps outside of her class and race in her choice of romantic relationships. Guadeloupeans join her parents in their disapproval of her love affair with the mulatto man because of his skin color. In Paris, the African street cleaner’s gaze upon her and her white French lover disturbs her and reminds her of a “racial misalliance.” She constantly dreams of the African street cleaner, the antithesis of Jean-Michel, the white Frenchman. Haunted by judgmental gazes and her sense of illegitimacy, Véronica seeks approval from her parents and her milieu by projecting her salvation through a return to her roots in Africa. Instead of finding emotional connection and legitimacy there, she realizes that her situation is part of what critic Homi Bhabha calls “the unhomely condition of the modern world.” 28 In fact, Véronica returns not to Guadeloupe, her motherland, but to Paris, her point of departure. She does not totally subscribe to Glissant’s Antillanité, “une prise en compte de la terre nouvelle” [a conscious awareness of the new land] (32). For Glissant, the Caribbean is the new land, where people of different races, cultures, languages, and customs clash and mix to create a complex society. While Heremakhonon questions the validity of the return, it also demonstrates that it is an opportunity for Véronica to discover who she is. As a woman, she finds that self-respect is crucial to her own survival, and makes the decision to free herself from the dominant paternalism that she voluntarily submits to at the beginning of her quest. Additionally, she dismisses Négritude’s fixation with a pure source of origins and becomes aware of her fragmented genealogies, a condition of her post-colonial identity. Upon leaving Africa, Véronica appears to be more confident than before. Freedom of self lies in acknowledging and owning one’s cultural legacy and identity. She gladly anticipates the frenzy of her life back in Paris. At the end of the narrative, Véronica hints to the reader that she will take up the pen to tell her story and no longer remain voiceless: “Un jour, je dois briser le silence. Il

32

Chapter 1

faut que j’explique”(165). This reflection suggests that Véronica finds her own voice and identity as a writer. Condé inscribes the act of writing in narratives such as Traversée de la mangrove, in which Francis Sancher attempts to write a novel with the same name. At the end of La vie scélérate (1987), the protagonist decides to write her family’s story. The portrayal of the novelist in these narratives points to Condé’s own reflection on the act of writing. THE PERSONAL BECOMES THE POLITICAL Condé’s personal preoccupations with social, political, and cultural issues are reflected throughout her writing. It was her discovery of Négritude and Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in Paris in the 1950s that shaped her desire to redefine her own identity. Contrary to her national identity as French, she discovered that she was not French, like most Antilleans from the DOM assume they are. Critic Richard Burton observes: “Social, political, economic and cultural advance were held to depend on denial of difference: one became French to the precise extent that one abjured West Indian-ness or, to put it differently, the identification with the Other [France]” (1995:3). As her newfound self unfolded, Condé went on a long journey to Africa to discover herself as a West Indian and as a writer. She says: “I shall simply say that Africa helped me to discover that I am not African. I am West Indian and I belong to the West Indies. . . . Now, it seems to me Africa helped me to see exactly who I am.” 29 She strongly opposes Négritude’s ideology by rejecting the myth of origins and acknowledging her West Indian identity. She further blames the movement for misleading Antilleans and African Americans into believing naively in a happy return to Africa: Les partisans de la Négritude ont fait une grave erreur et ont causé beaucoup de torts aux Antillais aussi bien qu’aux Américains noirs. Nous avons été amenés à croire que l’Afrique était la source. C’est la source mais nous avons cru que nous trouverions une patrie alors que ce n’est pas une patrie. Sans la Négritude, nous n’aurions pas subi un tel degré de désillusionnement. [The supporters of Negritude made a terrible mistake and caused Antilleans as well as African Americans to suffer immensely. We were led to believe that Africa was the source. It is the source but we believed that we would find a fatherland but it is not. Without Negritude, we would not have experienced such a deep feeling of disappointment.] 30

Condé’s migratory and political experiences have greatly impacted her fiction. 31 She was briefly involved in politics in Guadeloupe, where she ran for office. The fictional reworking of her experience in Guadeloupe, Paris, and in various African countries in Heremakhonon, Une saison à Rihata, and

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

33

of her symbolic return to Guadeloupe in Traversée de la mangrove, underscores the issue of diasporic identities and exile. These narratives describe the difficult itinerary of her protagonists’ search for their identity through a return to Africa and/or au pays natal [the native land]. In doing so, they point to the author’s own migratory journey. As Irène Assiba d’Almeida remarks, many women writers have taken the risks of telling their personal stories in order to make their voices heard, and to vent their frustration with a political system that affects their everyday lives. Condé’s fiction displays women characters who are dissatisfied with their situations and living conditions. Condé highlights a literary tradition in which the personal feeds the political. As critic Célia Britton points out: “Caribbean literature is inescapably political, and that is a collective practice” (1999:136). Most of Condé’s novels have recurrent themes—the quest for identity, the reconstruction of history, and gender relations—to which she attributes political significance. Her portrayals of political and social situations reveal her political consciousness and engagement through fiction. Reflecting on her political involvement in writing, Condé states: “After all, the people who taught me how to write, who gave me the desire to become a writer were politically motivated. They were saying something in the defense of our people, to raise their consciousness, to make people in the world know how unhappy and oppressed they are. The legacies and the lesson—you cannot forget that.” 32 The reader familiar with Condé’s fiction notices the author’s political awareness in her first novel, Heremakhonon. Critics came to appreciate the complex and political aspects of the novel, although it was “originally attacked as politically suspect.” 33 Apparently, Condé was inspired to write Heremakhonon after witnessing some of her African acquaintances being sent to jail or exile. 34 In Une saison à Rhiata, she describes almost a similar political corrupt regime that oppresses the people. Within a decade after publishing Heremakhonon (1976), in which she sketches out the identity quest through a return to Africa, Condé wrote plays, essays, and many other novels, including La vie scélérate (1987). This novel, the first one set in Guadeloupe, signals her own “retour au pays natal” [return to the native land] after thirty-three years: “Il fallait que je fasse ces voyages, il fallait que j’éteigne en moi le désir d’ailleurs pour réaliser, enfin que je ne pouvais trouver mon identité que chez moi” [I had to take all these trips in order to kill in me the desire for an elsewhere and to finally realize that I could only find my identity in my homeland]. 35 Does the assurance of finding one’s identity lead to a happy reconnection with one’s native land? Condé further explores the idea of returning to Guadeloupe with the publication of her next novel, Traversée de la mangrove (1989). Also set in Guadeloupe, the narrative takes into account the importance of the native land and oral culture. Francis Sancher’s wake is an occasion for celebrating Creole culture in Traversée de la mangrove. Cyrille, the typical male storyteller, which

34

Chapter 1

Patrick Chamoiseau considers to be the Caribbean’s “first literary figure” (1991:391), plays an important role in Traversée de la mangrove, but he does not control the narrative. He contributes, like all the other eighteen narrators, telling bits of Francis Sancher’s past. Condé reunites these scattered voices around Francis Sancher’s wake to emphasize the various ways storytelling is performed in Creole culture. Jeannie Suk contests the idea of Traversée de la mangrove as a celebratory Creole novel and suggests that “it challenges the very possibility of representing the Caribbean multiplicity and diversity to which créolité lays claim” (155). Condé presents a bleak portrait of Rivière au Sel. Caught in racial antagonisms, class hierarchies, and political stagnation, the community is divided and conveys a sense of powerlessness, alienation, and isolation. The lack of cultural production in the community is also exposed. Lucien Evariste, a presumed writer, does not write anything, and Emile Evarius (known as a historian) does not publish any history texts. The difficulty of rewriting history or the issue of historical continuity in the Caribbean is very much explored in Condé’s and Glissant’s works. As for Francis Sancher, the main protagonist, he does not finish his novel Traversée de la mangrove. Suspicious of his occupation, the community even questions his role as a writer. The villagers conclude that a writer is someone who does not really do any substantial work. Condé points out the lack of support for literary culture in the island. In portraying Francis Sancher as a Caribbean writer, Condé reflects on herself and demonstrates that there is a distance between a writer and the community, whose preoccupation focuses on means of survival. The writer and the community live in two separate worlds and do not necessarily share the same social and cultural values. Condé understands that the writer may be socially and politically conscious, but her role is limited in the sense that she cannot solve social or political problems. In a thoughtful article, she states: L’écrivain n’est pas un théoricien social. L’écrivain n’est pas un homme politique. . . . Je pense que dans son écriture, dans son oeuvre littéraire, l’écrivain intègre un certain nombre de dénonciations ou de revendications, mais ce ne doit jamais être le but primordial de son écriture. . . . Le but de l’œuvre c’est de restituer la vie. [The writer is not a social theorist. The writer is not a politician. I think that the writer weaves some denunciations or claims into her work, but that should not be the primary purpose of her writing. The purpose of writing is to represent life.] 36

Although Condé cautions against romanticizing political ideologies, she uses her voice to criticize, question, and subvert the established order of things in her fictional representation of patriarchal societies. She is an iconic figure who embodies empowerment, engagement, and political agency. Her voice stands against all forms of oppression. Condé’s primary concern is to

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

35

write, although she is aware that writing alone cannot radically change the course of social or political events. For her, the role of the writer is to represent the realities surrounding her. Her portrayal of the return to Africa in Heremakhonon and Une saison à Rihata and the return to Guadeloupe in Traversée de la mangrove contests Négritude’s ideology regarding the question of home and belonging, while suggesting that Antillean identity cannot construct a simple concrete space for itself. Therefore, for Condé, Antillean identity could move in between spaces—in other words, in errancy. NOTES 1. Carole Boyce Davies, preface, “Talking It Over: Women, Writing and Feminism,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994), xi. 2. Sam Haig, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women Writings of Guadeloupe (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2000), 75. 3. Bohmer also notes that exiled Somalian writer Nurrudin Farrah, who spent some time in exile, objects, in his nostalgia for his African nation, to calling Africa a father. 4. Marie-Clothilde Jacquey et Monique Hugon, “L’Afrique, un continent difficile,” Notre Librarie 74 (April–June 1984): 23. 5. See Lylian Kesteloot, “Maryse Condé, Négritude outsider,” Notre Librairie 111 (January–March 1992): 139. 6. Maryse Condé, “Panafricanism, Feminism, and Culture,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, ed. Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley (New York: Verso, 1994), 55–56. 7. Francoise Pfaff, Conversations with Maryse Condé (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 131. 8. Gérard Meudal, “Maryse Condé l’inconvenante,” Le Monde (10 Nov. 2000), 15. 9. Romuald Fonkoua, “Ecritures romanesques féminines,” Notre Librairie 117/118 (July– September 1994): 112–25. 10. Jonathan Ngate, “Maryse Condé and Africa: The Making of Recalcitrant Daughter?” A Current Bibliography of African Affairs 19 (1986–1987): 5–20. 11. Gérard Meudal, “Maryse Condé l’inconvenante,” Le Monde (10 Nov. 2000), 15. Madeleine Cottentot-Hage and Lydie Moudileno, eds., Maryse Condé. Une nomade inconvenante (Paris: Ibis Rouge Editions, 2002); Noëlle Carruggi, ed., Maryse Condé. Rébellion et transgression (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 12. Other Condé novels contain mother imagery: Une saison à Rihata (1981); Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . Noire (1986); Traversée de la mangrove (1989); Les derniers rois mages (1992); La migration des cœurs (1996); Desirada (1997); Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006). 13. Condé refers to Africa as a female entity: “Je n’ai jamais commis l’erreur de penser que l’Afrique était ma terre natale. J’aurais aimé que l’Afrique devienne une mère adoptive, mais elle ne peut être une mère naturelle” [I never committed the mistake in thinking that Africa is my native land. I would have liked her to be an adoptive mother, but she cannot be a natural mother]. Marie Clothilde Jacquey and Monique Hugon, “L’Afrique un continent difficile: Entretien avec Maryse Condé,” Notre Librairie 74 (1984): 31–37. 14. For an understanding of this debate, see Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 15. 1. Womanist: From womanish (opp. of “girlish,” i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious). A black feminist or feminist of color. From the colloquial expression of mothers to daughters, “You’re acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is

36

Chapter 1

considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown-up. Being grown-up. Interchangeable with other colloquial expression: “You’re trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. 2. Also: Herstorically capable, as in “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.” Alice Walker, In search of our mother’s garden: womanist prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace 1983). 16. The idea is that non-Western women writers or critics are allegedly intoxicated by Western theories. 17. Paravisini-Gebert Lizabeth, “Decolonizing Feminism,” in Daughters of Caliban, ed. Consuelo Lopez Springfield (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998). 18. Cécile Accilien, Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 17. 19. Ibid., 17. 20. Delphine Perret, “Interview,” Berkeley, April 1990. 21. I interviewed Condé in her apartment in Manhattan, New York, in 2000. 22. Edwidge Danticat also explores the same kind of relationships between mothers and daughters in Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994). 23. Condé has described in detail other characters’ births during carnival days. The birth of Spero in Les dernier rois mages and that of Marie Noëlle in Desirada are marked as traumas by this festive celebration. They seem to overshadow the protagonists’ relationship with their mothers from birth into adulthood. 24. Michaëlla Périna, Citoyenneté et sujétion aux Antilles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 9. 25. See Beverly Ormerod’s article, “The Representation of Women in French Caribbean Fiction,” in Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh (New York: Berg, 1999). Ormerod identifies a list of France-oriented Guadeloupean heroines in autobiographical fictions, such as those of Mayotte Capécia. 26. This skin color obsession is a common trope in Caribbean literature. From Mayotte Capécia to Marie Chauvet, Michèle Lacrosil, Frantz Fanon, and others, they all describe in their fiction the psychological consequences associated with the obsession of pigmentocracy. 27. The gaze of the Other, a common trope explored in African Diaspora literature, imposes its own fixed meanings of identity on the colonized. In his critical text Orientalism (1978), which draws upon developments in Marxist theories of power, Edouard Said explains how Western imperialism constructs knowledge of conquered people to justify its domination and subjugation of them. 28. Homi Bhabha, The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 355. 29. Mohamed B Taleb-Khyar, “An Interview with Maryse Condé,” Callaloo 14, no. 2 (1991): 347–66. 30. Carla Fratta, “Entrevue avec Maryse Condé, écrivain guadeloupéen,” Caribana 1 (1990): 85–92. 31. Sources of biographical information about Maryse Condé include: Francoise Pfaff, Interview avec Maryse Condé (Paris: Karthala, 1993); Vévé Clark, “Je me suis réconciliée avec mon île: Une interview de Maryse Condé,” Callaloo 12, no. 2 (1989): 86–132; Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar, “An Interview with Maryse Condé,” Callaloo 14, no. 2 (1991): 347–66; Maryse Condé, Un coeur à rire et à pleurer: Contes vrais de mon enfance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), Victoire. Les saveurs et les mots (France: Mercure de France, 2006). 32. Rebecca Wolf, “Maryse Condé,” Bomb (Summer 1999): 80. 33. Quoted in the introduction of Condé’s Land of Many Colors, trans. Nicole Ball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). For an understanding of Condé’s work in a political context, see, for example, Vévé Clark’s interview with the author; Leah Hewitt, Autobiographical Tight Ropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Francoise Lionnet, “Happiness Deferred,” in Autobiographical Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Jonathan Ngate, “Maryse Condé and Africa: The Making of a Recalcitrant Daughter?” A Current Bibliography of African Affairs 19 (1986–1987): 5–20. 34. La parole des femmes, op.cit., 124. 35. Isabelle Girard, “Maryse Condé: Je suis pour l’indépendance,” L’Evènement du Jeudi, 160 (26 Nov–2 Dec. 1997): 112–13.

Return to Africa and the Caribbean

37

36. Maryse Condé, “Habiter ce pays, la Guadeloupe,” Chemins Critiques 1, no. 3 (December 1989): 13.

Chapter Two

Toward a Creole Poetics

Ethnic identity is twin to skin identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. —Gloria Anzaldùa 1 Every colonized people—in other words other words, every people in whose soul of inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local originality finds itself face to face with the language of the civilization; that is, with the culture of the mother country. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Simone Schwarz-Bart’s three novels (Un plat de porc aux bananas vertes 1967; Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle 1972; Ti Jean L’Horizon 1979) all contain the themes of exile, dispossession, cultural erasure, and revalorization, as well as the dilemma of language. Schwarz-Bart belongs to a group of Francophone Caribbean women writers, who like Condé and Warner-Vieyra, have produced a body of writing and a set of discursive practices that explore the various possibilities of Caribbean cultures and identities. Ti Jean L’Horizon questions the validity of the return to Africa while drawing attention to the rediscovery of a neglected Caribbean history, culture, and language. While Condé and Warner-Vieyra portray female characters in search of their identities in Africa, Schwarz-Bart depicts Ti Jean, a male hero, on his journey to Africa and back “home” to Guadeloupe. Specific gender dynamics are represented in Ti Jean L’Horizon. This chapter examines Schwarz-Bart’s rewriting and claiming of Guadeloupean folklore and history as an alternative to the failed return to Africa. Ti Jean’s journey to Africa, like that of Condé’s heroine’s in Heremakhonon, highlights the difficult relationship between the Diaspora and the continent. I demonstrate how the difficulty of reconnecting to Africa leads to the rediscovery of Caribbean history and culture and the reclaiming of Creole identity with its complex layers and 39

40

Chapter 2

features. Ti Jean L’Horizon can be read as the author’s attempt to bridge the gap between oral and written culture, and to “decolonize” Creole identity and language by disrupting the association between Creole language and a shameful past tainted by slavery. In other words, Schwarz-Bart questions preconceived ideas about Caribbean identity and explores the manifold potentials of the Creole language in the presence of French. Choosing a language to write in is never easy for writers who share a history of colonialism, slavery, and historical discontinuity. Schwarz-Bart has an intimate connection with Creole oral culture and chooses to portray characters that belong to it. In her second novel, Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, as well as in Ti Jean L’Horizon, many of the characters do not know how to read and write in French, and their only means of communication is Creole. As a FrenchCaribbean writer aware of the potential of the Creole language, orality represents the free space in which Schwarz-Bart can manipulate language and create a voice for herself as well as for her characters. She is concerned with the cohabitation of the two languages and the tensions existing between them in expressing the complexity of French-Caribbean culture. As an heiress to oral tradition, Simone Schwarz-Bart reworks the tale of Ti Jean, a founding Caribbean myth, and transforms it into an epic novel in order to examine the Caribbean past and present as well as issues of identity and language. The narrative of Ti Jean L’Horizon relates to the Black experience in the Middle Passage. There are several written versions of this tale in Caribbean literature, though it is not exclusively Caribbean. 2 Suzanne Crosta, in Récits d’enfance antillaise (1998), discusses two studies that trace its various origins. In Le Conte Créole (1977), Pierre Jardel notes: “Le cycle de Ti Jean serait le plus répandu parmi les contes à personnages humains. . . . L’importance de ce héros est telle qu’on le retrouve dans les contes créoles de pays aussi éloignés que l’île Maurice, la Guyane ou le Missouri” [Ti Jean is the most known folktale with human characters. . . . This hero is so important that he is found in the Creole folktales in far away countries such as Mauritius Island, Guyana or Missouri] (178). In a 1993 article, Evelyn Voldeng also studies the tale of Ti Jean from different Francophone regions. 3 Despite their different geographical origins, these folktales depict the common struggle and liberation of the hero in confronting oppressive systems of domination as Tanta Toureh points out: “Les contes, texts oraux independents des uns des autres, renferment des points communs. . . . Ti Jean dans l’imaginaire populaire incarne la resource individuelle face à l’ordre répressif” [These narratives, whether they are folk tales or oral texts, share some characteristics. . . . In people’s imagination, Ti Jean symbolizes the individual resistance against the repressive order] (Toureh 80). Ti Jean, through his heroic deeds and survival skills, is a symbol of strength, resistance, and hope that feeds the diasporic imagination.

