The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

michèle praeger

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Parts of chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘Édouard Glissant: Of Masters and Maroons,’’ Journal of Caribbean Studies 9.3 (1993–94): 178–93, and as ‘‘Biographie Africaine, Autoethnotgraphies Créoles’’ in Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 245–54. Part of chapter 3 appeared as ‘‘Édoard Glissant: Toward a Literature of Orality,’’ Callaloo 15.1 (1992): 41–48. Parts of chapter 4 appeared as ‘‘Maryse Condé: Mythes et Contremythes’’ in L’Oeuvre de Maryse Condé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996): 205–15, and as ‘‘Créolité or Ambiguity?’’ in Crossing Racial Borderlines and Borderlands, ed. Debra J. Rosenthal and Monica Kaup (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 88–100. ∫ 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America ! Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Praeger, Michèle. The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean imaginary / Michèle Praeger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8032-3739-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Caribbean fiction (French) – History and criticism. 2. Creoles in literature. i. Title. pq3944.p73 2003 843.009%9729—dc21 2003050753

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contents Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1. The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

9

2. Performing Caribbean Histories and Déraisons

33

3. The Island Walkers and the Forest Wanderer

73

4. Créolité and Its Discontents

101

5. The Creolization of the Je

121

6. France and Its Caribbean ‘‘Peripheral’’

155

Conclusion

169

Notes

177

Bibliography

191

Index

201

acknowledgments I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their help and support: Richard Praeger, Catrina Bevilacqua, Claude Imbert, Hafid Gafaïti, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, Suzanne Develter, JoAnn Cannon, Ruby Cohn, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, Jacques Coursil, Jean Grunberg, Elizabeth Langland, and Ronnie Scharfman.

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

Introduction

It is thus at the border between what’s real and what’s fictive, between what it seems possible to say, to write, but which often proves to be, at the moment of writing, unthinkable, and that which seems obvious but appears, at the last second, inexpressible, that this elusive derived writing, writing adrift, begins to make its mark. – Nicole Brossard, The Aerial Letter

Caribbean and imaginary both have a multiplicity of signifieds. Caribbean refers to the first inhabitants of the archipelago, who have been wiped out but still provide the source for myths lurking within the Western Imaginary. It also refers to the islands themselves, which are, in all their physicality and fragility, also sources of myth. Caribbean further denotes a strange mix of people allegedly searching for their identity: not only Caribbean persons of African descent, whites, Asians, mulâtres, Creoles, and Antillais, but also chabins, chabins-kalazaza, chabines, capres, Neg’ Congo, nègres-marron, nègres mondongues, nègres-maquereaux, nègres anglais, and nègres-sans-manmans, not to mention mâles-bougres, femmes gagées, coulis malpropres, échappés coulis, békés, békés-goyave, Grands Blancs, Blancs-France, zoreilles, anges dépeignés, blancs créoles, and Syriens. If you look up the term imaginary in a thesaurus, you might find any of the following synonyms: conjectural, dreamlike, ethereal, fabled, fabulous, fanciful, fantastic, fictional, hypothetical, illusory, immaterial, incorporeal, insubstantial, invented, make-believe, metaphysical, mythical, nonexistent, romantic, speculative, supposed, theoretical, and unreal. Two main currents seem to emerge: immateriality and fiction. The Imaginary, whether Lacanian or not, belongs to the domain of the unreal and is explicitly opposed to the ‘‘Real’’ (or the ‘‘Symbolic’’ within the Lacanian hypothesis), which refers to the field of which history is supposedly composed. But the Caribbean Imaginary, whether collective or individual, is inextricably tied up with the inhabitants’ past and also with a forewarning of their future. The inhabitants of the 1