Toward a Creole Poetics

41

In Ti Jean L’Horizon, the hero, who lives in Fond-Zombi (a village in Guadeloupe) takes an oniric trip to Africa, the land of the ancestors, via the belly of a seven-headed Beast. The narrative compresses time and space and Ti Jean travels in the magical world of the living and the dead with the task of finding genealogy, freeing the island of Guadeloupe from the Beast’s domination, and bringing back the sun, which the huge beast had swallowed. The recycling of this popular folk tale by Schwarz-Bart points to the necessity of the return to Creole, the mother tongue and folk culture to engage in identity issues related to language, writing, and history. One can argue that the need to live out the return is deeply anchored in oral folk culture. The task of taking Creole children’s stories and transcribing them into a written form parallels that of rewriting a history that has been discarded or ignored. According to Glissant, because of its oral nature, the folktale transgresses writing and history: “Ce qu’il transgresse c’est le sacré du signe écrit. Le conte antillais balise une histoire déportée par l’édit et la loi. Il est l’anti-édit et l’anti-loi, c’est-à-dire l’anti-écriture” [It transgresses the sacredness of the written sign. The Antillean folktale marks a history deported by the edict and the law. It is anti-edict and anti-law meaning anti-writing] (1981:262–63). In Ti Jean L’Horizon, the folktale, considered by Glissant as the “lieu de la parole rentrée” [the space of the hidden word], is liberated, and it allows the protagonist to explore “notre manque historique” [our lack of history] (263). For Glissant, it is imperative that writers from the Caribbean try to recover the lost past, which is parallel to the identity quest. For a group of people who does not know its origins or its history, the folktale is the starting point in the attempt to fill in the gap. It is crucial in the process of genealogical quest as it “replaces the myth of origins” (Haigh 97). DETOUR BY AFRICA Schwarz-Bart belongs to the literary tradition that express the preoccupation sometimes felt in the Black Diaspora in regard to genealogy. From the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén (My Last Name 1958), to the African American writer Alex Hailey (Roots 1976), to the civil rights leader Malcom X (The Autobiography of Malcom X 1965), the anguish of not knowing one’s last name and history is well-inscribed in diasporic literature. The anxiety associated with the last name is linked to the legitimacy it confers on the one who bears it. It is significant that the last name in question is the missing patronymic “le nom du Père” [the name of the Father] to borrow the Lacanian term. The idea of nobility versus illegitimacy is recurrent in the primary novels examined in this study. All the protagonists’ quests involve legitimizing the self in Africa. We recall that Véronica, the protagonist in Condé’s Heremakhonon, wants to

42

Chapter 2

find a noble ancestor. Juletane, Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s eponymous heroine, decries not having a (last) name. In Ti Jean L’Horizon, the hero’s dream involves a genealogical quest in Africa, his ancestral land. The desire to find legitimacy is linked to the erasure of a shameful past associated with slavery. When Awa-Eloise, Ti Jean’s mother, begs Wademba to give his grandson an African name, he flatly refuses, saying that Ti Jean cannot have a name until he goes to Africa to claim it (30). Ti Jean’s mother left Wademba’s house in the hills to live with Ti Jean L’Horizon, whom she had met during a trip in the valley. At his birth, Ti Jean is named after him, but his real father is Wademba, his grandfather, who had an incestuous relationship with his mother, Awa-Eloise. Finding a proper name to assure Ti Jean’s legitimate status becomes a dilemma for the community. Because of folk superstitions, the valley people were scared to call him by his dead father’s name Jean L’Horizon. So he would only answer to names such as “Hey, Hi, Psst,” until someone had the idea of calling him Ti Jean. The search for Africa is a source of patrilineal or patriarchal legitimacy. Wademba’s refusal to give a name to his grandson is a strategy to force him to question his identity. Looking for the father’s name (unknown origins) is a literary trope in Caribbean literature. In her essay La civilisation du bossale (1978), Condé refers to another version of the same Caribbean tale, “Ti Jean et le nom de son père” [Ti Jean and his father’s name], in which the boy tries to find his father’s name because his mother deliberately keeps it a secret (41). The secrecy is a veiled allusion to the shame of the African origin widely felt in the Diaspora before and after Négritude and other similar movements of the rehabilitation of Black identity. In contrast to the African name of his grandfather, to which the narrator attributes historical significance and legitimacy, the absence of a patronymic affiliation for Ti Jean reinforces his sense of illegitimacy. As he does not have a “legitimate proper” last name, he must find it on his own by doing the reverse voyage, from the Caribbean to Africa. In Ti Jean L’Horizon, the hero’s quest for genealogy occurs in a dream, whereby he embarks on a trip in the womb of the Beast to his grandfather’s African village. It would appear that the author had chosen this psychoanalytical tool in order to see what Africa can offer the hero and what he can learn there about himself. Before his dreamed journey to Africa, Ti Jean, like Véronica or Juletane, knew little about Africa. He only had fragmented book knowledge of the continent. Upon his arrival, Ti Jean finds similarities between the daily scenes he witnesses and the ones found in his big textbook on Africa (142). He further thinks that it is not the real Africa that he has been fantasizing about. As he walks through the grass he thinks that maybe this Africa comes only from his dream or that he is unknowingly moving around the Beast mind, who creates this imaginary Africa for him. Despite his concerns, the place seems familiar to him. His recognition of the baobab tree and

Toward a Creole Poetics

43

his physical contact with a stone or a piece a grass give him the impression of being intimately part of the landscape. This is a feeling that he never had in Guadeloupe, where one sometimes feels exiled at home. Ti Jean’s initial euphoria is soon to be replaced by disappointment and he is forced to question his grandfather’s motives for sending him to Africa in order to claim his African name, even though Wademba had prophesied that his grandson’s journey will not be a happy one (61). Wademba had misled Ti Jean by omitting his own Middle Passage experience, and had instead painted the image of a welcoming community in his African village. Wademba, who was deported to the Caribbean as a slave, believes that Africa remains unchanged despite the passage of time. Having left his Obanishe village on the Niger river a long time ago, he still feels that he left his trace there. He believes that if Ti Jean or any of his family members return there and say they are related to him, they would be welcome as if they were part of the clan. To his dismay, Ti Jean discovers that Wademba has not told a reliable story of his ancestry. Contrary to what Wademba had told him to expect, the hero learns some troubling facts. His grandfather’s story begins like a fairy tale with the formulaic “Once upon a time,” but it is a story of violence, oppression, and betrayal. Ti Jean learns about Africa’s ethnic wars, its participation in the slave trade, and how the Sonanqués, an enemy ethnic group, sold his grandfather Wademba, a Ba’Sonanqué, into slavery at the age of ten (152). Wademba belongs to the people that lost the war to the Sonanqués. Furthermore, Ti Jean is outraged by the numerous trials he suffers at the hands of Africans, whom he previously regarded as his “brothers” upon his arrival in the continent (155). He comes to the realization that Wademba, like he, held an idealized image of an Africa of the past. The hero is perplexed by the grandfather, who persuaded him to go to Africa while knowing the realities of the continent. He wonders why Wademba, the night of his death, had talked to him so vividly about his village sending him into such an hazardous situation. By sending Ti Jean to Africa, Wademba perhaps wants his grandson to experience the Middle Passage in reverse from the New World to Africa and confront identity issues that are problematic: “Mon histoire à moi n’est pas morte, puisqu’elle continue avec toi” (69). Wademba, who comes from a royal people, is closely attached to the traditional culture of pre-colonial settings, in which the son replaces the father after his death to continue his task. He hopes that Ti Jean is the branch of the lineage that will fulfill his wish of going back to the continent. Critic Fanta Toureh suggests that by having an incestuous relationship with Ti Jean’s mother, Wademba desires “la répétition du même; comme dans les grandes dynasties égyptiennes” [the repetition of the same like in the great Egyptian dynasties] (1987:144). The idea of incest in the novel does not convey any “feeling” of guilt or sin, but

44

Chapter 2

functions for Wademba as a way of keeping his bloodline intact. In other words, Wademba’s fantasy is to keep a “pure” lineage in the event Ti Jean gets his African name. Just like Véronica in Heremakhonon, Wademba’s hope for Ti Jean to find legitimacy in Africa is connected to the idea of cleansing his (grand)son from the impurities associated with the stains of slavery: “Le rêve des gens d’en Haut est donc un rêve de continuité, d’harmonie, dans lequel l’esclavage n’a pas de place. Selon lui, le retour est possible, et effacera toute la longue période qui a suivi le débarquement” (Toureh 151). As the “dernier nègre d’Afrique” [the last African], Wademba, who has a name, remains a legitimate son of Africa whereas Ti Jean remains illegitimate. Ti Jean’s attempts to reclaim his African name in Africa require that he uncover and face difficult questions of betrayal and deceit that remain unanswered by his grandfather. Ti Jean’s quest for legitimacy or nobility in Africa fails for different reasons. He unfortunately aspires to what Glissant calls “le vieux rêve de l’Un” [the old dream of One] (225), a desire for a unique fixed identity or pure origin. Schwarz-Bart rejects and challenges the simplistic mode of constructing genealogy as Ti Jean builds a world of dreams and fantasies in which he confronts the harsh realities that were unknown to him. Naïve and unaware of existing class and caste distinctions and hierarchies in African societies, Ti Jean, who considers himself a son of the land, remains in fact a foreigner, an outsider, despite his agreement to go to war as part of his integration into African life. He experiences African village life for a period of two years, but gets caught up in endless internecine wars, and eventually gets metaphorically killed a number of times by his own protectors in a series of dreams. Ti Jean’s elimination through these killings symbolizes the ancestors’ rejection of him. Furthermore, he is made aware of the class difference between Africans with nobility and African descendants whose past has been tainted by slavery. To Ti Jean, who naively begs for brotherhood, the old African chief replies: Parmi les tiens? Non, tu es pour nous comme ces animaux que l’on voit partout dans la brousse, et pour lesquels on ne dispose pas de nom, voilà tout; et ton langage est pour nous comme la nuit, tes paroles sont pour nous comme des chouettes dans la nuit. . . . Ecoute, jeune homme aux yeux déssillés . . . nous ne voulons pas ta mort mais ta vie, retourne parmi les tiens . . . nous sommes des hommes libres, et qu’il n’y a pas de place ici pour ceux qu’on met dans les cordes. (165)

Ti Jean is rejected as a lost member of the family branch in Africa. Not only does the old African chief reject his plea for genealogy, but he also delineates for Ti Jean the insurmountable cultural distance between them. Ti Jean is forever condemned as an untouchable with no hope for redemption or restitution. His desire of finding his place among his (noble) ancestors is unfilled

Toward a Creole Poetics

45

because the Sonanqués compares slavery to leprosy. An escaped or freed slave is barred from claiming back his place in the community. Slavery is thus stigmatized as an incurable disease from which the condemned slaves and their descendants can never recover. As a descendant of slaves and a social outcast, Ti Jean is denied any right or social privilege in his grandfather’s village. Ironically, his grandfather Wademba, who strongly believes in his African nobility because of his Maroon status (he avoids being subjected to slavery), no longer holds such lineage according to the Sonanqués’ principles of class hierarchies. The narrative illustrates two diverging points of view concerning affiliation with the African community. It expresses the social and political distance between Africa and its Diaspora: the former rejects Caribbean descendants whose ancestors were slaves, whereas the latter demonstrates its profound ignorance of the continent until it realizes that it has created its own invention of an immutable Africa. It also suggests that the notion of racial commonality and solidarity in the Diaspora is unconvincing. Ti Jean, a French-Caribbean, is not welcome as a lost prodigal son of Africa. What follows for him is an extended detour through different strange landscapes while still looking for his genealogy. As the first stage of his genealogy quest in Africa ends without the desired results, the malaise and uncertainty of his fate still pursue Ti Jean. He continues to awake in countless unfamiliar surroundings and wonders about his place in the world. He has no sense of direction, and therefore his journey seems condemned to errancy. Frustrated, the hero realizes that Africa cannot provide him with the father figure he still seeks. As a result, he travels to the Niger Valley and wanders aimlessly in the legendary “Kingdom of the Dead” searching for a way to get back to Guadeloupe, which he is unable to locate. He walks for a long time, which seems “eternities” to him, searching endlessly for an underground path or a sign that would lead him to Guadeloupe. However, no one among the dead had ever heard of that country. Little by little he accepts his unsuccessful search of the island and the idea of “eternities” became one vague sea shattered by waves that faded into emptiness (217). The temporal and spatial distance the hero travels over in search of Guadeloupe is measured in eternities and oceanic immensity. It is indicative of the vast cultural and spiritual disconnection between him and Guadeloupe as well as between Guadeloupe and Africa. Ti Jean’s discovery that his (grand)father’s idealized view of origins is a fabrication and delusion forces him to reconsider the return to a less idealized, more contradictory land of the mother in all its harsh realities. Until Ti Jean finds his way back to his native island, he remains disoriented in the realm of the Dead, where the inhabitants are unable to help him (221). As he is forced to reconsider his identitarian quest, he questions Guadeloupe’s existence and collective cultural identity. He realizes that, for the inhabitants of Africa, Guadeloupe is unreadable and

46

Chapter 2

insignificant. He himself admits his own ignorance of his native land and expresses his own prejudices toward it. If Guadeloupe, the native land (in the hero’s mind), cannot provide him with legitimacy and a sense of rootedness, where else should he turn? Although Ti Jean manifests a desire to go back to Guadeloupe and to reunite with his mother and his beloved Egée, he realizes that reconnecting with the island proves to be a difficult task. Schwarz-Bart delineates her protagonist’s feelings of rejection, frustration, and obsession in his unsuccessful search for genealogy. Being rejected in Africa and having experienced difficulties in finding his way back “home” to Guadeloupe, Ti Jean pursues his quest in France, the mother nation. Ti Jean’s passage to France turns out to be insignificant in his long journey toward self-discovery. The metropole is presented as a cold and arid landscape. The hero has no contact with the inhabitants and his stay in France lasts only three weeks, in comparison to Africa, where he stayed for two years. The environment is so hostile and unwelcome that he considers returning again to Africa, where he has been previously rejected. As his body reacts to this hostility, his skin is covered with white frost and pieces of salt. A state of anxiety overwhelms him to the extent that he imagines metamorphosing into a bird and flying back to Africa. Throughout his oniric and epic journey, Ti Jean never entirely succumbs to the harshness of exile and displacement. He preserves the hope of transforming himself while he explores questions of his ambiguous identity. He is not welcome in France, where he holds a status of French citizenship. Rejected by the French people, he imagines himself as a migrating bird fantasizing about freedom. In spite of his realization that both France and Africa are places of dystopia, the latter remains his main cultural reference. His return to Africa turns out to be a detour that leads him toward Guadeloupe, a necessary and inevitable step due to the multiple Caribbean connections to Africa regarding culture, identity, history, and language. It involves crossing and re-entering multiple geographical and cultural spaces in order for Ti Jean to be transformed. He finally realizes that Guadeloupe is the place to return to, where he is recognized among his own. He trusts that the even the Dead know him and would not refer to him as a stranger nor ask about his place of origins (217). His anticipated return to Guadeloupe and his Caribbean roots replaces his failed quest for genealogy and legitimacy in Africa. The rejection of the African ancestors and the possible reconnection with Guadeloupe, the homeland, involve the negotiation of a very considerable historical and literary legacy. From the early 1930s to the 1960s, Négritude writers who rediscovered African history and its gaps reconnected to the continent through an essentialist vision, whereas the post-independence generation of women writers and Créolité writers rediscovered Caribbean history with its diverse components. Ti Jean’s response to his mentor, Eusèbe l’Ancien, who wants to bring a final message to Wademba in the underworld,

Toward a Creole Poetics

47

expresses his embrace of a complex Caribbean identity and hope for the Guadeloupean community. As Ti Jean meditates on his acceptance of his fragmented identity, he uses the symbolic image of the tree in stating that if one were to cut it and stuck in the ground, it would send out its roots in the end. He considers himself and (the Diaspora) to be the branch cut from the tree (Africa), swept away and forgotten. However, Ti Jean believes that it is possible for the branch to produce new brand of fruits and leaves that are unique (274). Here Ti Jean stresses the idea that both Africa and its Diaspora are connected through history, culture, time, and space, but are distinct in characteristics. The metaphor of the tree also recalls the prophetic words pronounced by the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, when, in 1802, he was arrested by order of Napoléon and deported to France, where he later died in Fort de Joux: “En me reversant, on m’a abattu à Saint-Domingue que le tronc de l’arbre de la liberté des noirs; il repoussera par les racines parce qu’elles sont profondes et nombreuses” [In defeating me, they only cut the trunk of freedom’s tree for Blacks; but it will grow because its roots are deep and numerous]. In a different vein, Ti Jean’s message points to Glissant’s philosophical concept of “Relation”: “Nous sommes les racines de la Relation. Des racines sous-marines: c’est-à-dire dérivées, non implantées d’un seul mât dans un seul limon, mais prolongées dans tous les sens de notre univers par le réseau de branches” [We are the roots of Relation. Submarine roots which are derived, not planted from only one mast and one silt, and buried deep in all directions of the universe through the network of branches] (231). Ti Jean’s experience of the Middle Passage in reverse and his crossing of different seas and geographical spaces at different time lapses foster in him the necessity for openness, difference, and fragmentation. He no longer searches for a unique source of racial and cultural identity, but looks forward to entering into “relation” with the different facets of the Caribbean reality. In other words, Ti Jean’s way of finding himself lies in his acceptance of his “rhizomatic” identity with multiple roots, to use Glissant’s term. Like Glissant, Schwarz-Bart valorizes cultural diversity and fragmented genealogies and explores the ways that history (or the lack thereof) contributes to them. MYTH AND HISTORY As previously noted, Schwarz-Bart belongs to a group of Caribbean women writers whose works reflect a concern for the survival of oral culture, which is deeply linked to history. Oral culture also exists outside history, since it persists throughout particular events. In Ti Jean L’Horizon, Schwarz-Bart demonstrates the need to shift the focus from Africa to the Caribbean in order

48

Chapter 2

to examine the links between Caribbean history and Creole culture. Acknowledging one’s hybrid identity, which was previously considered illegitimate because of a historical past associated with slavery, requires the reexamination of this history. In turn, the failure to find genealogical inheritance in Africa forces the protagonist to reconsider Caribbean history. Ti Jean learns about African history when he travels to the continent, but he does not know the history of Guadeloupe, his native island. Revisionist historians and critics came to understand that official history is written from the point of view of the victors. Most French-Caribbean people do not know about their own history due to its erasure or its absence in the official textbooks written by the former French colonizers. Glissant, like many Caribbean writers, is concerned and conscious of this historical erasure and gap in the French Caribbean Antilles. Glissant urgently invites them to the task of exploring further Caribbean history: Notre histoire est présence à la limite du supportable, présence que nous devons relier sans transition au tramé complexe de notre passé. Le passé, notre passé subi, qui n’est pas encore histoire pour nous, est pourtant là (ici) qui nous lancine. La tâche de l’écrivain est d’explorer ce lancinement, de le révéler de manière continue dans le présent et l’actuel. [Our history is barely present. We should connect its presence without transition to the complex thread of our past. The past, our past which is not yet for us history, is indeed here and there. It troubles us. The task of the writer is to explore this haunting past and to continually bring it up in the present.] (226)

One of the major consequences of the Middle Passage tragedy, for those who experienced its displacement, is a longing to rewrite their history. At the individual level, this longing feeds the literature of the African Diaspora, which has a large focus on historical discontinuity and its aftermath. This is particularly notable in French or Spanish former colonies, but less so in English colonies. Because of the particular circumstances of his/her history, the Caribbean writer remains haunted by the mystery of his/her origins. Where does he/she situate that history? How does he/she come to terms with the disconcerting reality that is a consequence of that history and tries to link it to a pre-historical reality? For the most part, this is what has sent writers and intellectuals searching for answers in the oral corpus. As a result, orality has shaped much of present-day Caribbean culture, especially as it is inscribed in storytelling, proverbs, songs, and music. Schwarz-Bart uses Ti Jean, a classic Caribbean folktale hero, to examine Guadeloupe culture as well as history. Most novelists and critics from the Diaspora are preoccupied with the task of challenging and rewriting history with a big H. They attempt to reclaim or re-invent the past in order to confront the uncertainties of the present. There are a number of works of twentieth-century writers who share

Toward a Creole Poetics

49

this obsession with history. For instance, a reading of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General (1950) without an understanding of the history of Latin America would be impossible. Without a willingness to accept her view of African American history, we would not be reading Toni Morrison in the same light. Without a knowledge of the French-Caribbean’s complex history, we could not have the spectacular re-creation of Caribbean life and history presented in Texaco (1992), by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, or in Ségou (1984–1985) and Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . Noire de Salem (1986), by Maryse Condé. Condé, like some other writers and critics, feels the need to reinvent or reinvestigate the seventeenth-century historical person of Tituba by giving her a voice. Critic Danielle Georges explores “the process by which Tituba has emerged in the historical and literary imagination as a key figure in the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692.” 4 Simone Schwarz-Bart’s novel Ti Jean L’Horizon belongs to that category of “re-invented history” because of the use of oral narrative technique and the oniric journey the hero takes to Africa and France in his retracing of history. I should emphasize that, given the particular construct of Caribbean life in which elements of fantasy are sometimes hard to distinguish from the so-called reality, it would be simplistic to describe the hero’s journey as purely dream-like. The attempt to rewrite history in Ti Jean L’Horizon is one of the finest manifestations from a historical and literary tradition that has also produced works by writers such as Edouard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, and Jacques Stéphen Alexis among others. Carpentier is internationally known for being the pioneer of the narrative technique of lo real maravilloso also called magic realism. His best-known work, El reino del mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1949), presents a historical fiction of the successful Haitian revolution in the late eighteenth century. Drawing from folk culture and religious and mythical beliefs, he examines the social, economical, and political impact of slavery before and after the Haitian revolution and exposes the oppressive regime of the French colonial slave-system colonizers and of the revolutionary Haitian leaders (former slaves) such as King Christophe who became despotic figures. Carpentier may have influenced the Haitian writer Jacques Stéphen Alexis whose fiction explores the real, the mythical, and the fantastic. Commenting on Glissant, Carpentier, and Alexis’ works, Barbara Webb, in Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction, writes: They view the folk traditions and history of the Americas as the source of a new form of fictional discourse in which they attempt to reshape the traditional literary values associated with the colonized past, while at the same time proposing an alternative to “fossilized” static conception of New World History. (4)

50

Chapter 2

Caribbean literature through the use of folklore and myth attempts to fill the void left by official history. A re-examination of history engages writers in a difficult dialogue, where gaps cannot be filled by myth or imagery alone. However, Glissant sees the dialectic between history and myth as a major step in the literary project: Le lien primordial entre une perception d’histoire et une ambition de littérature s’esquisse dans le mythe. Le mythe est le premier donné de la conscience historique encore naïve, et la matière première de l’ouvrage littéraire. Remarquons que, donné de la conscience historique en formation, le mythe préfigure l’histoire autant qu’il en répète nécessairement les accidents qu’il a transfigurés, c’est-à-dire qu’il est à son tour producteur d’histoire. [The primary link between a perception of history and a literary ambition is found in myth. Myth is the first manifestation of the historical consciousness and the first subject of the literary work. We notice that myth, as the manifestation of a historical consciousness in process, prefigures history. It had repeatedly transformed historical accidents that it gets to produces history.] (138)

Schwarz-Bart’s use of myth helps her in her attempt to reconstruct the history of Guadeloupe. Reflecting on writers-turned-historians, Clarissa Zimra states: “Facing the Hegelian void, every writer has claimed the recreation of a collective memory as the imperative of authentic creation” (1990:143). In the narrative of Ti Jean L’Horizon, the intricacies associated with history and identities reveal the complexity of the Caribbean experience. They inform the struggles of the Caribbean self facing historical and cultural entrapment. The resistance to the linear perspective or cultural dominance of official history is linked to an identity quest. Schwarz-Bart’s project to rewrite history reveals itself as a form of resistance inscribed in the text. The task of reexamining history, however, does not end in a triumphalist position against the dominant French discourse of ideology it opposes. It problematizes and interrogates the tenets of official history while attempting to create a Caribbean myth of origins. The question of history is established at the incipit of Ti Jean L’Horizon, in which the narrator opens in an almost documentary (factual) tone. On the next page, the location of the island is indicated as a no-man’s land. Guadeloupe is already described as a dot on the map and Fond-Zombi is even more nonexistent and it is useless to try to find it. In spite of that, the author/ narrator focuses on the fact that Fond-Zombi has a long and marvelous history comparable to places like Niniveh, Babylon, or Jerusalem. This passage is constructed on a paradox. Within two pages, the narrator evokes the Guadeloupean past, the smallness of the island (its symbolic insignificance from the colonizers’ point of view), and then condemns the official version of its history before manifesting a desire to re-inscribe Guadeloupe (particularly the village of Fond-Zombi) on the world map by

Toward a Creole Poetics

51

comparing it to ancient cities of the Middle East. Both Guadeloupe and Fond-Zombi are locations previously used in another Schwarz-Bart novel, Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972). Both locations are anchored in the present in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, whereas in Ti Jean L’Horizon, they are situated in the past as well as in the present. Both texts, however, represent different gendered stories. While Ti Jean L’Horizon focuses on a male folkloric figure in search of patrilineal legitimacy in Africa, Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle centers on a woman and a female lineage anchored in a Caribbean space. While Ti Jean is unable to find identity and to survive in the fatherland, the strong women characters in Pluie et Vent manage to create a sustainable world for themselves despite the numerous difficulties they face and the neocolonial conditions in which they live in the Caribbean motherland. They master their own time and space, re-create their own histories, and forge their own identities. Schwarz-Bart shows how Guadeloupe is haunted by historical dispossession and alienation due to a lack of mastery of its time and space. Ti Jean, who dreams about and imagines traveling through Africa, does not master his time and space. His body feels this lack of mastery as well. He cannot feel his body which is icy and fright. The feeling of wandering overhelms him that he finds himself in an undetermined space (77). Like Véronica in Heremakhonon, Ti Jean confuses the past and the present, the real and the imagined Africa. In the narrative the situation is further complicated by geography, whereby social status is defined in terms of where one lives. The villagers of Fond-Zombi in Guadeloupe live in two separate groups. Ti Jean stays with his mother Awa-Eloise En-bas, down in the valley, while his grandfather/ father Wademba, a Maroon, lives En-haut, up on the hills. Maroons were slaves who earned their freedom by revolting and escaping from the plantations, and taking refuge in the mountains, where they continually fought the colonists to remain free. In Caribbean literature, the hills are usually portrayed as symbolic places of resistance. The Matouba Hills fortress is one of the most important places in the history of Guadeloupean resistance against French domination and oppression. In 1802, after Napoléon ordered the re-establishment of slavery in the island, Louis Delgrès, a Guadeloupean officer in the French army, opposed it. He and his troops refused to surrender and decided to die on the mountain by exploding the mines surrounding them. Delgrès remained a heroic figure in Guadeloupean history. In the narrative of Ti Jean L’Horizon, the terms En-haut (Up Above) and En-bas (Down Below) symbolize the class division between workers who remain on the white owners’ plantations and the assumed African aristocracy, composed of Maroons. The latter feels superior because of its noble lineage and its heroic deed in its fight for freedom. This superiority to everyone is due to the fact that they were direct slave descendants who revolted,

52

Chapter 2

fought, and lived defending themselves. This is in contrast to the villagers, who do not care about their lineage; they do not bother to know Guadeloupe’s historical and cultural importance in the world. Africa is never too far from the Maroons’ group, who expresses its pride and self-assurance of knowing its origins and who maintains the glories of the past. Wademba, who holds an idealized image of Africa, remains the closest link for the inhabitants, who are nostalgic for the continent. Not surprisingly, in addition to being divided by geographical space and social status, these two groups are antagonistic regarding issues of history and origins. After the abolition of slavery in 1848, the people from the valley who were former slaves became affranchis, or freed men, whereas the Maroons had obtained freedom on their own. For the people in the hills, history is constructed around the awareness of revolt, the dynamics of social revolution, and the re-invention of the individual as a vital force for change whose environment is full of harmonic relations with the world of spirits. The same cannot be said for the people of the valley, who suffer from “historical amnesia” (34) and whose history is more prosaic. The narrator labels them “des cultivateurs d’oubli” [amnesic fools] because of their refusal to hear stories of resistance from the hills people: Après l’abolition de l’esclavage, ils avaient tenté de parler à ceux de la vallée, les gens d’En-Bas, comme ils les appelaient, pour leur dire la course des héros dans l’ombre et la chute finale et le foudroiement. Mais les autres avaient ri, d’un curieux petit rire pointu, et ils avaient dit que ces évènements n’en étaient pas, qu’il ne pouvait s’agir de vrais événements car, enfin, en quels livres étaient-ils écrits. (17)

The conflict between the two groups evolves around the notion of acculturated history. On the one hand, the valley folk are perceived as voiceless and paralyzed by the forces of official history. They only trust the official history from the French archives, while the descendants of the Maroons, as figures of resistance, try to keep a generic and collective memory. The valley people oppose myth in favor of written history. The reader is made aware of the absence of the Maroons’ history in French texts. The narrator states: “C’était seulement une petite tranche du monde qui ne figurait pas dans les livres, car les blancs avaient décidé de jeter un voile par-dessus” (47). History is written from the point of view of the victors and those who had power in that period. Ti Jean, who comes from the acculturated group that denies the importance of collective memory, is torn between these two worlds, although he seems to be the mediator between them. As the hero begins the process of inventing the self, the Guadeloupe he thinks he knows from books suddenly becomes mysterious. He no longer recognizes his surrounding, oscillates between dream and reality and experiences some sort of a primal injury. As

Toward a Creole Poetics

53

he loses his cultural references and experiences a sense of loss and identity, he must invent a language of his own and seek refuge in the magical to escape in order to reconcile with his present reality. In his attempt to repossess his history and his identity, Ti Jean takes the initiative and takes an oniric voyage to Africa, where he reverses the journey of the slaves in cow’s womb. I should stress that it would be rather simplistic to assume that all the novelist has done in creating this journey is to engage in a dreamlike narrative. To indulge in this device, she must have believed in an African worldview that was retained through narrative; one in which there is symmetry between opposing forces. The vehicle for the hero takes the shape of a marvelous Beast, similar to a big cow, which swallows him. This Beast is a familiar and heinous figure for Ti Jean. It is the specter of the slave ship, and the hero must enter into its womb to relive the Middle Passage experience like Mona, the heroine of Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993). In the film, Mona is transported through time and space to be captured and sold as a slave. The Beast’s womb is a signifier of death and source (roots). Ti Jean metaphorically dies in order to find his grandfather’s ancestors whose dwelling is in the land of Guinea. Critic Sylvie Kandé explains the desire for return: “Délivrés de la servitude par la mort, les esclaves défunts étaient censés retraverser l’océan pour rejoindre les ancêtres ‘au pays de Guinée’— lieu métaphoriquement utérin pour avoir été l’une des premières régions africaines pourvoyeuses d’esclaves” [Freed from servitude through death, dead slaves were supposed to cross back the ocean to reunite with their ancestors in the country of Guinea—a metaphorically uterine space for having been one of the first African regions where slaves were purchased] (1998:11). Surprisingly, the description of Ti Jean’s descent into the beast’s entrails is not terrifying. The figure of the beast is constructed as such to express the ambivalence of the hero’s reverie. The Beast’s womb is the repository of textual economy, for it represents an inquiry into history, a uterine milieu in reference to Africa the mother figure, and the experience of slavery. It also symbolizes the hero’s descent into slavery to obtain the knowledge of his history, which can be a source of strength for him. Knowledge of self includes knowledge of one’s history, culture, and language. In his dreamed journey through Africa, Ti Jean becomes aware of the importance of Guadeloupe’s history as well as its oral culture. CREOLE CULTURE AND ORALITY The Creole language has been the subject of social and political controversies since its evolution. A brief history of the Creole language and its revalorization is necessary in order to understand its integration into works of literature

54

Chapter 2

and its passage into a written language. In the seventeenth century, when the African deportees arrived on the plantations in the Caribbean, the colonizers separated them for fear of reprisals. One theory about the development of Creole maintains that the slaves, whose ethnic origins, languages, and dialects were varied, developed the Creole language in order to communicate. Glissant comments on the ingenuity and the unpredictability of Creole: “Il était inouï et imprévisible que les esclaves déportés . . . aient pu après une telle table rase de leurs coutumes, de leurs langues, de leurs cultures— réinventer par la trace et la mémoire, mais aussi avec quelque chose qui s’ajoute, cette langue ou ces langues créoles” [The idea that the slaves could manage to re-create through memory this language or languages in spite of the erasure of their customs, their languages, and their cultures was unthinkable and unpredictable] (50). Creole became a means of communication among slaves, as well as between slaves and masters. It was considered an inferior language due to its association with work and slavery on the plantation. The shame associated with the Creole language still persists today in the French Caribbean regions. Many people have an inferiority complex toward Creole, their mother tongue. French culture dominates every aspect of life in the DOM. The people from these regions are in favor of the language policy that promotes French language and culture, which further alienates them from the Creole culture. The educational system, modeled on the French one, was set for a successful French assimilation. At school, the children do not learn about the history of the islands nor the indigenous culture. They are taught to identify themselves as French by repeating “Our Fathers the Gauls,” therefore associating themselves consciously or unconsciously with Gallic/French ancestry. It is not surprising, therefore, that French, seen as the language of reason and social mobility, remains dominant. Mastering the colonizers’ language becomes part of the acculturation process at home and at school. In his autobiographical narratives, Antan d’enfance (1993) and Chemin d’école (1994) (School Days), Patrick Chamoiseau recounts terrifying tales of school children in the tenuous process of learning French and hating Creole: The slightest taint of Creole set off a merciless festival of mockery. It was all or nothing in French. As for Creole, it circulated easily but in a dilapidated state. Degraded to contraband, it grew callous from its freight of insults, dirty words, hatreds, violence, and tales of catastrophe. Creole wasn’t used anymore to say nice things. Or loving things, either. (School Days 66)

The Creole language as well as pigmentocracy becomes a divisive tool among the population. Shifting from its position as a common language used by the slaves and masters during the plantation system, it has contributed to the formation of a caste and class system in the Caribbean after the abolition

Toward a Creole Poetics

55

of slavery: “La bourgeoisie aux Antilles n’emploie pas le créole, sauf dans ses rapports avec les domestiques. A l’école le jeune Martiniquais apprend à mépriser le créole” [The bourgeois class in the Antilles only uses Creole to communicate with their domestics. At school the young Martinican learns how to despise the Creole language] (Fanon 1952:15). Many FrenchCaribbean intellectuals have always cultivated an ambivalent relationship with both French and Creole. They were prohibited by their parents from speaking Creole. Such distance and ambivalence toward the language are well illustrated in Condé’s fiction and other novelist’s from the regions. Véronica, in Heremakhonon, understands Creole but does not speak it. Francis Sancher, in Traversée de la mangrove, does not speak it well. In most French-Caribbean societies, the mastery of the French language thus becomes the ultimate goal, to the detriment of Creole, regarded as non-productive, non-expressive, and non-literary. Considering the economic, political, and cultural situation in these regions, one seems to survive in Creole but exist in French, as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant put it: Avec la langue et la culture [créole] on ne fait que survivre. Elles n’offrent que la perspective de demeurer dans les champs de canne. Une autre langue devient pertinente, le français, une autre culture opératoire, la culture française. Survivre en créole, ou exister en français. Donc, le mot d’ordre: devenir français. Devenir français, c’est d’accéder à la culture, quitter l’étatnature de cette périphérie et exister au centre. [One can only survive with the use of (Creole) language and culture. There is no other way to get out of the cane field than to learn French. The French language becomes necessary and the French culture becomes useful. One survives in Creole and exists in French. Therefore it becomes imperative to become French. In order to become French one needs to leave the peripheral space of Creole and to move to the center and have access to French culture.] (1991:88)

Although always marginalized and stigmatized, Creole was an important tool of communication in the plantation system. After emancipation, it seemed no longer useful in terms of survival. Chamoiseau and Confiant speak of two cultural phenomena in the French Caribbean: “la fétichisation de la langue française et la décréolisation” [the fetishization of the French language and decreolization] (94). Decreolization refers to the fascination with the French language and culture to the detriment of Creole. The “fetishization” of French also occurs in French Caribbean literature, where poets and writers naturally imitated contemporary French poets and writers, their only models (until Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontran-Damas, and others came onto the literary scene in the first part of the twentieth century). They would revolutionize what was called “la littérature doudouiste,” which had exotic qualities, and establish a new esthetic: dismantling the French syntax in order

56

Chapter 2

to express Caribbean reality. Despite his radical position toward the French language, Césaire has been much criticized by the Creolists for neglecting to inscribe the Creole esthetic into his works. In response, some literary critics feel the need to defend him and risk the wrath of the Creolists. 5 The debate on the importance or insignificance of Creole language, or any other language derived from slavery, has always been controversial in the Caribbean. The revalorization of the Creole language and culture has been a long process. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of Haitian writers and poets, such as Georges Sylvain, Massillon Coicou, and Oswald Durand, produced some literary works in Creole (Hoffmann 1984:40). In 1952, the Haitian playwright Félix Morisseau-Leroy translated the Greek play Antigone into Creole. This meant that the Creole language, which was previously thought of as inferior and nonexpressive, could actually express strong emotions associated with tragedy. The Martinican poet Gilbert Gratiant is also recognized as one of the earlier pioneers of the Creole language in his work. In the 1970s, the true revival of the Creole language took place when the Haitian playwright Frankétienne produced works that revolutionized the theater in Haiti. His first novel, Dezafi (1975), a political and social satire written in Creole, achieved great success in Port-au-Prince. His famous play, Pèlin-Tèt (1978), depicting the vicissitudes of the life of an intellectual and worker in New York City, made him an internationally recognized writer. In 2010, there were speculations that Frankétienne might win the Nobel Prize of Literature. Georges Castera, another Haitian poet, playwright, and essayist, also produced a huge volume of work in Creole. The 1980s witnessed an explosion of Creole awareness and a rediscovery of Caribbean culture and history. Dany Bébel-Gisler, a well-known sociolinguist from Guadeloupe, has done extensive research on Creole. 6 One of her major works, Léonora: L’histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe (1985), written in French and Creole, portrays a peasant woman telling her story and Guadeloupe’s history. BébelGisler empowers a female protagonist from the proletariat whose voice is hardly heard while attempting to rewrite the history of Guadeloupe. Her text is “a correspondence between her/story and national history” (Larrier 2000:2). Martinican writer and theorist Raphaël Confiant also contributed to the linguistic research on the Creole language. He initially wrote his first novels in Creole and later switched to French. 7 The publication of the manifesto Eloge de la Créolité (1989) by three prominent Martinican intellectuals—Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant—generated new discussions regarding the politics of identity, language, and culture. In this text, they criticized the Négritude movement, led by Aimé Césaire, for its exclusive racial and cultural allegiance to Africa. They distanced themselves from Antillanité (conceived by Glissant as the space and identity resulting from the weaving of cultural ties between the Caribbean archipela-

Toward a Creole Poetics

57

go and the Americas), and promoted Creolization, or Creoleness, as the new cultural and linguistic movement in the French Caribbean. Although they recognize their debts to both Césaire and Glissant and borrow heavily from the latter’s work, they seem to make a tabula rasa of past theories and propose an affirmation of a plural identity and a linguistic “réflexion” [thought] on Creole. According to the Creolists, neither Négritude nor Antillanité possesses the qualities of “vision intérieure” [internal vision] to arrive at the ultimate cultural and linguistic synthesis that Caribbean letters might need. It seems to the Creolists that “le grand cri poétique de Césaire” [the great poetic scream] against cultural alienation and assimilation in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal missed the opportunity to articulate its creolized nature: La Négritude a restitué le cri original venant de la cale du bateau que nous avons perdu. Mais ce cri nous fut restitué de manière insuffisante, comme symbolique, car la Négritude ne dénouera pas le silence qui avait succédé au cri. Elle ne pouvait pas. Il aurait fallu pour ce faire, suivre cette trace de silence dans les méandres du système d’habitation, épouser les balbutiements africains, s’émouvoir de la diversité éthno-culturelle, et habiter la parole nocturne, qui s’élève dedans la plantation. En clair, pour dénouer ce silence, il aurait fallu ne pas rompre avec le conteur. La Négritude ne réassume pas les stratégies créoles de résistance. . . . Sa résistance à elle, s’effectue avec des armes qui viennent d’Europe, donc aliénantes. [Negritude restituted the original scream of resistance coming from the slave hold ship that we lost. But this symbolic scream was incomplete because Negritude fails to denounce the silence following this scream. It could not do it. In order to do so, it would require one to follow the trace of this silence in the maze of the plantation system, recognize African stammerings and be proud of the ethnic and cultural diversity and live with the nocturnal word emerging from the plantation. In order words, to break the silence, one should stay in close contact with the storyteller. Negritude fails to recognize the Creole way of expression as a strategy of resistance. Negritude’s resistance is based on the European model, which is alienating.] (Lettres Créoles 170–71)

In addition to their criticism of Césaire’s neglect of the “matériel du terroir” [local cultural production, meaning Creolism], the Créolité writers reject his universalist perception 8 and propose to continue where they think Glissant stops: “L’Antillanité ne nous est pas accessible sans vision intérieure. Et la vision intérieure n’est rien sans la totale acceptation de notre créolité. . . . Nous déclarons que la Créolité est le ciment de notre culture et qu’elle doit régir les fondations de notre antillanité” [Antillanité is not accessible to us without an internal vision. And this internal vision does not work without the total acceptation of our creoleness. . . . We declare that Créolité is the cement of our culture and it must support the foundation of our antillanité] (Eloge de la Créolité 26). Considering themselves to be Glissant’s disciples, they man-

58

Chapter 2

age to go beyond the master, as critic James Arnold notes: “Be that as it may, Chamoiseau and Confiant’s Eloge de la Créolité has undeniably had a popular acceptance that Glissant’s essays on Creole culture have yet to attain” (1995:28). The founders of Creolité face criticism for portraying and praising themselves as the sole thinkers in search of an authentic Creole identity and ideology. Such claim to authenticity is fused with a narrow essentialist vision of identity. In addition, they fail to recognize significantly the female voices who have contributed to the tradition of oral culture. Despite their works, which exposed the myths surrounding the possibility of the return to Africa, and which opened the way for the exploration of Creoleness as a new esthetics in literature, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra are excluded from the Créolist literary history. Their novels support and illustrate these seminal ideas regarding Creoleness: hybridized culture and identity, and revalorization of Creole. While some critics accuse the women writers of shying away from theorizing, 9 they in fact restate in a different vein some of the criticisms leveled at Négritude at an earlier period by writers like René Depestre, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Wole Soyinka. The novelists incorporate theory in their narratives without claiming any ideology. The proponents of Négritude were accused of excessive theorization regarding philosophical and political questions of identity, race, and culture. The Créolité movement was able to develop in great part due to the women’s interrogation of the return, which broadens the perspectives on the African continent. Chamoiseau and Confiant’s praise of Condé and Schwarz-Bart in Lettres Créoles (1989) does not seem convincing enough to compensate for the exclusion of the women writers. James Arnold considers the male writers’ gesture “a tactical necessity and not a necessary outgrowth of their theory” (35). He goes on to state that there exists in the French Caribbean a masculinist versus a womanist literary tradition beginning with Césaire, Glissant, and the Créolité writers, who have a penchant for theorizing: “Women and any woman-authored competing tradition are excluded from the [Creole] tradition, are effectively silenced by an exclusively masculine historiography” (32). I argue that not all these women novelists are silenced by some form of exclusion. None of these female writers of this study wants to subscribe exclusively to a Creole aesthetic in their work. Condé, for her part, warns of cultural terrorism from the Créolité movement, which is obsessed with the idea of a Creolized authenticity (1995:305). In fact, she questions this fixation and seems suspicious of it. Of all the female writers of the French Caribbean, including Gisèle Pine10 au, whose work closely relates to that of the Creolists, Schwarz-Bart is most recognized for her contribution to Creoleness. In the literary review Textes et Documents (no. 2, 1979), Jean Bernabé particularly recognizes his debt to her for revalorizing the oral tradition and endowing the Caribbean writer with the quality of the conteur in Ti Jean L’Horizon—the very same

Toward a Creole Poetics

59

project that he and Créolité writers Chamoiseau and Confiant undertake as modern conteurs: portraying “le petit peuple” 11 [the peasant] and transposing “la parole à l’écriture” [the spoken word into writing]. The peasant class is monolingual and only speaks Creole. The conteur, the male storyteller, is traditionally from the peasant class. The conteur or marqueur de parole 12 [marker of word] is well-represented in Les Maîtres de la parole créole (1995), by Raphaël Confiant. The author interviews twenty-six male story-tellers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, French Guiana, and St-Lucia about their craft. A parallel study on the conteuse [female storyteller] might be complementary. The conteuse is mostly absent from the Créolité movement, although Chamoiseau portrays Marie Sophie Laborieux as conteuse in Texaco, but gives her masculine qualities specifically as the “femme-matador, femme à deux graines” [woman matador, woman with two balls]. Despite Chamoiseau’s portrayal of his heroine as a masculine conteuse, he deserves credit for having given this role to a female character. Nonetheless, I agree with James Arnold’s criticism of the Creolists’ notable phallocentric tendency: On reading Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, not to mention Glissant, we would be hard-pressed to account for all those grandmothers or elderly aunts, those repositories of oral history, folk medicine, and stories of all sorts who have been credited by nearly all women writers. None of these female figures of cultural transmission find their way into the history of oraliture that Chamoiseau and Confiant have constructed. (1995:30)