Introduction

Caribbean have everything to invent, as they cannot return to a particular culture or tradition. Some Caribbean writers and thinkers, Aimé Césaire in particular, have in the past been tempted by the idea of a return to Africa, but this ideology seems obsolete in the contemporary Caribbean as Caribbean writers know that their origins, like the origins of language, are irretrievable. Yet they do not see, or do not want to see, their foreclosed past disappearing irretrievably. This is one of the challenges faced by French Caribbean writers and intellectuals: to identify, acknowledge, and appreciate a past that has been denied them and of which only traces are left. But they wish to accomplish this project without falling victim to the seduction of Africa, ‘‘l’idole des origines,’’ or to the grand narrative of the maroon rising up from slavery and breaking the chains of his people. Paul Ricoeur, in Temps et récit, identifies two major types of narratives: fiction and poetry, and history. He believes that the wall between the reality of history and the invention of fiction is not impenetrable, that history is in part fiction (which does not however make it any less real), and that fictions are not simply ‘‘unreal’’ but function as revelations and as agents of transformation. He claims that ‘‘the shock of the possible’’ has no less impact than the ‘‘shock of the real’’ (2: 120). Perhaps, in contrast with the Imaginary of other cultures, the Caribbean Imaginary can be seen not so much as a product of a people or as a sort of collective unconscious but as an inventor of its own people. The ‘‘true’’ people of the Caribbean are yet to come, and they will be, and perhaps already are, the figments of a Caribbean Imaginary that is still in a state of formative flux. Indeed, the Caribbean Imaginary remains in the realm of possibilities and imagination, that is, of freedom and invention. The Caribbean past is itself part of the realm of the Imaginary, perhaps a Lacanian regressive Imaginary sometimes but also an Imaginary that entrusts the creation of the past not so much to professional historians as to poets and novelists. Gilbert Durand notes in Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire that ‘‘if memory does color the imagination with a posteriori residues [as Bergson would have it], this fact does not preclude the existence of a specific essence of the imaginary that di√erentiates the poet’s thought from that of the chronicler or the memorialist. There exists a function of the possible that should be studied with di√erent tools than those of Bergsonian introspection, which is always suspected of regression’’ (16).∞ 2

Introduction

Durand gives a central place to imagination, which is not, according to him, the result of a Freudian conflict between drives and their social repression but of a harmony (un accord) between individual desires and the forces of the natural and social worlds. Imagination is not a ‘‘product of repression’’ but of ‘‘liberation’’ (36). Durand defines imagination or the imaginary as an ‘‘anthropological journey’’ [trajet anthropologique]. The Imaginary is not the prerogative of the lone individual, as it tends to be considered now in Western art and philosophy. It is an exchange between individual subjectivities and the objectivity of what Durand calls the ‘‘cosmic and social milieu’’: ‘‘This anthropological journey can start from a culture or psychological disposition, but the essence of the representation and of the symbol is to be found between those two reversible milestones’’ (39– 40). One of the aims of this study is to follow this journey as traveled by Caribbean writers. In their narratives the end and the beginning lose their teleological and theological importance. What counts is what happens in between, the interactions of the self and the world. The specificity of Caribbean literature may very well be that it is a literature of the present in the two meanings of the term: the ‘‘contemporary’’ and the ‘‘gift.’’ If one remains strictly within the Lacanian terminology of the Imaginary as pertaining to the realm of the maternal, the corporeal, and even the psychotic, then it seems fairly obvious that the reality of the French Caribbean, or at least the reality of its relations with the Metropole, is familial, as Richard Burton has shown in his ‘‘psychohistory’’ of Martinique entitled La Famille coloniale. According to Burton, the Martinicans and Guadeloupeans from 1789 to 1950 represented their islands to themselves and to the French as the two youngest, most capricious, and most beloved daughters of ‘‘la France.’’ French Caribbean persons experience the French Metropole as both a masculine and a feminine force; in its presence they find themselves in the position of grateful yet vociferous children (see Burton 13–14). What is left for the inhabitants of the Caribbean but to question the construction of a symbolic universe where French reason and culture happen to be the main points of reference, a universe divided into seemingly impermeable dichotomies? In the French Caribbean, as in other areas that find themselves caught within a universalist ideological sphere, the Imaginary can function 3