The femme matador is also an archetype of strong female characters in the Caribbean world and in literature in general. In Haiti, these resilient women are called “poto mitan” [the pillars] 13 of their communities, where they use their voice, their strength, and their skills in their fight for survival. These courageous women are involved in politics and economic and social activism in order to keep their communities from being totally destroyed by poverty, lack of education, and globalization market. According to Beverly Ormerod: “In her capacity to withstand setbacks and misfortune, there is something of the femme matador’s stubborn refusal to be browbeaten” (105). The characters of Télumée Lougandor in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), by Schwarz-Bart, or Man Tine in La rue case-nègres (1950), by Joseph Zobel, to name a few, are some examples of femme matador in Caribbean literature. Télumée Lougandor is, moreover, a conteuse or l’orituraine [female storyteller] 14 par excellence. She is fluent in storytelling. She commands her autobiographical narrative as well as those of her relatives. Schwarz-Bart also inscribes the presence of the conteuse in Ti Jean L’Horizon and gives her a voice. The lady with a mouth like a duck also possesses the skills of

60

Chapter 2

storytelling, and excels in retelling Ti Jean’s own story to him. More importantly, Ti Jean learns about the delusions of his grandfather’s story through her. In addition to representing the figure of the conteur and the conteuse, Simone Schwarz-Bart combines the characteristics of the dominant figure of the Maroon and that of the griot. In part of West African culture, the griot is the keeper of oral tradition. He is also a musician who performs by reciting important historical events and transmitting knowledge to the next generation. In the Caribbean context, Schwarz-Bart transforms him into a conteur who gathers the children born on the hills of Fond Zombi at nighttime to tell them the stories of African life and of the Maroons’ constant fight for freedom in Guadeloupe. Wademba, the maroon and the conteur, is “le dernier nègre d’Afrique” [the last negro from Africa], who transposes other aspects of African culture into the Caribbean. Ti Jean, his (grand)son, carries the cultural legacy and becomes a storyteller to tell his own adventures in the land of Africa. Storytelling is a very important part of African and Caribbean cultures. The role of the griotte, the female storyteller in African culture, is equally important in keeping the tradition of oral culture. The young protagonist Sisi Tambu learns from her grandmother the story of Nigerian colonization in Nervous Conditions (1989). Many writers from the Diaspora recall in their fiction the moments spent listening to stories their grandmothers told them. They, themselves, follow in their grandmother’s footsteps by becoming griots/griottes [storytellers/novelists]. The need for Schwarz-Bart and other Caribbean writers to take back the role of conteur/conteuse or marqueur de parole [marker of word] is catalyzed by the realization of the disintegration of the Creole culture. The image of Solibo, the conteur in Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique, being choked by (Creole) words in his mouth (1988) mirrors Creole’s decline. The negation of Creole culture has been reinforced since Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyana became French departments in 1946: “At the same time that the traditional economic and social base was eroded, so the traditional culture it sustained was subject to increased dilution, fragmentation. Dress, food, family structures, music and, not least, the Creole language itself, were all exposed in their different ways to marked Europeanization” (Burton/Reno 1995:5). All aspects of life are permeated by French culture while the importance and relevance of Creole are minimized in these islands. Caribbean writers and intellectuals undertake work on Creole to prevent “spiritual and cultural death” in the islands (Burton/Reno 6). The increase in the publication of folk tales and children’s narratives is a sign of Creole’s revival. Suzanne Crosta reminds us that the exploration of childhood or the past is intended primarily for adults. She also postulates that:

Toward a Creole Poetics

61

Le discours du récit d’enfance aux Antilles contredit l’argument du “tabula rasa” des idéologies colonialistes et néo-colonialistes. . . . Le devoir de mémoire dans ces récits . . . est d’autant plus important car ils évoquent aussi l’historique de leurs communautés respectives. . . . Cet investissement dans l’oraliture 15 joue sur l’illusion de la vérité historique, en même temps cette tradition fournit ses propres stratégies de lecture de l’univers caribéen. [The discourse on children’s narrative in the Caribbean counteracts the argument of “tabula rasa” of colonialist and neocolonialist ideologies. . . . The task of memory in these narratives . . . is so important that they also emphasize the history of their respective communities. . . . This investment in oraliture mirrors the illusion of historical truth while this tradition provides its own reading strategies of the Caribbean world.] (1998:6)

Ti Jean L’Horizon, a children’s narrative turned epic novel, inscribes itself in the same register. To reclaim the Creole culture is important for SchwarzBart, but equally important is the choice of language in which her work of reclamation is performed. Unlike Confiant, who wrote a number of novels in Creole, the issue for Schwarz-Bart is not writing in Creole, but the working of her language into French. Through the focus on her mother tongue, she represents the notion of “home” defined in Ti Jean L’Horizon as the return to folk culture and orality. The reclamation of Creole culture as a territorial identity replaces the failed but fertile experience of the return to Africa. Ti Jean’s return to Guadeloupe indicates that home is not Africa, but the Caribbean, which was previously overlooked by seekers of identity in the land of ancestors. Home is the re-discovery of oraliture, which comprises of the use of proverbs, songs, and storytelling in Ti Jean L’Horizon. It helps to express the cultural realities of the Caribbean and to maintain the oral culture. The oral quality of the narrative in Ti Jean L’Horizon is kept through the structure of the folktale. The novel’s division into nine books serves as an essential indicator of the hero’s stages of growth. Each book contains a subtitle from which the narrator or conteur/conteuse announces the content of the chapter. The narrator gives the impression of having an audience, to whom he/she speaks directly, inviting it to participate, and sometimes seeking it out as a witness. This device is the equivalent of the conventional call and response formula “Krik? Krak!” in Caribbean storytelling, where the oral poet starts by saying “Krik?,” to which the audience answers “Krak!” According to Chamoiseau and Confiant, “la réponse du crac veut dire nous” [the answer to the Krak refers to us], emphasizing the collective process at work. The “Krik? Krak!” call equally refers to the author and to its readers. It brings to light the writer’s preoccupation and engagement. Embodying the figure of the Maroon, Schwarz-Bart figuratively attempts to “marroner le français” [destabilize the French language] in order to communicate with us, the readers. Furthermore she informs us of the potential in making it her language. She does so by manipulating, distorting, and subvert-

62

Chapter 2

ing the language in order to express Caribbean realities. The novel works as what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls a “speakerly text,” emphasizing its multiple oral layers. The author’s linguistic marronage functions as cultural resistance inscribed in the narrative. It seeks to reclaim a traditional Creole way of expression that is being erased in the Caribbean. Other aspects of orality are defined through the use of proverbs, which reflect the values and beliefs of the characters. Ti Jean L’Horizon contains a rich linguistic repertory of proverbs. Their insertion in the narrative highlights the use of parable in storytelling. Proverbs require deciphering from listeners and readers: “La feuille qui se détache de l’arbre ne tombe jamais loin de ses racines” (260). This proverb is a metaphor for Ti Jean (la feuille) [the leaf] returning to his roots (Creole culture). Not only are proverbs considered words of wisdom, but they are also cultivated as a distinct means of expression in the narrative and in the Creole culture. The following Creole proverb is translated into French: “Je sais qu’il y a des bois derrière les bois, des mondes derrière des mondes” (261). Enunciated by Ti Jean, it illustrates the idea that the world of knowledge is infinite. This proverb could also be interpreted as his curiosity to discover other worlds and cultures. It also delineates the idea that the reality of life is much more complex than people think. The powerful metaphors of this proverb give the reader an idea of the melody of the Creole language. As Kitzie McKinney argues, proverbs are “vehicles of education and initiation” for the character as well as for the reader (1996:27). For instance, in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, the grandmother, Toussine, uses proverbs to teach Télumée life lessons. Proverbs also function as commentary on some of characters. They reveal traditional respect for the old, who often use them as words of wisdom. After rescuing Ti Jean from death in Paris, Eusèbe l’Ancien, Ti Jean’s mentor, believes that he still smells the odor of death around him. In their conversation, Ti Jean is being challenged to refrain from using unnecessary words by Eusèbe, the sorcerer. The conversation between the two characters is punctuated with repetitions. Eusèbe asks all the questions; Ti Jean’s responses mirror Eusèbe’s own expressions. Ti Jean succeeds in mimicking the old man and proves to be as witty and wise as he is. The dialogue reveals an economy of repetition. The old man understands that Ti Jean needed to flee Guadeloupe in order to come back to it. Ti Jean, a metaphor for the “grain” that travels far away, carries the old man’s secret lineage: “la graine . . . emporte le secret de l’arbre.” Ti Jean, who fails to find genealogy in Africa, accepts his unknown origins in the end. The return to Creole culture in the narrative of Ti Jean L’Horizon also manifests itself through music, described as a cultural component of the Creole landscape’s everydayness. The incessant sounds of the tam-tams resonate throughout the villages during Ti Jean’s journey to Africa. Most importantly, musical rhythm is expressed through the sounds of words. For exam-

Toward a Creole Poetics

63

ple, there is a sustained movement in the following sentences, in which the narrator exposes Ti Jean’s mother and her first lover’s passion, and the loss they endure: “Leurs sangs allaient si bien ensemble qu’elle tomba enceinte dans l’année de son baptême. Mais elle ne sentait pas le poids de son ventre, qui lui paraissait gonflé d’air tel un ballon de baudruche; et le sixième mois toutes ses espérances tombèrent en eau et en sang”(28). When read out loud in French, the series of nasal vowels lend a musical cadence to the sentence. They bring awareness to the oral quality of the text. The metaphoric language used in this passage points to the destabilization of the French to suit the Creole language. Musical inscription, which emphasizes oral culture, is noticeable by other means in the narrative. For instance, when Eloise, Ti Jean’s mother, makes love to her man, her moans echo throughout the whole village and wake up the community, especially the women, who feel impelled to imitate her. Eloise a “musicienne de l’ombre,” uses her voice to integrate herself and mark her arrival into the community of the valley, where folks do not mingle with the hill people she left behind. The narrator states that amorous screams coming from Eloise, sound like drums, flutes, violins, guitars, etc., as if it were an orchestra. The cries were so contagious and ecstatic that other voices joined the nocturnal concert. This passage in the narrative represents the community’s celebration of oral culture. Adjectives representing sounds are used to describe the voices of the “musiciennes” [women musicians], which are compared to six different musical instruments. The use of key words “orchestra, concert, living wave” brings out the lively qualities of oral culture. In other words, SchwarzBart attempts to revalorize Creole folk culture by transforming a simple incident of lovemaking into a grandiose “nocturnal concert” into which the whole village participates. It is a collective celebration of folklore and the claiming of Creole language. Songs function as elements of transition to ease Ti Jean’s passages amid shifting worlds just as they do for his mother, Awa-Elise, who uses her musical voice to make her entrance into the new territory of the valley. Songs coupled with magical incantations are sung at key moments of the hero’s quest. They are also Ti Jean’s companions during his long, solitary, and arduous journey. Arriving at the sight of an unknown river, he is stunned and anxious by the magnitude of the world in which he finds himself alone, neither with friend nor enemy. He laughs at the chain of events that leads him to this river. When he is tired of laughing, he shoots out the song of the river from words that he makes up himself (241). At the end of his journey, when Ti Jean is about to reach home, he sings a victory song to announce his return home and greet the community. After many trials, he succeeds in killing the oppressive Beast and brings back the sun to Guadeloupe.

64

Chapter 2

O mes amis Je reviens je reviens J’ai rempli ma mission au-delà des collines Et je vous dis Bonjour. (301)

A polyphony of voices informs us that an oral process lives within the narrative. The polyphonic nature of the narrative mimics the folktale’s structure with its various narrators and interventions. Different minor characters repeatedly narrate the same tale. Eusèbe, the old sorcerer, knows about Ti Jean’s journey. The lady who has a mouth like a duck tells Ti Jean a story similar to his own. Also playing the role of the storyteller, the omnipresent narrator, who controls the narrative, addresses the reader twice in books 4 and 6. This intervention erases the distance between the narrator and the reader. There are many occurrences of a character’s slippage into the oral style of narration. Ti Jean becomes a storyteller in addition to his role as a character. He narrates many times his heroic journey to the people. As a mediator and through his storytelling skills, Ti Jean is able to reconcile the two worlds that were divided in the beginning of the narrative. At the end of orphic quest, he learns to celebrate the oral culture, which is the most important aspect of his cultural identity: “le premier don que la nature m’ait fait, c’est la voix, la voix humaine, compagnon” (157). In the oral tradition, the storyteller can present different versions of a tale by adding or eliminating elements that help captivate the audience’s attention. Storytelling is also being performed for an audience inscribed in the narrative. Many voices contribute to Ti Jean’s tale, which begins as an individual story but ends as a collective one. This telling and retelling of the tale points to the oral culture of which the use of Creole is the most important manifestation: the original folktale is of Creole material. The reader may find some Creole expressions scattered throughout Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), a novel that the author co-wrote with her ex-husband, André Schwarz-Bart. The presence of Creole in Ti Jean L’Horizon’s narrative, however, is not inscribed in written words, but by the Creole rhythm or music that emanates from the text. The use of rich metaphors and the treatment of proverbs and songs amplify the Creole rhythm and the various oral components of the text. The transformation of Ti Jean, a Caribbean folktale, into a work of literature, reveals the text’s métissage. A concept once associated with the notion of race-mixing, métissage goes beyond its previous definition to extend in the post-modern era into the domain of arts, culture, and literature. As critic Sylvie Kandé points out:

Toward a Creole Poetics

65

Dans le processus actuel de globalisation économique, politique, culturelle, le métissage est plus que jamais un concept-clé pour comprendre les aventures et l’avenir de l’identitaire dans l’aire francophone. . . . La notion de métissage et les représentations qui lui sont associées sont ainsi devenues centrales dans les différentes disciplines des sciences humaines, dans la théorie littéraire et le travail des écrivains francophones. [In the actual process of economic, political, and cultural globalization, “métissage” is more than ever a key concept to help understand the journey and the future of the individual in the francophone sphere. . . . The notion of “métissage” and the representations that are linked to it are being explored in different fields of sciences, literary criticism, and the works of francophone writers.] (1999:8)

Schwarz-Bart subverts the French language and reworks the Creole to invent a harmonious way for the two languages to cohabit in the narrative. There is no division between them. She blurs the socio-linguistic boundaries between them. Their unequal social and political position is not stressed. The narrative is constructed out of the interaction between French and Creole. The text’s métissage is also manifested through the double belonging of some words to both French and Creole. When used as verbs, some specific words have another meaning in French. For example, the verb “calebasser” in the following quote illustrates a linguistic displacement, or better yet, métissage: “Assez de ventres calebassaient avant l’heure, et Ti Jean décida d‘attendre l’âge de mettre la fille en case, avant d’habiter son corps vivant” (73). The noun “calebasse,” which exists in French and Creole, means a squash whose hard-shelled, round shape serves as a container after the insides are scooped out. It could be used to carry water in tropical countries, or serve as an art object. But the verb “calebasser” does not exist in French or Creole. Here, it functions as a metaphor for the female condition of pregnancy. Schwarz-Bart transforms the word into a verb and makes the reader aware of the textual métissage of the narrative. In addition, she integrates diverse aspects of orality (proverbs, songs, storytelling), and uses a series of metaphors in the narrative to stress its hybrid aspect, or métissage. The following passage illustrates the hybrid quality of the text. Awa-Eloise anxiously wants to get her father’s approval of her relationship with her lover but is afraid to go see him: Eloise voyait bien que l’homme marinait dans un triste bouillon. Et tous les jours que Dieu tisse comme disaient les gens de la vallée, elle était tentée de prendre le sentier pour demander consentement au père. . . . Mais elle craignait qu il la retienne, s’étant peut-être habituée à son jeune corps vivant, à son parfum de vanille éclatée. (28)

66

Chapter 2

The two verbs “marinait” and “tisse” refer to the length of time. Awa-Eloise notices that her lover has been depressed for some time. Here, depression is associated with the image of “bouillon,” a vegetable soup in Creole culture, and in this case, a metaphor for trouble. The word play is noticeable in “bouillon” having the same root as brouiller, which in French means to trouble, confuse, or create antagonism. The narrator makes us aware of the metaphorical use of the verb “tisse” for the passage of time, and then signals its local use by asserting that that is the way the valley people speak. Here, this emphasis refers to the oral aspect of the narrative. The narrator switches from using the sauce metaphor “marinait, bouillon” to express sadness and trouble to illustrating a sexual image, “parfum de vanille éclatée.” The key words “bouillon, mariner, tisser” are linked to the concept of métissage due to their connotations of mixing different ingredients. One of the main aspects that inform the métissage of the text lies in the characters’ hybridity. AwaEloise, Wademba, and Ti Jean are hybrid “creatures.” Awa-Eloise is the embodiment of hybridized culture. She was given a Christian name (Eloise) when she got baptized. Her double name (African and Christian) is a marker of her cultural identity. Her father, Wademba, has the ability to transform himself into a supernatural creature nicknamed “The Immortal.” He is also called “Le Congre vert” [Green Congre]. Ti Jean, the son and the grandson, is endowed with the same magic power. When he travels through time and space, he is at times half-man, half-owl (54). The apparition and disappearance of the hero in different places at different times signal the integration of magic realism (one of the characteristics of the folktale) into the narrative. MAGIC REALISM While the narrator reclaims Creole culture, he purposely emphasizes how Fond-Zombi, his village, “a même une longue histoire chargée de merveilles” (12). The hero’s spectacular descent into the beast’s womb and his oscillation between the past and the present are manifestations of magic realism in the novel. For a definition of magic realism, 16 a technique first glimpsed in the novels of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (but that had, in fact, been the basis of the writings of Nigerian writers like Amos Tutuola [1920–1987]) or Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquéz, I have relied on the Haitian writer Jacques Stéphen Alexis’s article “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens,” in Présence Africaine (1956). For Alexis, a new vision of social realism needs to emerge in accordance with the writer’s engagement in the fight for his/her people. A reinvestment of the Caribbean cultural legacy—folktales, legends, and myths—with an emphasis on history must be inscribed in literature and the arts. According to Alexis, magic

Toward a Creole Poetics

67

realism is comprised of l’imaginaire [the imaginary] and social realism. Schwarz-Bart’s use of magic realism in Ti Jean L’Horizon is closest to the definition of Alexis although it does not project a clear socialist agenda in the narrative. Ti Jean L’Horizon is, however, composed of a juxtaposition of two treatments of magic realism. There is the traditional magic realism: one in which metamorphosis and the fantastic inform the stunning nature of the perception of so-called reality. For Ti Jean, there is no distinction between the reality of his surrounding and the world of dreams in which he travels: “Toutes choses avaient une à la fois une une allure insolite et familière” (140). The other type of magic realism in the text is the more generic African worldview, in which the marvelous or magical is a day-to-day reality that frames the narrative genres of the continent, such as the epic story, songs, and proverbs. This novel itself could be compared to the marvelous Beast in regard to its use of mythical allusions, whereby metamorphosis of a sort imposes upon the reader the need to look anew at how Schwarz-Bart tries to resist the dominant discourse by reinventing a Creole universe. It becomes imperative for Schwarz-Bart to emphasize this cultural legacy that keeps alive collective memory. In his article “Marvelous Realism, The Way out of Négritude,” Michael Dash suggests that: Such an attitude would signify for the Third World writer an investigation of his past, which goes beyond the documented privations of slavery and colonization to a more speculative vision of history in which the consciousness of the dominated cultures would predominate. . . . That is to say that colonization and slavery did not make things of men, but in their own way the enslaved people have in their own imagination so reordered their reality as to reach beyond the tangible and concrete to acquire a new sensibility which could aid in the harsh battle for survival. (1974: 57)

Through the use of magic realism in the narrative, Schwarz-Bart distances herself from Négritude and rejects the idea of going back to Africa. This is manifested in her focus on Creole culture. Magic realism, therefore, becomes for her the tool with which to examine the past, the present, and the culture of the Caribbean people. As Jacques Stéphen Alexis reminds us: Qu’est-ce donc que le Merveilleux sinon l’imagerie dans laquelle un peuple enveloppe son expérience, reflète sa conception du monde et de la vie, sa foi, son espérance, sa confiance en l’homme, en une grande justice, et l’explication qu’il trouve aux forces antagonistes du progrès? [What is the Marvelous other than the imagery in which a people protects its experience, reflects its conception of the world and life, its faith, hope and trust in man and true justice, and the answers he is looking for in facing the antagonistic forces of progress?] (1956:267)

68

Chapter 2

The use of magic realism not only reflects another aspect of the oral culture but also sheds lights on the beliefs of the Caribbean people, their way of perceiving their world, and their attempt in trying to make sense of their past and actual realities. Magic realism has a transformative quality in that it gives writers and characters the freedom to use their imagination beyond the realm of concrete reality. The idea of metamorphosis has another dimension. It is perceived as a means of survival in the presence of adversity and tragedy. Using her magical powers, the character Man Cia in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle can transform herself into a black dog. Likewise, Wademba and his grandson, Ti Jean, have the ability to transform themselves into animals. The metamorphosis of the characters is a mise en abyme in the text: the transformation of Ti Jean, the Caribbean folktale, into an epic novel. The hero’s final metamorphosis occurs at the end of his journey, when he rediscovers Guadeloupe by killing the Beast. His courageous action brings the sun back to his community in Guadeloupe, which was overshadowed during the Beast’s domination. The metaphor of the sun and the shadow reveals the forces of opposition in the chaotic world of Guadeloupe. The mythological significance of the sun is registered in other Caribbean texts. The sun is personified as the character Compère Général Soleil in Jacques Stéphen Alexis’ second novel, which carries the same title: “Le Général Soleil est un grand nègre, c’est l’ami des pauvres, le papa, il ne montre qu’un œil seul jaune aux chrétiens vivants, mais il lutte pour vous à chaque instant, et nous indique la route” [General Sun is a big negro; he is the friend of the poor people, the daddy; he only shows one yellow eye to the living Christians, but he fights for you every time and shows us the way] (quoted in Toureh 155). Another novel that depicts the sun as a character is Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé Soleil (1981). It takes up the historic resistance of Louis Delgrès, the rebellious officer who died in Guadeloupe’s Matouba hills fortress in his fight against slavery. The sun represents suffering, hope, and resistance. It is also the symbol of the hard work of the slaves, who toil in the plantations from sunrise to sunset. For Ti Jean the return of the sun to Guadeloupe signals his focus on his native island. When he wakes up from his long dream and travels back to Guadeloupe, he has a new understanding of his island’s fragmented history and hybridized culture. Like Véronica in Heremakhonon, he realizes that Africa cannot be the father he is searching for. Instead he goes back to Guadeloupe, which is seen as the original matrix to which its children return. Ti Jean’s return to Guadeloupe stresses Schwarz-Bart’s commitment to represent Guadeloupe as a viable space in which to rediscover one’s identity. Her focus on orality is an attempt to give legitimacy to Creole, a language that is not recognized as official in Guadeloupe. Unlike Condé’s characters, who experience difficulties in rerooting themselves in Guadeloupean and Creole culture, Schwarz-Bart’s characters, despite their trials, manage to

Toward a Creole Poetics

69

return to the very place they loathed before their journeys. The novel suggests the return to Caribbean roots as a means of healing the original wound resulting from historical and cultural discontinuity with Africa. It also contends that, in order to return, one must first acknowledge one’s origin, language, and culture, and that the idea of going back to the source is often more a utopia than the actual return. As we see through Ti Jean’s journey, sometimes it takes leaving and experiencing another culture and community to appreciate one’s own. NOTES 1. Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987). 2. Ina Césaire, Enfants de Passages: La geste de Ti Jean (Paris: Editions Caribbéennes, 1987); Ina Césaire and Joëlle Laurent, Contes de vie et de mort aux Antilles (Paris: Nubia, 1976); Thérèse George, Contes et légendes aux Antilles (Paris: F. Nathan, 1963). 3. Evelyn Voldeng, “Le cycle de Ti-Jean dans les contes populaires en Bretagne, au Canada français et aux Antilles,” Espace Caraïbe 1 (1993): 113–23. 4. Danielle Georges wrote an excellent essay, “Tituba’s Stairway: Representations of Tituba in Historical and Fictional Texts,” which will be published shortly. 5. Annie Lebrun, an expert on Césaire’s works, who rightly defended Césaire against the Creolists’ unfounded criticism, was the subject of misogynist and racist remarks in articles written respectively by Confiant and Chamoiseau. “Les Elucubrations de Dame Lebrun” and “Une semaine en pays dominé,” Antilla 619 (February 1995): 4, 33. See also Annie Lebrun’s study of Césaire Soleil cou coupé (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1996). 6. See Dany Bébel-Gisler’s study of the opposing forces between French and Creole in her text La langue créole, force jugulée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1976). See also Bébel-Gisler, Le défi guadeloupéen. Devenir ce que nous sommes (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1989). See also Micheline Rice-Maximin, Karukera Présence littéraire de la Guadeloupe (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). 7. Confiant, who promotes Creoleness in works of literature, finds himself in a paradoxical position in switching from Creole to French. He realized long ago that he cannot afford to keep writing in Creole if he wants to have a readership and make a living as a writer. Books are rare commodities in the Caribbean, where there are very few publishing houses. For whom would he be writing anyway when the majority of the people cannot afford to buy expensive books and do not want necessarily to read Creole texts? 8. The Creolists are guilty of the same sin (essentialist view of identity) of which they accuse Césaire of. See Jacky Dahomey, “Habiter la Créolité ou le Heurt de L’Universel,” Revue Chemins Critiques 1, no. 3 (December 1989): 109–33. 9. These women writers indeed theorize in their writings, but indirectly so. I argue that the very fact that they reveal through their writing their distinct positions against ideologies, regarding culture, identity, language is in itself a theory. See James Arnold, “The Gendering of Créolité,” in Penser La Créolité (Paris: Kahartala, 1995). 10. See Gisèle Pineau, Un papillon dans la cité (Paris: Editions Sepia, 1992); La Grande Drive des Esprits (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1993). 11. “Le petit peuple” refers to the “djobeur,” the proletariat, an urban figure. 12. Marqueur de parole, a term coined by the Créolité writers, is translated in English as “word marker” or “scratcher.”

70

Chapter 2

13. See the documentary “Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy” (2009). A project of The USCB (University of South California, Barbara) Center for Black Studies Research. See also the article “Christiane Taubira, Poto-Mitan D’arnaud Montebourg? Peut-on être le Poto-Mitan de quelqu’un” posted by Sandrine Joseph on Poto-mitan.com. 14. Renée Larrier connotes the word “l’oraturaine” the female counterpart of “conteur,” “l’oraturaine” to claim her “rightful place” in the history of oral literature, in her text Francophone Women Writers from the Caribbean and Africa. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). 15. “L’oraliture” has an Afro-Caribbean origin, and the neologism “l’oraliturain” (another definiton for conteur), was created by the Creolists. 16. For more definitions of magic realism, lo real maravilloso, see Mariella Aita, Simone Schawrz-Bart dans la poétique du réel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008).

Chapter Three

Rethinking the Return

Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their own bodies for the same reasons, by the same law with the same fatal law, with the same goal. Woman must put herself in the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. —Hélène Cixous 1

In Juletane (1982), the Guadeloupean writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra emphasizes a woman’s difficulty of experiencing the return to Africa because of the intricacies of polygamy or, precisely, polygyny. 2 Warner-Vieyra uses the cultural practice of polygamy as the symptom of a social order in which the identity and social meanings of women are determined in relation to men. Women’s identities are entirely derivative of their relations with men (father, husband, son, etc.). Warner-Vieyra seems to indict polygamy as a causal agent of female mental disorders and physical illness in the patriarchal system. In this chapter, I link the metaphorical value of polygamy to the impossibility of returning to Africa while examining its disastrous effects on a female protagonist born outside of this cultural system and outside of Africa, and yet tied to the continent by her ancestry. Furthermore, I also emphasize how writing and reading the Guadeloupean woman subject leads to the creation of an “imagined community,” of women writers and readers in which a woman’s story becomes legible. Juletane’s journal provides a space for selfreflection, but it only conveys meaning through the participating presence of a female reader, Hélène Parpin. The framing narrative of Hélène as the discoverer and reader of Juletane’s journal is central to its meaning and suggests that the other problem in the novel is the legibility of a woman’s text. As a Guadeloupean native who had lived in France before “going back” to Africa with her new African husband, Mamadou, her cultural difference is unrecognizable in the continent. “Framed” into a polygamous situation with71

72

Chapter 3

out her consent, Juletane sees her happy “return” to Africa threatened by this institution, a true cultural shock for her. She becomes mad as a result of her situation and attempts to come to terms with it through writing. The eponymous heroine’s quest for identity and happiness ends with negative results. Juletane’s return is more or less conditioned by polygamy because of its central importance in many African communities and cultures. Instead of finding genealogy in Africa, she discovers writing as a key to liberation and self-construction. The journal is the confessional mode through which she enters into subjectivity. Having found a language of her own, Juletane, as a first-person narrator, becomes the subject-in-process on her arduous journey fraught with deception, madness, and death. The heroine, at first victimized by the order of things in her fatherland, manages to open for herself a space of her own—her diary. Writing becomes for her a survival strategy. Yet, overcome by the tension between life and death impulses, she dies in the end. But she dies as a writer describing in a vitriolic way the reality of a polygamous African household from a diasporic and feminist standpoint. Themes of displacement and internal exile illustrate the heroine’s loss of self. Deep and unresolved internal alienation leads to depression, denial, and violence. Even before Juletane literally falls into the pit of madness in Africa, her life in Guadeloupe has been insignificant: “Hélas! Je n’ai ni parents, ni amis”(13). Orphaned at a tender age, Juletane suffered from isolation in Guadeloupe, carrying with her a sense of not belonging to her immediate surroundings. She imagines her life cursed by fate, divine malediction, and historical circumstances. Conceived one night during Lent, traditionally a time of abstinence, she judges her father responsible for her existential problems. Considering herself a victim of the history of slavery since birth, she has difficulties understanding her historical identity. Juletane is troubled not only by the idea of a divine curse on her life, but also by the mystery of her ancestral roots obscured by slavery. She agonizes over for not having a (last) name—in other words a legitimate status. She resents her supposed “bastard status” resulting from slavery, and she views Africa as the place to legitimize her new identity in a gesture similar to Véronica’s in Condé’s novel, Heremakhonon. Juletane expects to realize her legitimacy metaphorically through a male figure, Mamadou, her protector and husband, who will give her an African name. Finding identity for Juletane means finding happiness. By marrying Mamadou, in her mind and heart, she was gaining not only a husband but also a whole family. She idealizes her relationship with Mamadou and overburdens him with various roles (father, lover, and husband) to compensate for her losses. Juletane’s desire to find a name in Africa is similar to Ti Jean’s quest in Schwarz-Bart‘s Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979). The narrative is, as we know it, a saga of a painful and unfulfilled quest for origins. Unlike Ti Jean, however, who returns to his native island of Guadeloupe, Juletane remains in Africa, becomes mad, and resorts to violence.

Rethinking the Return

73

Juletane is one of the rare violent female characters portrayed in WarnerVieyra’s generation. Her violence is brought on by her entrapment in Africa, the place she had constructed as her only escape. Consequently, she refuses to leave the only place where she feels somehow wanted. She also neglects to gain the cultural skills needed to deal with her unanticipated polygamous situation. For example, she does not learn the local language, presumably Wolof, and fails to establish blood and cultural ties with her new family, who cannot speak French. Feeling trapped and unable to verbalize her inner contradictions, she attacks her surrounding and makes a spectacle of it. She is unable to control her rage and wants to scream. To demonstrate her rage, she starts by making a hole in her sheet and meticulously tearing the sheet into pieces and she further tears those pieces into tiny squares. She then scatters the pieces all over the yard and sits by the window to watch the others’ reaction. The torn sheet symbolizes Juletane’s fragmented mind which is puzzled by questions she cannot answer. The image of the torn sheet (the sheet from her bed) could also be interpreted as a link between her sexual self and her cultural identity. As she experiences difficulty in constructing a meaningful intimate relationship with Mamadou, she is unable to reconcile the different components of her cross-cultural identity. As a result, the split of her self between the Caribbean, France, and Africa becomes apparent. The image of the broken record also exemplifies Juletane’s split cultural identity. Angry at Juletane for turning on high the volume of her record player, Ndeye, Mamadou’s third wife, destroys Juletane’s favorite record (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). Totally assimilated, Juletane acknowledges the European cultural heritage as part of herself. Yet, she cannot understand African culture, another part of herself. She resists investing herself in the African culture in which she lives. She criticizes Ndeye for her lack of admiration for high (European) culture and for her consumption of trashy novels. This situation creates more tensions, cultural misunderstandings, and a sense of distrust between Juletane and the family. As they ignore her and watch her silently, Juletane has to go a step further, asserting her power by worsening her condition. She plays a double role of actor and spectator, watching others reacting to her acts of violence. The family in the compound takes a distance from her and cautiously watches her every move. Juletane’s isolation is reinforced by the fear she seems to bring to the community. She is considered an intruder since she was not chosen by Mamadou’s relatives to become his second wife. The lack of support from Mamadou and the lack of communication between her and the family reinforce her sense of alienation and push her over the edge. Expressing displeasure and anxiety, Juletane consciously displays her anger through her actions and attitude. Her responsibility regarding her irrational behavior is blurred in the text. There is no definitive indication, for in-

74

Chapter 3

stance, that she is responsible for the sudden death of Awa and Mamadou’s three children. The author intentionally leaves it up to the reader to decide whether or not Juletane should be indicted in this tragic situation. The reader is taken into her madness and cannot completely resolve whether or not Juletane murdered the children, who, after all, were one of her only tenuous human relationships. Juletane herself ponders the mystery of these three deaths: “Et la mort des enfants. Qui est responsible de leur mort? . . . Ne m’avait-on pas prescrit des gouttes?”(69). Juletane withdraws physically as well as mentally. She seems disconnected from her surroundings and the tragic situation. She remains in her room while the whole household mourns the loss of the children. She confesses to her diary that she does not miss the children after the initial of learning about their death. Her claims to be the most lucid person in the household are not founded because she loses all notion of time and experiences a sudden rage of hopelessness. She seems, however, triumphant because the tragedy makes Awa, her co-spouse, childless like her. Not completely satisfied yet, she finds solace in her journal and in the presence of her “companions and only friends, the cockroaches,” which she watches intensely as they crawl over her body. Juletane physical isolation in her bare, cockroach-filled room is representative of her mental landscape. The ambiguous nature of Juletane’s madness lies in the fact that she cannot function socially, but writes lucidly. Her surroundings seem dangerous to her and her journal provides a space where she feels safe to venture. 3 Juletane’s madness is a mode of covered and stubborn resistance, in which she even calls into question the very notion of madness and tries to revalorize it. For her, the people calling her mad know nothing about madness. She rationalizes that maybe the so-called mad people are not really mad and that it is possible that the so-called normal and simplistic people label “madness” a certain behavior that is in reality one that demonstrates wisdom (13). In the Western world, there is a tradition of labeling women who do not conform to a set of social, cultural, and/or patriarchal rules as “mad” or “monsters,” as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note in their critical text, The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979). They observe: “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (55). Juletane criticizes the cultural practice of polygamy and refuses to abide by its laws. How should one read Juletane’s madness? Is she called mad because of her refusal of polygamy? Is madness the only means, or is it a disguise through which she can examine African realities? Her madness is a process that begins with feelings of jealousy and powerlessness, eventually leading to violence and self-destruction. While Mamadou is away visiting Awa, his first wife, Juletane loses her mind in the hospital. She further acts upon her madness by breaking everything in the room and hitting

Rethinking the Return

75

herself in the wall. She suffers from depression, loneliness, and anger according to her diagnosis (51). Ambiguously, the crisis culminates with nervous laughter while the heroine remains on the verge of collapsing into an abyss. Another sign of mental deterioration is Juletane’s experiences regarding her voluntary seclusion from the outside world, her immense weight loss, and her changing self-perception. The reflection of her gaunt and emaciated body in “a broken mirror” reveals signs of anorexia: “Mes yeux trop brillants reflètent un je ne sais quoi de froid, d’inquiétude; mes pommettes saillent audessus de mes joues creuses; ma peau est terne. J’ai une tête de désespérée et d’affamée” (120). The broken mirror, like the image of the torn sheet, is a metaphor for her broken body and mind. She is physically and mentally distraught. In her text, Of Suffoctated Hearts and Tortured Souls (2006), critic Valérie Orlando notes that “madness offers a mirror image of unreality for the female heroine [Juletane] seeking relief from the socio-cultural arenas and political repressions in which she finds herself trapped” (66). Madness serves as a temporary escape for Juletane into the “unreal world,” and yet she can still perceive the reality of her situation. The second time she consults a mirror she has a favorable perception of herself and is full of hope that Mamadou still finds her attractive. The examination of Juletane’s body in the mirror is indicative of the poetic of the double at work in the text, where women go by pairs, and Juletane herself is split into two minds and two bodies. She is aware of the double gaze (hers and others’) scrutinizing and judging her body. Through her return gaze in the mirror, Juletane realizes that her body carries cultural and social marks that are indelible. As a childless female who rejects polygamy, her body is doubly marginalized in the community. It loses its cultural and social value. Under the cultural pressure of motherhood, Juletane gives the impression of wanting to get closer to her husband’s family by becoming pregnant. But she loses her baby in a car accident, which ends her hope of becoming a mother. Furthermore, the addition of a third wife (Ndeye) to the marriage shows that no one counts on her anymore to ensure Mamadou’s lineage. Moreover, Juletane’s exposed body is also racially targeted in the community. Upon reading Juletane’s journal, Hélène reflects that Juletane experiences in Africa an exile worse than the one she knew in Europe. She faces racial prejudices at the hands of her co-wife Ndeye, who calls her toubabesse (a white woman, wife of a colonial). Ndeye cleverly locks up Juletane, who had come to Africa in search of a name, in a derogatory term that refers to outsiders and colonizers. She sees her as an assimilée who rejects African culture though her refusal of polygamy and her passion for classical music. Reacting to Ndeye’s blunt rejection of her, Juletane reveals her knowledge of history and race consciousness by stating that her forefathers had worked hard and had given up their blood in the Americas so she could be a free and proud black woman. Juletane assumes naïvely that she will be accepted

76

Chapter 3

because of her skin color. Her blackness in terms of culture and race is being questioned by Ndeye. We recall that Ndeye broke Juletane’s Beethoven record, a cultural signifier for Juletane. Race and culture are not interchangeable in any culture. This African culture involves a host of tacit and non-tacit rules about which Juletane is clueless or refuses to follow. The racist attitude from the part of her rival co-wife and the selfishness of Mamadou (her husband) reinforce her sense of isolation and indignation and lead her to thoughts of revenge against the community. In addition, her inability to have children affects her stability and further alienates her. Juletane resembles the jealous and vengeful Medea of Greek mythology, who kills her rival, and then her own children because of her husband Jason’s desertion. In many African cultures motherhood defines womanhood. This trope is common in African and other world literatures. Unless a woman can conceive, presumably sons, she is not considered complete. Her social worth is equal to the number of children she can bear for the husband. The more children she brings into the world, the more she is valued in the community. In Joys of Motherhood (1979) by Buchi Emecheta, the female character Nnu Ego wants to commit suicide because her first baby boy dies. The social shame of being childless is unbearable and the collective voice in the narrative admits that “a woman without a child is not a woman” (16). In these cultures, children belong to all women regardless of their status. Juletane’s lack of understanding of this cultural aspect of motherhood, as well as her inability to comprehend the boundaries (or lack thereof) between the self and the African community, worsen her situation. She does not understand that as a co-wife, she may have killed her own children. Unable to conceive, her obsession for love turns into rage and destruction. It leaves her devoid of any compassion, and eventually leads to her death. The novel is a circular narrative that tells the sad story of a lost young woman in search of identity who finds death in Africa, the very place where her double, Hélène Parpin, wants to begin another phase of her life. Both female characters come to Africa because of a man: Juletane to follow her husband, and Hélène to forget her lover. Hélène, a Guadeloupean who had lived in Paris, comes to work in Africa as a social worker in order to put some distance between her and her lover, Hector, who deceived her. After shutting herself inside for two days to mourn her lost love, Hélène came to the realization that a woman could live by herself and decided to never suffer like that again because of a man. To finish the healing that she has started, she asked to be transferred overseas to Africa as a way to completely get over Hector and close that chapter of her life. Following her decision not to invest herself in a man, Hélène becomes a happy wanderer in Africa. She does not have the same expectations as Juletane. A few years later, she meets Hector, to whom she describes her life in Africa as being free, pleasant, and with no strings attached (57). Hélène’s

Rethinking the Return

77

happy return to Africa contrasts sharply with Juletane’s. With Juletane’s destruction of everything she was looking for (name, children, and community), the plot resembles a Greek tragedy in which no character survives. Following the death of her children—probably caused by Juletane—Awa, Mamadou’s first wife, commits suicide by throwing herself in a well. Without children, she no longer has a space in the community. Mamadou dies in a car accident. Juletane disfigures and silences Ndeye by pouring hot oil on her face. She intentionally destroys and reduces Ndeye to shame. In the end, Juletane metaphorically kills everyone in order to write. Her return to Africa is marked by the destruction of the father’s house. Juletane’s return to Africa, which she experiences through deception, is not prepared by any research she could have done. Her culture and that of Mamadou are not compatible to each other, even though they appear to be, when they were both living in Paris. The incompatibility of their cultures is compounded by the different expectations of men and women in each. Relying on the Western concept of the married couple as “becoming one,” Juletane is culturally ill-equipped to deal with a polygamous situation where three women are vying for the attention of one man. She does not want to share a husband with a woman. It is inconceivable for her to accept a husband for five days during the week and then have him leave to go to Awa in the village during the weekend. This is so strange that she feels she is living in another planet whereby she understands nothing and no one. In Juletane’s mind and consciousness a husband was an intimate other, another half and not an object that could be lent or shared. Suddenly faced with polygamy, she looks at Awa, her co-wife, with an ethno-centrist bias, saying ironically that they could have been a big happy family if she were born in a polygamous family with the spirit of sharing her master with other women. If the idea of sharing a husband is unacceptable to Juletane, accumulating wives provides great satisfaction to Mamadou, who gets more respect from the community. Having many wives gives him the impression of being wealthy and important, and having many children assures his masculinity and lineage, or clan. Juletane exposes Mamadou’s unfairness and criticizes the hypocritical nature of the polygamous system. She describes it as “a show” from the male’s point of view where everything is a façade because Mamadou appears to be rich, generous, temperate, and a good Moslem and husband. In reality it is the complete opposite because he is a broke, selfish, alcoholic liar who fails to take care of his family. She further criticizes him for his inability to financially sustain his large family. He spends beyond his means to keep the third wife happy, regardless of the disintegration of his household. In the Moslem faith, a man is only permitted to take the number of wives for which he can provide. But what is a wife to do when the husband does not follow the rules? There is no protection instituted in her favor. Religion and tradition unconditionally support male