Introduction

as the Symbolic and the Symbolic be sustained by the Imaginary. Caribbean fiction and poetry reveal that the Caribbean Symbolic is not in a state of rupture with the Imaginary; rather, the Imaginary both feeds and disrupts the field of the Symbolic to such an extent that, in this case, the Lacanian dichotomy of Symbolic/Imaginary loses its ingenious power. I use the adjective imaginary in the expression the ‘‘imaginary Caribbean’’ as Alain Finkielkraut does in The Imaginary Jew, as an imaginary cultural construction. However, I expand on Finkielkraut’s use of the term to include not only the representation of minorities to themselves and to the dominant culture but also the way the dominant culture represents the Caribbean. Unlike the Holocaust, the horror of abduction and enslavement has never been acknowledged publicly by Westerners. No day of atonement, no spectacular gestures such as Willy Brandt’s redemptive kneeling at the monument to Warsaw’s former ghetto, no scandalous act such as Ronald Reagan’s visit to an SS cemetery, no museums of slavery, no memorials, no monuments, no memories, no remorse. The history of enslaved Africans did not know its acme. Their holocaust spread over more than three centuries. The slaves and their descendants were not exterminated as the Native Americans were; they were emancipated by the power that had enslaved them: Enlightened France. The nightmare of slavery has been repudiated: rather than acknowledging its role in slavery, the West produces images that either cover it up or justify it. Fetishes such as Uncle Tom, black nannies, knife-wielding, terrifying maroons, and sexy mulâtresses have been created by the white Western world in order to rationalize and naturalize its role in the tra≈cking of human beings. The Caribbean Imaginary encompasses the ways in which Caribbean writers and intellectuals bend these representations and play with them, performing individual interpretations that have been refracted by the collective imaginary and in turn refract them once again. In this instance imaginary goes beyond representation or illusion and points the way toward a Caribbean Symbolic, a redistribution of roles, and this is where the Caribbean Imaginary becomes critical. Unlike the master sign that separates the signifier from its signified, the Caribbean signifier, be it linguistic or not, is saturated 4

Introduction

through and through by the mnemic traces that make up the signified. For instance, for the Westerner the word slave is composed of a signifier of Latin origin and a signified, albeit one evoking more than one referent, while for the Caribbean person the imploding sign slave cannot be so neatly dissected. Discourses of the Imaginary in every sense of the term abound in representations of the Caribbean Islands and their people. Jacques André reminds us that the ‘‘discoverers’’ of these islands not only did not discover the real India but dreamed or, rather, in their impatient and brutal desire for paradise found, ‘‘hallucinated’’ the West Indies in a never-ending ‘‘good trip’’ (Caraïbales 7). The islands, states André, have never really recovered from the fantasy that created them: ‘‘This ‘minimal reality’ that informs Caribbean reality spares no domain of the social field. . . . Life is elsewhere’’ (8). André poses a crucial question: ‘‘When the imaginary occupies the place of the real, what can be the position of the work?’’ (11).≤ This is the question Patrick Chamoiseau asks in his Ecrire en pays dominé (Writing in a dominated country). It is the question I believe Edouard Glissant answers or at least addresses most successfully among Caribbean writers. Caribbean identities are not only collective, political, or social but, like most other identities, also highly individual. There may be a collective ‘‘black’’ unconscious, as Frantz Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks, but there are also individual unconsciousnesses, and consciousnesses, made up, as Edouard Glissant maintains, of the overlap of history and nonhistory, the overlap of race, gender, class, individual stories, and dreams. Revised forms of psychoanalysis by feminist and postcolonial scholars can be useful when informed by cultural, social, and political trends. Caribbean texts grapple with the complexities of Caribbean identities and, if read outside of a purely collective perspective, turn these complexities into textual perplexities. These texts produce a surplus, which Claudia Tate discloses, an enigma that most critics have brushed aside in favor of political, racialist, and/or gendered interpretations. It is around these textual enigmatic surpluses that I would like to linger, commenting on the similarities but also on the dissimilarities of Caribbean texts, which are, like those of their Metropolitan counterparts, also imaginary in that they are deeply personal and phantasmagoric. 5