78

Chapter 3

supremacy, as critic Cécile Accilien notes: “Religion is thus a weapon for those in power, mostly males, to maintain the status quo and do what pleases them” (2008:75). Polygamy, which secures the centrality of the male, is a fundamental element in some African and most Moslem societies. It is institutionalized with laws and rules, which are not always respected, as demonstrated in Juletane. To become part of an African community where polygamy is practiced is to accept its traditions. Véronica, in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon, and Ti Jean, in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’Horizon, have different experiences with polygamy. It does not affect Véronica, who does not mind having a relationship with a married man since she refrains from fully investing herself in Africa. As for Ti Jean, he is puzzled at first when his first African wife brings other women in the marriage, but then, he enjoys being the object of so much female attention. The novel Juletane suggests that in the patriarchal system, polygamy is designed to maintain male centrality and define female interests in relation to men. The internal division it creates among the female characters guarantees male sexual power and dominance. The women are necessarily divided because they must relate first and foremost to a man. It is relevant that Juletane is brought into polygamy, and to the return, through deception. She learns about the first wife through a jealous woman when it is too late to turn back (33). Her own total investment in her husband (father, friend, family) is misplaced, but she does not see any other alternative. Like Véronica in Heremakhonon, she could have chosen to “return” to France, her point of departure. Juletane’s co-wives invest themselves in their husband by constantly competing against each other to get his attention. Awa bears children for the husband. Ndeye, the third, childless wife, uses her cooking skills, beauty, and seductive manners to keep him around longer than the prescribed number of days he must spend with each wife. 4 She succeeds in angering Juletane and creates constant tensions between the two of them. Despite her resistance to polygamy, Juletane does not leave Mamadou because she loves him, and beyond him, she dreams of belonging somewhere and to someone. Mamadou, who does not understand Juletane’s rejection of polygamy, ignores her concerns and behaves selfishly. The portrayal of men in the narrative is negative. They act irresponsibly. Mamadou violates one of the rules of polygamy since Awa, his first wife, who is supposed to have a say in her husband’s choice, was not consulted. In addition, he minimizes the importance of Awa by not telling Juletane about her in the first place (47). Soon after arriving in Africa, Juletane notices the changes in her husband’s behavior. He behaves in such a way that she becomes confused and does not understand his mood. Later, Juletane observes that the co-wives’ hierarchy in the polygamous system is not respected. As the second wife (the one in between), or precisely the cultural outsider, she is

Rethinking the Return

79

unable to find her own space. Awa, the first or senior wife, is relegated to an inferior rank while Ndeye, the third wife, rules the house and remains the husband’s trophy. Mamadou, who prefers Ndeye, is estranged from his first and second wives. He seems burdened with the vicissitudes of polygamous life and is a victim of tradition while still playing the role of the patriarch. But his character is not fully developed in the novel, and his psychology remains vague to the reader. He serves as the necessary means for Juletane to return to Africa. Juletane’s awareness of the continent begins when she first begins a romantic relationship with him. He suddenly becomes for her a metonymy for Africa. Before meeting Mamadou, she did not know much about the colonial world nor heard words such as independence and autonomy. Juletane is surely the victim of the naïve story of a happy return that she herself invented. Her apprehensions about her co-wives prove to be false, and she misses the cultural clues that would make her situation less tense. Before her arrival to Africa, she had imagined a welcomed that was very different from what she got. At the time she did not realize that she was being welcome by his family as a new wife with the co-wife treating her like a “sister.” Since Juletane is not fully aware of her status as a second wife, she does not understand that it is the custom for a senior wife to honor a new wife coming into an existing marriage even if it causes her displeasure. For example, in Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego, already burdened with financial problems and the care of her several children, does not like the idea of her husband, Nnaife, bringing another wife into the marriage. But she follows the cultural expectations of the senior wife and feels obliged to welcome her rival with open arms. Like Nnu Ego in Joys of Motherhood, Awa, Mamadou’s first wife, does not show any signs of animosity toward Juletane, the second wife. Ndeye, the favorite wife, gets everything she wants (affection, expensive jewelry, boubous) from the husband and easily integrates herself in the marriage. She occupies a superior position in the marriage and does not express any intention of bearing children. Her nature, according to Juletane, contrasts with that of Awa, the stereotypical good mother and submissive wife. Among the three female characters married to the same man—two Africans, one French Caribbean—Juletane is the only one antagonistic to the institution of polygamy. Her disappointment with the polygamous system is the beginning of her feminist and cultural awareness. Her coming to Africa forces her to face and to raise gender issues such as sex segregation, gender discrimination, and inequality in the African community in which she lives. Feeling neglected by Mamadou, Juletane writes:

80

Chapter 3 Je le voyais [Mamadou] plus loin, volubile avec les hommes. Je ne comprenais pas non plus cette forme de ségrégation où les femmes semblaient n’avoir aucune importance dans la vie de l’homme, sauf au moment de ses plaisirs ou encore comme mères des enfants. Elles n’étaient pas les compagnes complices et confidentes.(49)

Juletane questions the woman’s place and roles in a society that relegates her to an inferior status. Women are devoid of power and are trapped in fixed gender roles of mothers, wives, and concubines. They are further restrained from making decisions in economic matters of their families, as Juletane observes. Juletane does not try to leave or change her situation because of her isolation and emotional frailty. She ends up ill and suicidal. Feeling powerless, she gives up when faced with a rigid patriarchal system in which sociocultural structures undermine women’s actions and voices and suppress their desires. But Juletane also realizes that, through writing, she can claim a voice for herself and find a way to expose these restrictions that affect women’s lives. African critic Irène D’Almeida discusses the various patriarchal restrictions some African women face when participating in different aspects of their cultures, as well as the difficulties they encounter in denouncing these restrictions (1994:11). Reflecting upon the works of many women writers from the African Diaspora, Françoise Lionnet notes: “[They] dramatize deep seated cultural misogyny and the potential fatal consequences of practices which construct women as objects of exchange within the male economy” (1995:105). Many African writers have explored the theme of polygamy in their writings. 5 It is at times represented as a cultural norm in works such as Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir (1953), and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1967). This first generation of African male writers such as Laye and Achebe has not emphasized its abusive effects on the well-being of women. The rare exceptions are Cyprien Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961), and Ousmane Sembène’s short story “Ses trois jours” in Voltaïque, and La noire de . . . Nouvelles (1962), which discuss the social, economical, and psychological problems associated with polygamy. They give a voice to their female protagonists, who are victims of the polygamous system. Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a West African male writer, raises critical questions about polygamy that is imposed on women who live in patriarchal societies where they have very little choice. In this short story “Ses trois jours” [Her Three Days], he portrays the pathological case of a woman made literally ill by her husband’s abuse. Noubé, a third wife in a polygamous marriage, falls from grace and is abandoned by her husband for a fourth, younger wife. At last, Noubé, sick and tired of the situation she has to endure, in a liberating gesture breaks the plates of food she prepared for her elusive husband, while

Rethinking the Return

81

asking the question: “Pourquoi acceptons-nous d’être le jouet des hommes?” [Why do we accept to be men’s toys?]. In his work in general, and in this short story in particular, Sembène takes a strong pro-women stance and condemns polygamy as oppressive toward women. 6 As a rule, polygamy is usually portrayed negatively in African women writers’ works. Buchi Emecheta and Tsitsi Dagaremba have largely represented the plight of women in disastrous polygamous situations. In Nervous Conditions (1989) by Tsitsi Dagaremba, Sisi Tambu, the main protagonist, witnesses the struggles of her female relatives attempting to regain control in polygamous marriages. These female characters are under the authority of the husband or the family, who can decide when and whom to add to existing marriages. Likewise, the ordeal caused by polygamy is the object of Une si longue lettre (1981) by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. In it, she describes the slow recovery of a frustrated wife, Ramatoulaye, who is abandoned by her husband when he marries a second wife without her consent. Throughout Ramatoulaye’s narrative, the reader encounters other female characters suffering from the psychological effects of polygamy or their husbands’ unfaithful behavior. For example, Jacqueline, whose husband cheats on her, ends up in a psychiatric hospital. The African female characters, just like Juletane, suffer disastrous effects caused by polygamy. In other African narratives, female protagonists, however, have sometimes promoted polygamy as advantageous to them. A wife may want her husband to marry other women in order to free herself from the sexual pressures that marriage can bring. In Assia Djebar’s novel, A Sister to Scheherazade (1987), Isma, the main protagonist, a well-educated Algerian woman, explains her decision to leave her husband and choose another wife (illiterate and poor) for him. She wants to free herself from the bonds of a marriage she no longer enjoys. Hajila, the second wife, however, is abused by the husband and thus becomes a victim. Djebar examines the idea of polygamy as a veil that seems to trap men, as well as women. She implies that polygamy limits the ability of a woman to choose another woman for a husband, regardless of her intention. Isma contributes to the enslavement of another woman by introducing her into an abusive marriage. The cultural practice of polygamy perpetuates unequal power relations between men and women, as well as between women themselves. Despite its negative representation, a few feminist scholars from the Diaspora even cultivate the idea of polygamy being advantageous to educated women, by making other women available to care for their children while they devote their time to research. This notion, however, sounds too idealistic, according to Irène D’Almeida. While supporting Buchi Emecheta’s and Carole Boyce Davies’ feminist theories on other issues, she condemns their idealization of polygamy: “I am afraid both Carole Boyce Davies and Buchi Emecheta’s positions are those of intellectual academics who—like most of

82

Chapter 3

us—do not have to confront the problems of polygamy in their own lives” (1994:14). It appears that these women scholars, who have freedom of choice and economic power, are looking for women domestics to be substitute mothers to their children. The subject of polygamy is not so taboo in the United States. It is in the news with the television reality show “Sister Wives.” It is widely practiced in the Mormon religious group. Even some women adopt a positive attitude toward it. For example, Elizabeth Joseph, an American critic, claims that polygamy produces good results by giving women freedom and allowing them to expand their horizons. In her article “An Immodest Proposal,” the feminist critic Julie Ann Kessler reports: “Joseph, a self-proclaimed feminist, appeared in May as a featured speaker at a meeting of the Utah chapter of the National Organization of Women, where she promoted the polygamous lifestyle as a way of empowering career-minded women.” 7 The problem with these intellectual academics promoting polygamy is that they belong to a class of women who hold economic power and educational standing, and as a result of their position, they create a social and economic distance between them and the other women in a polygamous situation. As such, the lack of sisterhood solidarity hinders social awareness regarding the female condition in a polygamous situation. Moreover, the feminization of poverty is a reality for women with the addition of more wives and children to an existing marriage. Many women find themselves the sole breadwinners of the household when their husbands or male partners fail to provide for the children. The representation of polygamy in diasporic literature mostly shows female protagonists at a disadvantageous position. Most women submit to it because of tradition and religion, not because they rationalize the benefits they could get from it. We can argue again that religion is served to maintain the status quo for men. Religion dictates men and women to observe the rules, which mostly work in favor of men. For example, Nnu Ego, the main character in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood (1979), who discusses with her husband, Nnaife, the “adoption” of his elder brother’s widows, does not have much of a choice. Although she does not favor the arrival of another woman in her household, she nevertheless agrees to share her husband. Other female protagonists enter into a polygamous marriage because of its societal or monetary advantages, and because of a lack of educational or economic opportunities, as is the case for Ndeye, Mamadou’s third wife in Juletane. As for Juletane, after a short period of acceptance when she appears to regain control over her husband, she remains fiercely opposed to polygamy. She only knows Africa through those who gravitate around her husband, who is at the same time the head of the household, the father of someone else’s children, and her tormentor. Her rejection of polygamy equates a rejection of Africa. Yet, she cannot have her husband (a metonymy for Africa) if she

Rethinking the Return

83

rejects polygamy. Moreover, her expectations of fulfillment from the man, whom she has to share with other women, make it impossible for her to connect with African women, especially if they become mothers. Another reason that keeps Juletane from a total experience of returning to Africa is the way she constructs language as an inextricable barrier between her and her new family. As the product of a complex history, language is simply a barrier for the Diaspora, which is multilingual and composed of diverse cultures. When Juletane first meets Mamadou’s family, they greet her in the local language mixed with French. Despite the bit of French, Juletane claims not to understand a single word. She becomes upset when Mamadou talks to his family in the African language in her presence. They both spend time with his friends and relatives, but although these people are kind, they are unable to communicate with her, which further alienates her. She adds to her alienation by refusing to learn the local language. Warner-Vieyra warns us against the naive notion of a homogenous African continent, which is diverse in so many ways. The linguistic difference and cultural misunderstanding underline the poor communication sometimes existing between Africa and the Diaspora. Juletane is not aware of the diverse cultural manifestations of Africa. She, like Véronica in Heremakhonon and Ti Jean in Ti Jean L’Horizon, knows very little about Africa. They assume that, because they are of African descent, they can easily fit into and be accepted by the African community. One might argue that Juletane contributes to her own suffering. 8 It seems to the reader that Juletane has an alternative to staying in a place where she is not accepted. She could have gone back to Paris as she first intended to do, followed her doctor’s advice, or received the help of Hélène Parpin, the social worker, who attempts to see her twice. Painfully aware that she does not belong, either in Paris or Guadeloupe her native land, she decides to waste her life in Africa. She does not feel like doing anything. Her depression is so deep that she does not care where she vegetates. Trapped by her own expectations of intimacy and happiness in married life, Juletane, according to Warner-Vieyra, “wanted to follow a man, the one she marries. If she had met a Japanese or an American, she would have gone to Japan or America. In fact, she meets Mamadou” (1993:108). While this may be true, the plot takes an additional existential dimension when Juletane chooses to marry an African, whom she follows “home.” Juletane’s mistake is investing herself totally in a man in her search of identity and happiness. The author consequently suggests writing as another venue for her heroine to define her identity. Juletane’s apparent failure to reconnect with Africa through her husband, Mamadou, leads her to another quest: writing. In her writing, she invents a language of her own and succeeds in formulating her revolt against polygamy, which she sees as a patriarchal institution that oppresses women. She

84

Chapter 3

brings to her writings the fresh and powerful insight of an insider and outsider. On one hand, the description of her own experience in her journal points to her as a first-hand witness of the effects of polygamy on women. On the other hand, her foreigner status enables her to distance herself from the culture in order to examine it. WRITING OF SELF AND OTHER SELVES Warner-Vieyra’s female protagonists, who share a history of exile, psychological anguish, and abuse, turn to writing, reading, or madness in order to liberate themselves and find their personal identity. Her first novel, Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit . . . (1980), set in the Caribbean, describes the story of Suzette, a young woman abandoned at birth by her mother, who later takes her back and psychologically abuses her. Like Juletane, Suzette ends up in a psychiatric hospital. In her journal, she describes her difficult journey from Guadeloupe to France. In the series of short stories called Femmes échouées (1988), Warner-Vieyra portrays other female characters who fail in their outward quests built around masculine figures and African roots. In Juletane, she further suggests writing as an act of creating the self for the protagonist, when intimacy with a husband or integration within a family appears impossible. As Francoise Lionnet affirms: Self-writing is a strategic move that opens up a space of possibility where the subject of history and the agent of discourse can engage in a dialogue with each other. New modes of interaction between the personal and the political are created and metaphors of abortion and rebirth are given significance within the larger social and historical spheres in which women’s lives unfold. (1995:193)

As the personal becomes political for most women writers from the diaspora, autobiographical elements may be integrated in their fiction. Like Maryse Condé in her first novel, Heremakhonon (1976), Warner-Vieyra draws upon her intimate knowledge of Guadeloupe and Africa to write Juletane. Like her heroine Juletane, Warner-Vieyra experienced migration, made the reverse “triangular voyage” (Guadeloupe, France, Africa), and still lives in Africa. She married a Beninese, Paulin Vieyra, a renowned filmmaker who died in 1987. Ultimately, writing about Africa is writing about her itinerary as a writer. Juletane, her heroine, comes to Africa in search of identity and happiness. Instead, she dies a writer leaving behind her only legacy, the diary she wrote to record her own descent into hell. Although the author does not deny some parallels between her life and her heroine’s, she rejects the characterization of Juletane as an autobiographical text (1993:108). In some aspects,

Rethinking the Return

85

the text stands on its own regardless of any autobiographical material. And since the narrative is not representative of the author’s life, its importance lies in the description of a polygamous situation from the point of view of a Caribbean female victim. More importantly, the reader of Juletane’s diary (Hélène Parpin) is Guadeloupean, like Juletane. She has travelled from Guadeloupe, France, and Africa, and made some emotional sacrifices for her own survival. By contrast, her story frames the text, which enhances its literariness and makes a simple reading of it as an autobiography impossible. In other words, the author constructs her heroine, Juletane, and invites her double, a female reader (Hélène), to ponder questions dealing with female identity and the return to Africa. Furthermore, Hélène’s presence in the narrative serves as a catalyst to look at polygamy from another female point of view. As Juletane fails in her quest to find genealogy through Mamadou (the father figure), she begins writing, casting herself in the role of subject and narrator at the same time. In other words, she attempts to find genealogy through writing. The diary allows Juletane to survive as long as she needs it in order to address the pitfalls of the physical and spiritual quest for her African roots. She maintains that it is intended for her husband, Mamadou, the women’s oppressor, as its sole reader (140). Because of the latter’s death in a car accident, Hélène Parpin is substituted as a non-intended reader. Hélène’s experience and life itinerary are different from Juletane’s. Unlike Juletane, who is an orphan and who depends financially and emotionally on Mamadou, Hélène is portrayed as an independent female protagonist who comes from a large caring family with a happy childhood (39). Endowed with a strong sense of self and identity, Hélène has a very different view of men and love than Juletane. Yet, the narrator notices that the more she was moving forward in her reading the more she felt drawn to Juletane. She sympathizes with her suffering. However, Hélène realizes that she could not imagine loving a man so much to the point of going mad. Having suffered from an adventure at the age of twenty in Paris, she had promised herself not to fall in love again. She represses her emotions because of past experiences of disillusion, deceit, and betrayal. The reading of Juletane’s autobiographical account of her mental breakdown has a therapeutic effect on her. By the time she finishes reading the journal, Hélène is transformed and moved. The narrator notices that Hélène smoothed the corners of the notebook, closed it, and wept, something she has not done in twenty years. The diary has melted the block of ice in her heart (79). As Juletane’s diary brings meaning to her life, it allows Hélène to escape from the emotional wall that had entrapped her own. The diary becomes a common ground between her and Juletane, whom she met briefly in Africa. Now, years later Hélène regretted not having taken

86

Chapter 3

the time to take care of her fellow compatriot. Although she had tried to visit Juletane, who refused to see her, Hélène felt guilty for not having made more of an effort to see her. Juletane’s diary creates a sense of rebirth for the independent Hélène. Upon reading it, she soon realizes the void in her existence and reexamines her own attitude toward life. Being at this turning point in her life, she feels that reading this diary is going to change her life. Conversely, Hélène resurrects Juletane by rescuing her untold story. The importance of sisterhood-intexts is reflected here through this exchange. Other post-colonial women writers such as Nawal el Saadawi (Woman at Point Zero 1975), Mariama Bâ (Une si longue lettre 1979), Assia Djebar (A Sister to Scheherazade 1987) and Calixte Belaya (Tu t’appelleras Tanga 1988) explore the theme of female bonding or collaborative effort between females through texts. These writers’ female protagonists, like Juletane, depend on their doubles for their stories to be heard, and for them to emerge out of confinement. Prisoners in jails, castles, harems, or houses, they all fight for liberation. As for Juletane, she is obsessed with the images of walls, enclosed rooms, and pits (26). Her whole life takes place inside a very small room in the house she shares with the polygamous family. In the end, she is able to subvert entrapment within a confined space where she becomes a “speaking and narrating subject.” 9 Ultimately, writing gives her the freedom to travel through space, history, and memory, and to expose important gender issues and explore the location of women in patriarchal society. Writing also brings up this question: can the idea of sisterhood that Hélène experiences be translated to the African culture? Juletane’s journal appeals to Hélène, a female character with whom she shares a historical and cultural background. In terms of sisterhood, can Juletane, a FrenchCaribbean woman educated in the West, speak for the “subaltern” 10 and supposedly voiceless African woman in a patriarchal society? The notion of happiness, independence, and equality for women is different in every culture. Juletane’s discourse on African women is problematic, not only because she is well aware of her cultural difference, but also because she feels somehow trapped by the African culture. She succumbs to societal pressures to have children, while she criticizes Awa for being the stereotypical image of an African woman fulfilling her mother’s role. She thinks Awa’s world is constituted of a mat under a tree and three children. The reader is made aware of Juletane’s bad faith regarding motherhood. She does understand the cultural and social importance of motherhood in African culture. She is not quite resigned to lose Mamadou’s love and wants to gain him back by getting pregnant. She believes in the false assumption that a woman can keep a man by having children with him and for him and that her worth increases that motherhood (a trope commonly found in literatures that challenge these ideas).