Introduction

I have generated within this study a dialogic confrontation between the imaginary Caribbean and the Caribbean Imaginary. The discourse of the imaginary Caribbean, for the most part, places itself squarely within the field of ‘‘white’’ discourse, mainly the modern discourse of the social sciences such as psychoanalysis, history, and sociology.≥ Why have I selected this discourse within the realm of the social sciences rather than literature? For a very practical reason: there does not seem to be a contemporary white literature of the Caribbean. Alexis Leger (a.k.a. Saint-John Perse) has been celebrated by such Caribbean writers as Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant as a precursor of ‘‘true’’ Caribbean literature, ahead of Aimé Césaire, until then considered the founder of modern French Caribbean literature. But there does not seem to be, after Saint-John Perse, any worthy, white Caribbean literature. Can there be a modern, worthwhile, white Caribbean literature? The obvious answer to this question explains why I have relied on the social sciences for illustrating the notion of the imaginary Caribbean. And I have shown that these discourses are not just the prerogative of white theoreticians but also, sometimes, can seep into the thinking of such luminaries as Frantz Fanon. I believe I have also demonstrated that these white sciences, such as psychoanalysis and history, can be derouted and detoured by modern Caribbean and Metropolitan intellectuals. Chapter 1, ‘‘The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts,’’ is an attempt to show how di≈cult it is for a certain type of positivist history to go beyond the analysis of the data on the Caribbean, particularly when it comes to women. I show the blind spots of psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or Lacanian, when applied, as is, to the Caribbean family. I also demonstrate that a Caribbean anthropological discourse can indeed scramble the master’s discourse, even occasionally Fanon’s, and create or, rather, illuminate other types of relationships between Caribbean people, besides those based on hatred and envy. The following chapter, ‘‘Performing Caribbean Histories and Déraisons,’’ is an oblique and complex answer to the first chapter. Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé propose, besides the master’s way, other ways of looking at the Caribbean past. Glissant maroons it and eventually maroons his own earlier writing.∂ Maryse Condé, 6

Introduction

ironically and empathetically, shows us the damages caused by a rigid countermodel to white history, that is, the fascination of some Caribbean people and some African Americans with Africa. Both these writers, in fact, question the notion of history and show us that we often confuse history with historiography. In this chapter I also highlight how one of Michèle Lacrosil’s characters, Cajou, deserves to be deciphered with the tools of feminist psychoanalysis; she needs to be detribalized, not in the way the Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques André has detribalized the Caribbean family but because she deserves to be read not just in a racialist perspective – that is, not ‘‘just’’ as a neurotic black woman – but as a being of desire and, up to a certain point, of resistance. In chapter 3 I engage André Breton, Suzanne Césaire, and Edouard Glissant in a (non)confrontational imaginary dialogue about Caribbean geography and history. Whereas Breton (and André Masson, with whom he is venturing into the Caribbean forest) at times seems able to see himself as a Metropolitan French lost in the jungle, more often than not he equates this jungle with a painting by the douanier Rousseau in order to feel ‘‘comfortable’’ (his own word) strolling in it. As for Suzanne Césaire, she walks her island with the heavier load of Alice Walker’s women, and hence with a broader vision. Edouard Glissant, later on, will theorize, in his inimitable way, this vision and link it to orality. He will forge the term antillanité, boldly placing it as a cornerstone from which to perform and read the Caribbean.∑ Chapter 4, ‘‘Créolité and Its Discontents,’’ appears as an oblique dialogue between two answers to francité and Negritude, two different forms of créolité. One is boldly and uncritically proclaimed by three young Caribbean intellectuals, and the other, a ‘‘feminine’’ one, is suggested by Maryse Condé, who engages not only her elders, such as Césaire, in a debate but also younger male Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, proposing a much more subtle, complex, and ironical view of the relation between the races and the sexes than do the authors of Eloge de la créolité.∏ Chapter 5, ‘‘The Creolization of the Je,’’ attempts to redress the somewhat simplistic view of créolité as exposed by Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in their Creole manifesto by borrowing Glissant’s notion of creolization as a process in constant motion and 7