Rethinking the Return

87

When Juletane finds out that she is pregnant, all her problems with Mamadou seem to disappear, as if his love and acceptance of her were based on her ability to procreate. She says: Mamadou ne fut jamais autant attentionné. . . . Il m’avoua qu’une des raisons pour laquelle il n’avait pas voulu répudier sa première femme était la crainte que je ne puisse pas lui donner des enfants. Avoir des enfants était le plus grand bonheur pour lui dans le cadre du mariage. Nous menâmes à cette époque une vie très agréable toute de tendresse, pendant deux mois.(65)

When Juletane learns that she will no longer be able to have children, she is devastated. To make matters worse, Mamadou immediately resumes his weekend visits to Awa (the first wife). African and Caribbean novels are full of tragic stories of female characters who are abandoned, neglected, or mistreated because of their inability to reproduce. Juletane, who comes to Africa with empty hands (no family, no children, no name), may have felt that she was the barren Diaspora, as opposed to the fertile Africa. Throughout the journal, she constantly compares herself to the barren mango tree in Mamadou’s front yard, a constant reminder of her childless status. Interestingly, the first mention of motherhood in the novel concerns Hélène. Although independent and sophisticated, she, like Juletane, struggles with cultural aspects of motherhood. She explains her decision for getting married “dans l’unique but d’avoir un enfant tout à elle” (11). Her decision to marry Ousmane is also based on his comment to her that she lacks something (meaning a child) to fulfill her life’s purpose (57). Later in the narrative, Hélène admits being fearful that, at the age of forty, she will not be able to bear children. It is not until after Hélène reads Juletane’s journal that she begins to question her decision. She understands that she agreed to marry Ousmane to respond to society’s pressures as well as her own. Women of all cultures are trained through gender socialization to become mothers and many tend to feel ostracized or inadequate if they are not (Morgan 2001:64). 11 Motherhood becomes the central focus in their lives and it helps them fulfill the cultural expectations of their families or husbands. Warner-Vieyra portrays two female characters who are under pressure from the two men in their lives to have children. But through writing and reading, both Juletane and Hélène are starting to question this view of themselves. The act of writing brings back sad memories of Juletane’s orphan times in the Caribbean and her loneliness in France. Moreover, writing transcends her experience in Africa. It is a mature act that begins in the midst of her depression, and not at its inception. It provides Juletane with inner freedom in the midst of her chaotic environment to analyze her depression and confront her divided self. Writing proves to be more than a way of venting her anger; it also serves as a therapeutic process, liberating her from

88

Chapter 3

her bouts of deliria, and creates a space for creating a new self. Writing is a way of putting herself back together, and realizing that her “life is not in pieces” like the sheet she rips to shreds (51). Considering her diary as a friend and a confidante, she seems sure of herself. Her comments on her intimate relationship with her diary draw the reader’s attention to the work one puts into the making of a text. Her passion for words is reflected in her gesture of filling up the white pages of the notebook. She is mesmerized by the magical power of words and letters. Every time she makes an entry, she seems to be rejuvenated by the creative power of writing. She enjoys writing, and is impatient to find her cahier [notebook] in the morning. She is able to breathe, to be alive and energized through her writing. Many entries in the journal start with key verbs such as ouvrir [open] and découvrir [discover], which illustrate Juletane’s enthusiasm for writing and her discovery of a new sense of self. Despite her affection for the making of words and her meditation on their mysterious connections, the writing does not totally free Juletane from her turmoils. In an interview with Mildred Mortimer, WarnerVieyra reflects: “Writing is [Juletane’s] therapy. It becomes a way for her to free herself. Did she succeed in her attempt to free herself in this way? At least she tried!” (Mortimer 112). Although writing serves as a therapeutic process for Juletane, it does not cure her madness. Perhaps it could provide, as Francoise Lionnet puts it, “an enabling force in the creating of a plural self, one that strives on ambiguity and plurality, on affirmation of differences, not on polarized notions of identity, culture, race and gender” (1996:50). For Juletane, writing is the place where she can balance the past and the present, and address her diverse cultural heritage: Caribbean, French, and African. It also forces her to face the repressed memories from her childhood in Guadeloupe and grapple with her exiled situation in Africa. Opening her diary to write herself in it requires her to stop talking. She manages to identify with seemingly other silent madwomen she meets in the hospital where she stays for treatments. One of them, Nabou, who had lived in Paris, has had a similar experience to Juletane’s. She had suffered from loneliness, estrangement, and dis/location within the community. The parallel between Nabou’s and Juletane’s respective stories reflects the difficulty of cultural migration, as well as the impossibility of a woman’s integration into another cultural milieu through marriage or a man. Juletane lives in a world of self-imposed silence. She stops talking to her husband and does not communicate with the household members, who do not understand French. Reduced to isolation, writing, like madness, becomes for Juletane the road to liberation, self-expression, and meaning. Writing also allows Juletane to break her inner silence. Writing is what the Egyptian novelist Nawal el Saadawi calls the “killer” of silence. Hélène Cixous invites women to write for themselves to break the imposed or inner silence: “Women must write

Rethinking the Return

89

through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word silence.” 12 In order to write or kill her silence, Juletane imagines hurting her husband or co-wives and then lets out a demented liberating laugh. She dreams of revenge as she witnesses the celebration of Mamadou’s third child by Awa. In her mind she is already weeping for Mamadou, who will pay for the suffering he has bestowed upon her. In an ironic fashion, she is laughing absurdly as she visualizes Mamadou’s body, lifeless and like a corpse. She futher fantasizes about murdering her rival, Ndeye, with a knife: “Je suis heureuse. Je pense à Ndeye que Mamadou va découvrir morte, elle aussi. Je tiens ma vengeance. J’éclate de rire en pensant à tout ce beau sang rouge qui s’échappe de la poitrine de Ndeye” (125). One might argue that the image of the “flowing blood” in the imagined murder of the protagonist’s rival is a metaphor for the flowing ink. The author metaphorically lends her “plume délirante” [delirious pen] to Juletane, whose imaginings result in an impressive number of deaths. On the first page of Juletane, the author dedicates the text to her family and maintains that her daughter’s mathematical interests are far removed from her “plume délirante.” The image of the wandering or insane pen is antithetic to logic and reason. Is Juletane to be read as a delirious discourse? Interestingly enough, the reader notices that Juletane, who may have killed the family through her bouts of deliria, writes lucidly. Because it is conceived as a delirious discourse, Juletane loses some of its potency as a weapon against the patriarchal system. As a narrative strategy, however, it gives Warner-Vieyra the freedom to take on patriarchal societies and their traditions. The author creates Juletane as an insider-outsider who has multiple insights on the meanings of alienation, estrangement, and displacement. She criticizes gender politics within the polygamous system with a distance. The country where Juletane’s story takes place is not named in the narrative. The text lends itself to a feminist reading, but the point of view is not feminist, as Warner-Vieyra does not proclaim herself to be a feminist. With the emergence of feminist theorization in the Caribbean, works of fiction such as Juletane can be considered as ground-breaking texts that bridge the gap between the female condition in Africa and the Caribbean, and suggest that writing is to the self-searching woman her true homeland, in other words a means to interrogate the self. Writing also helps create a space in which dialogues between women writers and a community of readers can take place. Portraying female rebellion and questioning women’s status and roles in polygamous relationships in African patriarchal societies could be interpreted as a feminist stance. Betty Wilson notes that Caribbean women’s writing is not militantly feminist; “however, the preoccupations of the writing

90

Chapter 3

point to the necessity for change and are feminist in the wider sense of having to do primarily with women’s lives. The works speak of the feminine condition” (vii). Wilson also stresses that “unlike male-authored Caribbean fiction, the quest in women’s writing usually ends in withdrawal and isolation and/or flight and evasion rather than confrontation” (1990:44). In Juletane’s case, I think differently and I argue that deliberate processes—descending into madness, taking to writing, and taking one’s life or accepting death—are confrontational in and of themselves. Juletane’s resignation to die reduces the idea of her journal as a totally liberating strategy for her, but the ability of Hélène, her double, to read it (which she had not been able to do before) shows the positive effect of the diary. Hélène’s reading of the journal is feminist, in that it empowers her to face issues of motherhood and marriage in a gender-conscious way. THE PROBLEMATIC DOUBLE The vexed question of the double is dealt with in the narrative. Are Juletane and Hélène two faces of the same coin? Juletane’s experience of the return is successfully transmitted to Hélène through the diary. It enables Hélène to ponder on the questions of marriage and motherhood. Hélène, her double, who returns temporarily and successfully to Africa, uses Juletane’s journal and experiences to better navigate the diasporically cultural diverse world. As stated before, Juletane and Hélène have both the same racial and cultural identity and came to Africa because of a man. In addition, their lives are intertwined. Are Juletane or Hélène doubles of the author even though Warner-Vieyra declares that the novel is not autobiographical? Is Ousmane (Hélène’s fiancé, another avatar of Father-Africa) like Mamadou (Juletane’s husband)? He might be a threat to Hélène’s independence and sanity since he comes from a polygamous family. The author’s portrayal of him, as suspicious as Mamadou’s, is not flattering: Ousmane ne vivait que pour sa mère, avant sa rencontre avec Hélène. Depuis, il était véritablement subjugué par sa future épouse qui pensait et décidait pour lui. Avec elle, il se sentait comme en sécurité. Il n’aimait pas avoir à prendre de décisions. Enfant, il obéissait toujours à sa mere. (85)

One might argue that the domineering Hélène replaces the castrating mother. She might be able to challenge the patriarchal system by forcing Ousmane into a monogamous marriage. That could amount to a reversal of the situation.

Rethinking the Return

91

First of all, we see that the theme of the double is explored in several manners in the novel through the double structure of the narrative, in which Juletane’s journal alternates with Hélène’s story. In other words, the novel is the story of a character reading the main character’s story. The two stories are typographically distinct, with Hélène’s written in italics. The incipit of the novel consists of comments by a third-person narrator, indicating Hélène Parpin in the act of reading Juletane’s diary. Then, on the second page, Juletane, the first-person narrator, makes the first dated entry in the journal. Juletane’s diary appeals to Hélène as if it were her own story because of some obvious parallels between the lives of the two characters. She is about to marry her fiancé, Ousmane, an African man (never married before), who comes from a polygamous family. Juletane’s diary informs Hélène about the specifics of polygamy and forces her to examine her projected marriage and motherhood. Hélène, the opposite of Juletane, may be reminiscent of the author’s journey back to Africa. She, even more than Juletane, may well be the author’s double. While living in Africa, Hélène travels to France and to Guadeloupe to visit her family. She has a liberated trajectory that Juletane does not have. The nomadic situation of Hélène reflects the author’s. As indicated in the narrative, Hélène lives and works in Africa for many years, just like the author. Unlike Hélène, her character, the author, marries and has children, a career, and a successful integration in Africa. The framing device also functions as a means to set in motion the relationship of women writers and readers in Juletane. It alludes to the complexity associated with the legibility of a woman’s text in a patriarchal society. Juletane, as a text, would be illegible to Mamadou, the intended reader. From a male point of view, he would not have understood the crucial issues of gender. Hélène is, in a way, the ideal reader because she understands the multiplicity of cultural background and specific challenges to the woman’s wholeness as a cultural subject in a patriarchal society. As a social worker, she understands the states of anguish, dislocation, and alienation that Juletane must have experienced during her ordeal in Africa. The split structure of the narrative, or its framing, mirrors Juletane’s split identity. She is caught between two antagonistic selves: one who tries to liberate herself, and the other who is still caught in the web of the past. In the journal, Juletane herself plays the double role of protagonist/narrator and character. The reader notices the tension, or rather a backward and forward motion, between the two distinct “I”s—between the present and the past, between reality and madness. The narrative “I” reflects back on its own actions in every entry in the journal. Juletane’s moments of lucidity only occur at the time of writing. The other “I” is uncontrollable and destructive. Although she admits suffering from depression, she nevertheless doubts the depth of her illness. Overwhelmed by the unnerving situation, she hallucinates and is unable to distinguish reality from her imagination. She perceives

92

Chapter 3

her surroundings as threatening and monstrous. The uncanny occurs when she starts reading and interpreting signs. Her perception of the outside world is distorted: “Je regardais les êtres humains qui m’entouraient; c’étaient des géants terrifiants, au visage monstrueux. . . . J’eus peur” (74). Juletane refuses to open up to the outside world and constantly tunes in to watch herself. An image of enclosure surrounds her throughout the narrative. The image of her falling into a pit and of her struggles with the thick mud is repeated throughout the text. Interestingly enough, it is the fate of Mamadou’s first wife (Awa), who commits suicide by throwing herself in a well. The text highlights enclosing devices—rooms, walls, pit—which are illustrative of Juletane’s entrapment. Secluded in her African backyard, she withdraws into other dreams to escape from the previous ones, now awfully fulfilled. Juletane’s “doubleness” is indicative of the irresolution of her situation. She cannot sort through dream, fantasy, desire, and reality toward the end. Juletane’s hope of being reborn in the ancestral land ends in exclusion, pain, and madness. Her physical return to Africa ends with death. She accomplishes Médouze’s dream of return in Joseph Zobel’s La rue case-nègres (1950). Old Médouze, whose grandfather was deported from Africa to Martinique, confides in José (the narrator), recounting his dream of going back to be with his ancestors in the land of Guinea when he dies. The idea of going back to Africa after death provides a sense of freedom and happiness that was denied to displaced African slaves. However, Juletane’s spiritual return to Africa fails. She cannot connect with her fatherland, which remains more than a foreign place, “another planet,” due to her rejection of polygamy, a core institution in the culture she encounters. Her own death symbolizes the rejection of the myth of origins. She succeeds in using writing as a space where she creates subjectivity following her inability to fulfill her identity quest and achieve motherhood status in the fatherland. For her, writing replaces the failed return to Africa, where she is unable to maintain her status as a wife and a mother and thus she does not “exist” in the society. The very act of writing allows her to be alive and remain alive, for, to write is to exist. NOTES 1. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 244. 2. I will use the word “polygamy” since it is most commonly used. However, what I focus on in this chapter is polygyny. It is important to differentiate between polygamy, polygyny, and polyandry. “Polygamy” is defined as the institution that allows a man or woman to have more than one spouse or mate. “Polygyny” is the practice of a man having more than one wife or female mate at the same time. “Polyandry” is the practice of a woman having more than one male spouse or mate at the same time.

Rethinking the Return

93

3. In “An Interview with Myriam Warner-Vieyra,” literary critic Mildred Mortimer suggests that Juletane uses madness “as a cover to withdraw physically and psychologically into the imaginative space of her notebook” (1993:108). 4. According to polygamous rules, a husband must spend alternately three days with each wife. 5. Works discussing polygamy include: Ousmane Sembène, “Ses Trois Jours,” in Voltaique, La noire de . . . Nouvelles (1962); Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (1979); Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (1980); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1989); Flora Nwapa, One is Enough (1992). 6. In his novel and film Xala (1973, 1976), Ousmane demystifies the image of the polygamist happy family. 7. Julie Ann Kessler, “An Immodest Proposal,” 2 November 2001, www.Claremont.org/ nat_law/polygamy.cfm (accessed 6 January 2002). 8. Cilas Kemedjo, “Le miroir brisé: Afrique victime, Afrique victime chez Maryse Condé et Myriam Warner-Vieyra,” Notre Librairie 117 (Jul–Sept. 1994): 98–101. 9. Elizabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, “Narrative ‘je’ in Kamouraska by Anne Hébert and Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra,” in Post-Colonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 56. 10. Gayatri Chakravirty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1987). 11. Elizabeth Morgan, Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels (New York: Heinneman, 2001), 11. 12. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 244.

Conclusion

Ce que tu es, toi seul peux le savoir, toi seul. You alone know who you are. —Simone Schwarz-Bart (268)

In this book, I examined the ways in which Guadeloupean women writers, such as Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, question the return to Africa mythologized by the previous generations of the Négritude male writers from the 1930s to the 1960s. In doing so, I considered the rise of Négritude as a literary philosophical movement. Césaire, as one of the founding fathers of the Négritude movement, crystallizes in his Cahier du retour au pays natal a powerful model of the notion of return to African roots and liberation through the rejection of colonization and European assimilation. As an antithesis to the French policy of assimilation, Négritude served as the restoration of the wounded Caribbean psyche. One of its main objectives was to rediscover African history, and to promote a symbolic return to Africa, constructed as the beloved Motherland. This image became crucial for several male writers of the Négritude period to restore the paradise (Africa) that was lost during the Middle Passage experience on the personal and national level, and to contest centuries of European denigration. As for the post-independence generation of female writers, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, they had different political agendas and interrogated the romantic idea of recovering one’s origins in their texts. I analyzed why this return is problematic and, in many cases, impossible for their various protagonists. One of the major aspects of this work is the definition of an intermediary sequence between Négritude and métissage: the challenging of the myth of Africa as a beloved mother. These women writers, who transformed the allegory of Africa, a loving mother figure, into a disappointing father figure, 95

96

Conclusion

published at a crucial juncture in the Caribbean discourse matrix of history and identity. If Africa is a bad parent, one has to transform the epic of the return into global nomadism, and the original quest for genealogy into an appreciation of the local and celebration of “métissage.” Global nomadism refers to the protagonist’s awareness that the world is home, and that they should not restrict themselves from exploring it. For instance, the characters Véronica, Francis Sancher, and Marie-Hélène wander the world and become acquainted with other cultures. The term “métissage,” which has multiple significances, opens up the possibility for crossing borders between languages, literatures, identities, and so forth. Négritude male writers, in their quest for legitimacy, have looked for a unique source of genealogy (the African ancestor) while neglecting the Caribbean (the mother), the site of an explosion of cultures, identities, and languages whose origins are to be found in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the New World. Disappointed in their own pursuit of the absent father, Condé and particularly Schwarz-Bart reorient their path toward the Caribbean for a rediscovery of history, culture, and self. Schwarz-Bart is more optimistic than Condé about expectations of Creoleness or Creole roots. One important feature in Condé’s work is her refusal to limit herself to any literary tradition or exclusive ideology. Overall, the literary landscape for the women writers of this study is not limited to the Caribbean. They have their novels set on different continents. The women writers’ questioning of existing modes of representation of the return also draws attention to the return of female characters in Africa. The portrayal of Caribbean females in Condé’s Heremakhonon and WarnerVieyra’s Juletane reveals a new way of looking at female characters, and sheds light on the mother-daughter relationship. Two new types of female characters emerge from their novels: the new bad Caribbean biological mother who, by her absence or lack of maternal instinct, is unable to love her children; and her daughter, an adventurer who, feeling alienated from the native island, seeks identity and happiness beyond the womb in the past, in Africa. In the context of identity formation, Condé reveals the complexity of the new Caribbean mother’s role and the thematic complex of negative motherdaughter relationships. The victim of an alienated culture, and the perpetrator of it, the mother is seen as an accomplice of the system, which in turn alienates her daughter. Véronica lacks the experience of a good motherdaughter relationship during childhood. Her distant mother rejects her from birth. The portrayal of the bad mother reveals Condé’s anti-conformist reaction against traditional modes of female representation: the nurturing Caribbean mother. The new daughter is presented as experiencing migration and displacement. Instead of finding community, she faces exile. Her presence in Africa, though, illustrates her “prise de conscience” [awareness] of her own aliena-

Conclusion

97

tion. Consequently, the Caribbean female character evolves from the shadow of her male companion to assert herself and design her own journey. Cosmopolitan, independent, and childless, she embodies the unconventional Caribbean female. For example, Véronica, who, in Heremakhanon, is looking for happiness, expresses no desire for marriage and children, while WarnerVieyra’s heroine, Juletane, remains, after all her trials, childless. The children of Juletane’s co-wife die. So too does their mother, who commits suicide. Hélène, who initially wanted to marry Ousmane just to have children, questions her desire for motherhood after reading Juletane’s journal. Any possibility of having children for Véronica and Juletane is eliminated. In contrast, Marie-Hélène, who has six daughters, does not love them. Her experience of motherhood is negative. Overall, Condé and Warner-Vieyra choose to reject motherhood, a major element that defines womanhood in many societies. Their female characters rather find freedom through errancy and writing. Véronica returns to Paris as “the new Negro of the New World” as critic Vèvè Clark suggests (303). She refuses to be defined by existing ideologies or conventional modes of existence. Marie-Hélène comes to the realization that neither motherhood nor marriage can fulfill her identity quest. Although Juletane dies at the end of the novel, she finds her new self in writing, a more comfortable place than her lost origin. As for Hélène, her reading of Juletane’s journal leads her to self-examination. Armed with new self-knowledge and cultural information on Africa, she has a clearer vision of life. Her portrayal is the successful story of a French-Caribbean woman who values cultural diversity and understands her cross-cultural identity. She is able to connect and interact with communities within and outside the Caribbean. Although Schwarz-Bart’s female protagonist does not go to Africa, it would be worthwhile to understand how she conceives her sense of self and freedom. She is different from Condé’s and Warner-Vieyra’s character in that she is anchored in the Caribbean soil and has no nostalgia for an African past or father. In Ti Jean L’Horizon, when Awa-Eloise, Ti Jean’s mother, leaves the hills (a symbolic place of resistance for the Maroons) to live among the people down in the valley, she develops a concept of freedom different from her father’s. Wademba represents the figure of the noble Maroon. Unlike him (a symbol of the African past, frozen in time and space), Awa-Eloise liberates herself to join other Schwarz-Bartian female characters such as Télumée Lougandor and Reine sans Nom in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, who are rooted in the present and in oral tradition. SchwarzBart’s female characters, unlike her male ones, are rooted in their Caribbeanness and have no desire of returning to Africa to be complete. Her female characters are not obsessed with the idea of defining their racial or cultural identity. They have other existential problems to face, such as experiencing

98

Conclusion

the everyday neocolonialist conditions in which they live. They develop female solidarity in their fight for physical survival and look to oral tradition for cultural sustenance. Setting themselves up against the Black Nationalist agenda of the time, these women writers whose texts have been discussed in this study drew attention to the need of reconceptualizing Francophone Caribbean identity politics in the aftermath of the African post-independence era in the 1970s from a feminist perspective. They demonstrate the uselessness of the Diasporic quest for the African genealogical mother or father. The return to the maternal figure of Africa is thus exposed as a convenient myth, a needed one, given the time and space in which Négritude flourished. With time and the emergence of polyvalent issues regarding race, class, gender, history, culture, and politics, Négritude’s gaze on Mother-Africa came under great criticism. Condé, one of the most vocal of the women writers, points out the limits of Négritude in an interview with Marie-Clothilde Jacquey and Monique Hugon: “L’Afrique était pour eux [Césaire et d’autres] la grande matrice noire et tout enfant issu de cette matrice devait pour se connaître, fatalement, se rattacher à elle. En fin de compte, je pense que c’est un piège, et je ne suis pas la seule à penser ainsi actuellement” [Africa was for them (Césaire and others) the big black matrix and any child born of her must remain fatally close to her. In the end, I think it is a trap. I am not the only person who thinks so] (1984:21). Although the women writers of this study, specifically Maryse Condé, resist polarizing their own writing process along gender lines, their gesture of deconstructing Mother-Africa can be read as an attack on sexist ideologies. In Heremakhonon, Une saison à Rhiata, and Juletane, unequal power relations between males and females are represented and problems between the sexes are raised differently. Paradoxically, the female protagonists turn toward Father-Africa in their journeys. Véronica’s obsession with Ibrahim Sory and Juletane’s passion for Mamadou—the African substitute father—are illustrative of their quest for self-meaning. The characters’ ontological quest turns around the father with the hope of saving themselves from the obscurity of their origins. The women writers’ works ultimately contest the traditionalist and essentialist concepts of sex, culture, and race by redirecting the discourse toward the notions of ambivalence, hybridity, and openness. The focus on the Caribbean suggests that returning to Africa need not be part of the self-searching process. Maryse Condé, who strongly articulated her view regarding the return, points out: “La quête d’identité d’un Antillais peut très bien se résoudre sans passer surtout physiquement, par l’Afrique, ou si l’on veut, le passage en Afrique prouve simplement qu’elle n’est pas essentielle dans l’identité antillaise” [The Antillean identity quest could be solved without going physically to Africa. It simply proves that it is not essential in the process of the identity quest] (1984:25).

Conclusion

99

In their fictional interrogation of the return, the women writers strategically negate the redemptive value of the continent. It is striking that they all portray Africa as a negative and lethal father figure. It is a father who kills. Véronica, in Heremakhonon, miraculously escapes a tragic fate during her stay in Africa. In the end, she realizes that she mistakes Africa for her ancestor and that she needs to flee. As for Marie-Hélène, her dream to make a successful return to Guadeloupe does not materialize. She remains confined in a psychological state of displacement in Africa. Ti Jean, in Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’Horizon, experienced betrayal and rejection at his grandfather’s African village. Unable to find legitimacy in Africa, he wanders aimlessly until he finally returns to Guadeloupe. And as for Juletane, she dies a victim of the institution of polygamy. All four protagonists come to the realization of what Condé considers an absurdity: talking of the Black world as if it were a whole entity. The experience of a partially shared history and culture between Africa and the Diaspora is not contested here. It is the idea of an essential Black experience or racial affinity, which is shown to be no longer valid. The women writers shift the focus from Africa back to the Caribbean. Their revision of the return is not to be taken as a total rejection of Africa. They complemented and challenged at the same time the traditional perspective regarding the myth, including their own, by proposing a refocus on Caribbean history, identity, culture, and politics. The continent has greatly contributed to their discovery of their identity as writers. The women writers’ awareness of the complexity of Caribbean identity, culture, and politics is manifested in their characters’ refusal of an exclusive racial, cultural, and political allegiance with Africa. That awareness made it possible for them to find their own writing space in relation to Négritude, Antillanité, and Créolité in spite of their earlier exclusion from these cultural and literary movements in the French Caribbean. Condé subverts the romanticized idea of homeland, while Schwarz-Bart and Warner-Vieyra propose métissage as a positive alternative to a fossilized construction of self. The aforementioned notions of return are seen through the study of the three women writers’ novels. Because of their interrogation of the return and their common focus on identity, we are able to look at their proposal in a new light. Furthermore, in this book, I consider the family as a microcosm of society to help articulate the women writers’ reevaluation of the Caribbean motherland and their rewriting of the return to the metaphorical father figure of Africa. The family’s function or dysfunction is a metaphor for the African or Caribbean society. The women writers’ position on the return suggests that Africa could be represented as neither the mother nor the father of the Caribbean, because of its Creole identity, but most definitely as the distant ancestor. In their texts, blood relations do not necessarily foster nurturance,

100

Conclusion

and identity does not exclusively originate from African or Caribbean ascendance, but from the ability to recuperate and master its biological, social, geographic, and cultural components. Although the women writers’ texts point to the impossibility of the return, they do not, however, eliminate the importance of Africa in Caribbean history and culture. The return becomes, indeed, questionable because of political, social, and economic troubles in Africa. If Maryse Condé admits that her heroine, Véronica, could not reconnect with the African past because in the present she finds malnutrition, dictatorship, and so forth, does that mean that Africa would be represented differently if it were very rich and democratic? If Africa were part of the global market at the level of the European Union, it would probably pose another kind of problem for the Diaspora. Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra, nevertheless, confirm in their texts what many Haitian writers have been practicing for years: no nostalgia for the Motherland or anguish to return “au pays natal.” Either forced into exile by Haitian dictators or choosing it themselves, they became aware that “rootlessness may be the special condition of Caribbean writing” (Dash 1994:452). Nomadism or errancy could therefore be a source of productive creativity in spite of its alienated aspects. 1 Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra seem to be inspired by their travels, and their works are a great achievement in Francophone Caribbean literature. The women writers’ combined novels, plays, short stories, children’s literature, and essays constitute a substantial body of work. Maryse Condé is the most prolific among them. A major novelist, essayist, playwright, and a former professor of African and Caribbean literature, Maryse Condé is the embodiment of a nomadic experience. She constantly migrates between three continents (Europe, Africa, and North America). As for Simone Schwarz-Bart, she is anchored in Caribbean space, which she considers home. Warner-Vieyra made a successful return to Africa, where she lives even while challenging and changing the meanings of return. The tensions engendered by this group of women writers bear witness to the impossibility of the return to Africa by bringing diverse material (race, class, gender, culture, language, identity, politics, etc.) in dialogue with each other, and revealing new directions and limits, as their novels in this study demonstrate. Their texts show that Diasporic imagination constructs the impossible dream of return.

Conclusion

101

NOTES 1. Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière are successful examples of Haitian writers who are not confined by space and language. For example, Danticat, a Creolophone and Francophone speaker who moved to the United States at the age of twelve, chooses to write in English to express Caribbean realities in her fiction.

Bibliography

Accilien, Cécile. Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Aita, Mariela. Simone Schwarz-Bart dans la poétique du réel. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Alexander, Simone. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001 Alexis, Jacques Stéphen. Compère Général Soleil. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ———. “Du Réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens.” numéro spécial du premier congrès des écrivains noirs. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and the Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anzaldùa, Gloria. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987. Arnold, James. “The Gendering of Créolité.” In Penser La Créolité, eds. Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage. Paris: Karthala, 1995 (21–40). Bâ, Mariama. Une si longue lettre. Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1979. Barbour, Sarah E., and Gerise Herndon, eds. Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006. Baudot, Alain. “Maryse Condé ou la parole du refus.” Recherche Pédagogique et Culture 57 (1982): 30–35. Bébel-Gisler, Dany. La langue créole, force jugulée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1976. ———. Léonora: L’histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe. Paris: Seghers, 1985. ———. Le défi guadeloupéen. Devenir ce que nous sommes. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1989. Beyala, Calixte. Tu t’appelleras Tanga. Paris: Stock, 1988. Bernabé, Jean. “Contribution à la diglossie littéraire.” In Textes Et Documents 2. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1979. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la Créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Boehmer, Elleke. “Stories of Women and Mothers: Gender and Nationalism, in the Early Fiction of Flora Nwapa.” In Motherlands: Black Women Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992 (3–23). Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974.

103

104

Bibliography

Brooks, Jane. “Challenging to Writing Literature in Creole: The Cases of Martinique and Guadeloupe.” In An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing, ed. Sam Haig. Oxford: Berg, 1999 (119–34). Bryce-Okunlola, Jane. “Motherland as Metaphor for Creativity in Three African Women’s Novels: Flora Nwapa, Rebeka Njau and Bessie Head.” In Motherlands: Black Women Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1992 (200–18). Buchi, Emecheta. The Joys of Motherhood. London: Heinemann, 1979. Burton, Richard, and Fred Reno, eds. French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today. Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Capécia, Mayotte. Je suis Martiniquaise. Paris: Corréa, 1948. Carpentier, Alejo. Le Royaume de ce monde. Trans. René L. F. Durand. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Carruggi Noëlle, ed. Maryse Condé: Rébellion et transgression. Paris: Karthala, 2010. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1939, 1988. ———. La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963. Césaire, Ina. L’enfant des passages ou la geste de Ti Jean. Paris: Editions Caribénnes, 1987. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. ———. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. Chemin d’école. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. ———. Schools Days. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1997. Chancy, Myriam. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1997. Chauvet, Marie. La Danse sur le volcan. Paris: Plon, 1957. ———. Amour, Colère, Folie. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Clark, Vévé A. “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon.” In Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990 (302–19). Condé, Maryse. Heremakhonon. Paris: Editions 10/18, 1976. ———. La civilisation du bossale: Réflexions sur la littérature orale de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1977. ———. La Parole des femmes: Essai sur les romancières des Antilles de langue française. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979. ———. Une saison à Rihata. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981. ———. Heremakhonon. Trans. Richard Philcox. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1982. ———. Ségou. Les murailles de terre. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984. ———. Ségou. La terre en miettes. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985. ———. Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . Noire. Paris: Mercure de France, 1986. ———. La vie scélarate. Paris: Seghers, 1987. ———. En attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon). Paris: Union Seghers, 1988. ———. Traversée de la Mangrove. Paris: Mercure de France, 1989. ———. Les derniers rois mages. Paris: Mercure, 1992. ———. “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer.” Yale French Studies 83 (1993): 121–35. ———. Crossing the Mangrove. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Doubleday, 1995. ———. Desirada. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. ———. Le cœur à rire et à pleurer: contes vrais de mon enfance. Paris : Robert Laffont, 1999. ———. Victoire, les saveurs et les mots. Paris: Mercure de France, 2006. Confiant, Raphaël, ed. Les Maîtres de la parole créole. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Confiant, Raphaël, and Patrick Chamoiseau. Lettres Créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature, 1635–1976. Paris: Hatier, 1991. Conroy Kennedy, Ellen. The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine, and Lydie Moudileno, ed. Maryse Condé: Une nomade inconvenante. Paris: Ibis Rouge, 2002. Crosta, Suzanne. Récits d’enfance antillaise. Québec: GRELCA, 1998.

Bibliography

105

d’Almeida, Assiba Irène. Francophone Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994. Dash, Michael. “Marvellous Realism: The Way Out of Negritude.” Caribbean Studies 13, no. 4 (1974): 57–70. ———. “Exile and Recent Literature.” In A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Volume 1 Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. James Arnold. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994 (451–61). ———. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London: Routledge, 1994. Davies, Carole Boyce, and Elaine Savory Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Delas, Daniel. Aimé Césaire. Paris: Hachette, 1991. Delpech, Catherine, and Maurice Roelens, eds. Société et Littérature Antillaises Aujourd’hui. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 1994. Djebar, Assia. A Sister to Scheherazade. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. Ekwenzi, Cyprien. Jagua Nana. London: Heinemann, 1961. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952. Felman, Shoshana, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982. Firmin, Anténor. De l’égalité des races humaines. Paris: F. Pichon, 1855. Fulton, Dawn. Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism. University of Virginia Press, 2009. Gikandi, Simon. “The Politics and Poetics of National Formation: Recent African Writing.” Conference paper, ACLAS Conference, Canterbury (24–31 August, 1989): 1–20. Glissant, Edouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. ———. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Gobineau, Arthur de. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Paris: P. Firmin-Didot, 1933. Green, Mary Jean, et al. Postcolonial Subjects. Francophone Women Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Guillén, Nicólas. Man-Making Words. Cuba: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1972. Gyssels, Kathleen. Filles de Solitude. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. ———. Sages Sorcières? Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Haigh, Sam. Mapping a Tradition. Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe. England: Maney Publishing, 1998. Haley, Alex. Roots. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Hewitt, Leah. Autobiographical Tightropes. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1990. ———. “Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé and Literary Tradition.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 17, no.1 (1993): 79–96. Hoffmann, Léon-François. Essays on Haitian Literature. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984. Huntington, Julie. “Rethinking Rootedness in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’horizon.” The French Review 80, no.3 (February 2007): 594–605. Ippolito, Emilia. Caribbean Women Writers: Identity and Gender. New York: Camden House, 2000. Jacquey, Marie Clothilde, and Monique Hugon. “L’Afrique, un continent difficile: Entretien avec Maryse Condé.” Notre Librairie 75 (1984): 21–25. Kandé, Sylvie. Terres, Urbanisme et Architecture “Créoles” en Sierra Leone. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. ———, ed. Discours sur le métissage. Identités métisses. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Klein, Melanie. The Psychoanalysis of Children. London: Hogarth, 1932 ———. Love, Guilt and Reparation. And Other Works, 1921–1945. New York: Free Press, 1975. Kmedjio, Cilas. De la Négritude à la Créolité. Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la malédiction de la théorie. Hamburg: LIT, 1999.

106

Bibliography

Lahens, Yannick. “L’exil: entre écrire et habiter.” Chemins Critiques 1, no.3 (December 1989): 167–83. Larrier René. Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Laye, Camara. L’Enfant noir. Paris: Plon, 1953. Lionnet, Françoise. Postcolonial Representations. Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Ludwig, Ralph, ed. Ecrire la parole de nuit. La nouvelle littérature antillaise. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Maran, René. Batouala. Paris: Morney, 1921. Maximin, Daniel. L’Isolé Soleil. Paris: Seuil, 1981. Mehta, Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Mildred, Mortimer. “An Interview with Myriam Warner-Vieyra.” Callaloo 16, no.1 (1993): 108–15. Miller, Christopher. Theories of the Africans. Francophone Literature: An Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990. Morgan, Elizabeth. Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001. Mudimbe-Boyi, Elizabeth. “The Poetics of Exile in Le baobab fou by Ken Bugul and Ti Jean L’Horizon by Simone Schwarz-Bart.” Yale French Studies 82, no.2 (1993): 196–202. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Neruda, Pablo. Canto General. México: Ediciones Oceano, 1952. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960. Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. Recreating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. Orlando, Valérie. Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls. Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Decolonizing Feminism.” In Daughters of Caliban, ed. Consuelo Lopez Springfield. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Périna, Mickaëlla. Citoyenneté et sujétion aux Antilles francophones: Post-esclavagiste et aspiration démocratique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Pfaff, Françoise. Entretiens avec Maryse Condé. Paris: Karthala, 1993. Pineau, Gisèle. Papillon dans la cité. Paris: Sepia, 1992. ———. La grande drive des esprits. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes, 1993. Price, Hannibal. De la réhabilitation de la race noire. Paris: J. Verrollot, 1900. Rice-Maximain, Micheline. Karukéra. Présence littéraire de la Guadeloupe. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Roumain, Jacques. Gouverneurs de la rosée. Paris: Messidor, 1946, 1988. El Saadawi, Nawal. Woman at Point Zero. London: Zed, 1975. Schwarz-Bart, André. La mûlatresse Solitude. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Schwarz-Bart, André, and Simone Schwarz-Bart. Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Schwarz-Bart, Simone. Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle. Paris: Seuil, 1972. ———. Ti Jean L’Horizon. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Trans. Barbara Bray under the title Between Two Worlds. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. ———. Ton beau capitaine. Paris: Seuil, 1987 Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Segun, Mabel. “Polygamy: Ancient and Modern.” In Friends, Nigerians, Countrymen. London: Heinemann, 1965. Sembène, Ousmane. Voltaïque: La noire de. . . . Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Oeuvre Poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1964, 1973, 1984, 1990. Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Bibliography

107

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Steady Chioma, Filomena. The Black Women Cross-Culturally. Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981. Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tamsir, Niane Djibril. Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1960. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and Protocol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Thomas, Bonnie. Breadfruit or Chesnut? Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Tirolien, Guy. “Black Beauty in Balles d’or.” Paris: Présence Africaine, 1961. Toureh, Fanta. L’imaginaire dans l’oeuvre de Simone Schwarz-Bart. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Warner-Vieyra, Myriam. Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit. . . . Paris: Présence Africaine, 1980. ———. Juletane. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982. Trans. Betty Wilson under the title Juletane. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. ———. Femmes échouées. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1988. Webb, Barbara. Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. Zobel, Joseph. La rue case-nègres. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1950.

Index

Accilien, Cécile, 14, 77 acculturation, 54 affranchis, 52 Africa/African, ix, 1, 4–7, 9, 17, 39, 41, 76–79, 84, 88 Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 48, 66, 67, 68 alienation, 9, 11, 16, 17, 56 allegorization, xiii, xxii, 5 Antillanité, x, xiv, 56–57 Antillean. See Caribbean Bebel-Gisler, Danny (La langue créole, force jugulée), 69n6 Bedaut, Alain, 6 béké, 19 Black history, xiii, 6 blackness, xxii, 29, 75 Boehmer, Elleke, 3–4 Burton, Richard, 32 Caribbean, xxiv, xxvi, 21, 30, 40, 53 Césaire, Aimé, xiii, xxi, 7, 55 Cixous, Hélène, 71, 88 colonialism, ix, xviii, xx, xxiii, 4, 7, 11, 29 colonization. See colonialism colonizer. See colonialism conteur/conteuse, 58, 59. See also storytelling Creole language, x, xxiii, 53–56, 60–63 Creoleness, xiv, 56, 57, 58, 95 Créolité, xiv, xxvi, 46, 58

Creolism, xxiii, xxix, 57 Creolization, x, xxvi, 56 childless, 2, 75, 76, 78, 87 children, 75–79, 87 cultural identity, xxii, 20, 28, 45, 47, 73. See also culture culture, x, xvi, xxiii, 39, 47, 54 decolonize, 39 decreolization, 55 detour, x, xxviii, xxix, 46 DOM (Départements d’outre-mer), 27, 54 Eloge de la créolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant), x emancipation, 55 Emecheta, Buchi, 5, 76 errancy, 3, 8, 20, 34 essentialism, xiv exile, xiv, 16, 20, 39, 46, 75 Fanon, Frantz (Peau noire, masques blancs), xx, 39 fatherland, ix, 21, 22, 50, 92 feminism, 14, 16 feminist, xxxi, 14, 27, 71, 79, 81, 89, 98 femme matador, 59 “Femme noire”, xxii Francophone Caribbean, xxii, xxiii, 3, 19, 39 Frankétienne, xxiii, 56 109

110

Index

Fulton, Dawn, 19 Garveyism, xvii gaze, 3, 6, 11, 31, 75 gender politics, 89 gender socialization, 87 genealogy/genealogies, 2, 8, 13, 19, 22, 25, 31, 41, 47 Gilbert, Sandra, Gubar, Susan (The mad woman in the Attic), 74 Glissant, Edouard, xxvi, 47–48, 50, 53 griot/griotte, 60 Guadeloupe, xxi, xxiii, 3, 9, 18 Haigh, Sam, xiv Haïti/Haitian, xvi, xvii, xix, xxviii historical, xix, 2, 33, 39, 43 history, 6, 39, 41, 46, 47, 48–50, 52 hybrid/hybridity, 20, 47, 65, 66, 98. See also métissage identity/identities, xxviii, 32, 39, 40, 50, 71 Indigenism, xvii, xxi, 4 Kandé, Sylvie, 52 Klein, Melanie, 24, 27 Krik Krak, 61 Larrier, Renée, 70n14 legitimacy, xxviii, 11, 41, 44, 45, 50, 68 light skin, 26, 28, 29. See race Lionnet, Françoise, xxiv, 83 littérature doudouiste, 55 l’oraturaine, 70n14 Louverture, Toussaint, 47 madness, xxiv, 73, 74, 84, 88 magic realism, 48, 66, 68 mangrove, xxvi, xxviii, 19 manhood, 22 marabout, 9, 11 Maroon, xiv, 44, 51–52, 61 marqueur de parole, 69n12 marriage, 79, 81, 82, 89, 92, 96 marronage, 61 Martinique, xiii, 21, 60 masculinist, x, 19, 58 métissage, xxvi, 64, 65, 66, 95, 99

Middle Passage, xiv, xv, 6, 9, 43, 47. See also slave trade migrations, xv, xxvii, 48 Miller, Christopher, 5, 12, 17 motherhood, x, 2, 76, 86, 87, 89, 96 motherland, ix, xxiv, 5, 3, 9, 18 mulatto class, 29, 30 multiculturalism, xxvi multilingualism, xxvi myth/myths, xviii, xxv, xxviii, 23, 50, 52, 58, 66, 92 Négritude, ix, 10, 12, 29, 31, 46 negrophobia, 29 neocolonialism, 12 nomadism, xxvii, 1, 100 Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara, 14 oneiric, 9, 41 ontological, ix, 3, 9, 24, 27 orality, 39, 62 oraliture, 59, 61 origins, xiv, 16, 18, 41, 48, 52, 92 Orlando Valérie, 75 Panafricanist, 2 patriarchy, xxv, xxxi, 18 Pfaff, Françoise, 8, 14 phallocentric, 9, 59 pigmentocracy, 29, 54 Pineau, Gisèle, xv, 58 plantation, xiv, xvi, 22, 51, 54, 55 polygamy, xxix, 74–78, 81–83. See also polygyny polygyny, 71, 92n2 postcolonial, ix, 1 poto mitan, 59, 70n13 Price-Mars, Jean, xvi proverbs, 48, 62, 64 race, xiv, xix, xx, 16, 29, 75 rhizome, x, xxvi rootedness, 3, 45 rootlessness, 5, 20 Roumain, Jacques, xvi, xx Sembène, Ousmane, 80 Senghor, Léopold Sedar, xiii, xxii slave. See slavery

Index slavery, xiv, 9, 30, 39, 41, 44, 47 slave trade, xiii, xv, 11, 43 social realism, 66 storytelling, 33, 48, 60, 61

westoxication, 36n16 womanhood, xxx, 2, 76 womanist, 14, 35n15 Zobel, Joseph, xxi, 21

Tirolien, Guy, xxi transculturation, xxvii West Indian, xxxi, 32

111