Introduction

yielding unpredictable results. In this chapter I highlight the complexities of this process in Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s creative work. The final chapter, ‘‘France and Its Caribbean ‘Peripheral,’ ’’ places Caribbean literature in the Metropole, examining how the French ‘‘from France’’ appreciate Caribbean literature and theory. On what grounds does the imaginary Caribbean meet the Caribbean Imaginary? What misunderstandings arise from this encounter? What promises? A word about my selection of Caribbean writers: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant are arguably the most visible of Aimé Césaire’s and Saint-John Perse’s literary and intellectual heirs. They write fictional works, poetry (Glissant), and essays. They all engage in a public debate about Negritude, créolité, and globalization (mondialisation).π They also engage in a literary debate: should ethics and aesthetics mirror each other, as Glissant advocates, or should one write for a broader public than, in Glissant’s words, ‘‘the readers to come’’ [les lecteurs à venir], as Maryse Condé obviously believes? I find these ongoing debates among these three men and this lone woman (which may also reveal a partially unrecorded debate between Caribbean women and men) challenging. The arguments of these four writers and intellectuals deserve to be studied in conversation with the Metropole and with each other. This is what I have attempted to do.

8

chapter ∞

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

The more one depends on the master’s house for support, the less one hears what he doesn’t want to hear. – Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘‘Di√erence: ‘A Special World Women Issue’ ’’

As an example of representations that Caribbean writers contend with, I will start by looking at the way gender in the Caribbean has been represented by Europe and North America, as well as by the Caribbean itself, in accounts of historians and in the discourse of psychoanalysts. History and psychoanalysis curiously intersect when they are applied to the study of plantation society and its aftermath. It is as if history is no longer so sure of its facts and has to somehow support the material traces by introducing a psychoanalytical prop to hold up the entire edifice. It seems also as if psychoanalysis must justify its discourse by calling to its rescue the empirical proofs furnished by history. I will review some psychoanalytic literature as it has been applied to the Caribbean and will not distinguish between a French discourse and an Anglo-Saxon one, although the distinction would no doubt lead to some interesting observations. Caribbean and African American discourses on the subjects of gender and history, and gender and the unconscious, have begun an attempt to counteract what I will call, for lack of a better expression, a Freudian-Lacanian Western discourse, which is sometimes practiced by Caribbean scholars themselves. These Caribbean and African American discourses reveal that sometimes the tyranny of the binary opposition woman/man is stronger than the tyranny of the master/slave relationship, or, rather, they reveal that slavery and gender are inseparable: gender distorts typical images of slavery, which 9

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

in turn inflect accepted perceptions of gender. These Caribbean and African American discourses do not form a monolith, but they do question the accepted truths about gender relations in slave societies. They present other interpretations, other methods of writing a history that calls for a new type of Imaginary, since the stories of Caribbean and African American people have been reconstructed and interpreted from the point of view of a Western elite. Caribbean and African American theoreticians urge us to look at history from the point of view of a non-elite, whether the view of the colonizers or that of the oppressed. Some of them also request that we take into account the condition of women, of black women, for the most part, but also of white women, thus contributing to a gendering of history and to the recent study of the construction of whiteness in slave and postemancipation societies. Traditional historians of slavery are, for the most part, gender-blind when it comes to the condition of the slaves on the plantation. They discuss ‘‘l’esclave’’ or ‘‘the slave,’’ unwittingly espousing a quasi-evolutionary discourse that dates back to the sixteenth century. For example, one such scholar reports that ‘‘the men and women go so alike that one cannot know a man from a woman but by their breasts which in the most part be very foule, hanging downe low like the udder of a goate’’ (qtd. in Bush 14). Christopher L. Miller, in Blank Darkness, masterfully analyzes what he calls the ‘‘discourse with tails’’ of Europeans with regard to Africans, but he ignores the not so implicit white male European ‘‘udder discourse’’ about African American women (3–6). Black women have been and are still overlooked by historians, anthropologists, and Africanists, as well as by the deconstructors of these disciplines. Michel Leiris, in L’Afrique fantôme, his 1931 journal about his expedition to Africa and his repositioning of the white gaze, writes that to disrobe a white woman, to make her an object of (male) fantasy, is ‘‘to strip her of a considerable number of conventions, . . . material as well as institutional conventions. This is not possible for a woman whose institutions are so di√erent from ours. In some respects she is not a woman strictly speaking’’ (469; my translation and emphasis). Leiris’s observation implies, and the implication is quite deeply buried, that the black woman cannot participate in the erotic theater of the white man because eroticism implies civilization. Thus, there is no sacrilege, no crime possible against the body 10

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

or the spirit of a black woman. African or black women are not ‘‘women.’’ But what about the mulâtresse? She is an actor on the white colonial erotic scene, but does that mean that she is a woman, according to Leiris’s definition of the term? Cultural historian, literary critic, and feminist bell hooks argues in Ain’t I a Woman that the rape of a white woman by a black man has been, at least in the United States, one of the representations contributing to the physical and ideological eradication of the black man and the submission of the white woman. The term rape did not apply to black women in plantation society. According to hooks, even contemporary black women cannot be raped: ‘‘One has only to look at American television twenty-four hours a day for an entire week to learn the way in which black women are perceived in American society – the predominant image is that of the ‘fallen’ woman, the whore, the slut, the prostitute’’ (53). If one considers slave women at work, it is obvious that black women were not treated like ‘‘women.’’ Women on the plantation were not spared hard physical work; on the contrary, the majority of fieldworkers were women. Even when pregnant they were whipped and punished as harshly as men. A Swiss traveler to Santo Domingo in 1782 describes the slaves working in a sugar field: ‘‘A mournful silenced reigned. Exhaustion was stamped on every face, but the hour of rest had not yet come. The pitiless eye of the manager patrolled the gang of several foremen armed with long whips moving periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take a rest – men or women – young or old without distinction’’ (qtd. in Moitt 156). Yet historians of women contend that life on the plantation was highly gendered and favored men: ‘‘The skilled workers, coachmen, boilers, makers of animal-drawn carts . . . were all men. . . . Men could be promoted from field work to artisanal and other types of specialized labor, leaving the heavy tasks which required no skills to women’’ (Moitt 161).∞ Historians of women have written that the skilled slaves were truly privileged among the slaves and have described the arrogance of the skilled slaves toward field slaves and women. Arlette Gautier even states that there was a conscious complicity between white and (some) black men to keep women down. Were the masters and the slaves conscious accomplices? Not likely, 11

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

but for concerned observers it comes as no surprise that sometimes two ‘‘races’’ at odds, the African and the European, might recognize their mutual interests and collectively act upon them. If one subscribes to Gautier’s view, black men might be accused of having been traitors to their race in favor of their class and gender. Nevertheless, male slaves have not been accused of treason in the way that black women have. It has even been suggested by certain scholars that among slaves it was not men but women who were ‘‘privileged.’’ Historians of women have studied ‘‘the di√erential treatment of male and female slaves in terms of physical abuse and cruelty,’’ nutrition, and labor productivity (Morrissey 7). For instance, women, because of their alleged temperance and nurturing qualities, fed the canes into the sugar mill, a dangerous beast-machine that would engulf and crush them if their fingertips came into contact with the rollers. Yet planters considered mill-feeding not only women’s work but work that dishonored male slaves. In fact, Father Labat, as reported in his Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique (1693–1705), used it as a form of punishment. Labat reportedly ‘‘gave male slaves whom he deemed slack or lazy the work of the second woman mill-feeder’’ (qtd. in Moitt 164). Indeed, women were given harder and more dangerous work than men because the latter were usually more ‘‘highly’’ valued by their owners. Some historians of women and/or gender have taken into consideration the plight of white women as indentured workers, owners of plantations, or wives of plantation owners. What was the position of white women before and after the institutionalization of slavery? The Caribbean historian Hilary Beckles points out that the concept of ‘‘woman’’ was invented and constructed by white men. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of woman or, rather, of the ‘‘lady’’ was created and reinforced. Ladies were seen as inferior to men but oddly worthy of their respect within certain boundaries, such as their alleged aversion to sex, hard work, and hard thinking. Enslaved women, on the contrary, became sexual predators and manipulators of white men. This ‘‘engineering and reengineering’’ of ‘‘woman’’ became necessary, according to Beckles, to ‘‘facilitate the agro-commercial enterprise and its supportive social environment’’ (131). Beckles uses the findings of feminists and poststructuralists to highlight the arbitrary but motivated origins of oppression. He 12

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

writes that the ‘‘superordinate position of the white male patriarch . . . ensured the marginalisation of all women, and sought the corresponding social emasculation of the black male’’ (131). Beckles is not as interested in the fertility of slave women as contemporary historians such as Marietta Morrissey and Gabriel Debien are. He is instead concerned with the fact that there has been, on the part of traditional historians and social scientists, an ‘‘insu≈cient conceptual attention [focused] upon their biological and constitutional function as the conduits for slavery’’ (Beckles 129; my emphasis). Giving birth, as far as black women were concerned, became ‘‘the soil in which slavery grew and gave life to capitalist accumulation on a grand scale,’’ as Beckles reminds us. The o√spring of a white woman were legally free, regardless of the race of the father, while the children of a black woman were legally slaves. Therefore, the successful reproduction of black women was to be encouraged at all costs, at least later in the slave system, when trading was forbidden and the sexual life of white women was repressed. Beckles points out that ‘‘the linking of white womanhood and black womanhood to freedom and slavery respectively meant that the entire ideological fabric of the slave system was conceived in terms of race, sex and gender’’ (131). Beckles shows that the concept of ‘‘woman’’ was engineered so as to serve the interests of the master: the black woman as sexual beast, the white woman as sexually unapproachable. He examines the representations of women during the times of slavery and states that these representations say more about their ‘‘origins and character than about the actual lives, experiences, and identity of women’’ (131). Although bell hooks would no doubt agree with Beckles’s theory of the construction of woman in slave societies, she does object to one of its alleged consequences: the demasculinization of the black man. In Ain’t I a Woman she builds a clever and sensible theory about black male and female sexualization that contradicts the popular notion of the demasculinization of black slave men. She says that white purchasers were attracted to black men because of their perceived hypermasculinity: ‘‘For it was by the sale of virile African men, ‘would-be workers,’ that the white slave trader expected to receive maximum profit return on his investment’’ (21). Black men were not forced to take on the work of black women; on the contrary, it was a 13

The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

punishment to force them to perform, even temporarily, a woman’s task such as feeding the mill (22): ‘‘While black men were not forced to assume a role colonial American society regarded as ‘feminine,’ black women were forced to assume a ‘masculine’ role’’ (22). Thus, bell hooks wishes that scholars would cease obsessively researching and lecturing on the black man’s alleged castration. She reminds us that in Africa during the time of slavery in the new world, a ‘‘real’’ woman was not supposed to be weak or devoid of intelligence. In Africa the task of laboring in the fields was considered an ‘‘extension of a woman’s feminine role’’ (23). She also maintains that the notion of the man as the provider for and protector of his family is a fairly recent Euro-American invention; in Africa men did not feel demasculinized as a result of not toiling in the fields. Likewise, black men in America and, it should be added, in the Caribbean probably never felt that they were not providers for their families; rather, the benefits they reaped from work were systematically looted by the white establishment. There is nothing more ‘‘feminine,’’ hooks adds, than a black woman. Even the slaves working in the fields wore dresses, though trousers would have been much more practical. The black woman was masculinized against her wishes by slaveholders. She was made to appear as physically strong as a man, as sexually aggressive as a man. What ‘‘feminine’’ qualities were left to her were her venality and her corrupting talents, evils fiercely denounced by the monotheistic religions. Black women, contends hooks, were desperate to be feminine, respected, and kept (in other words, white). She claims that black women, far from depriving black men of their virility, are annoyed at black men who cannot succeed in white America. Contradictory myths have emerged from the discourses concerning the black woman as the ‘‘promiscuous harlot’’ or the ‘‘domineering matriarch’’ (Bush 20). She was, according to some, privileged among the slaves, a manipulative sensual lover, even a manipulator of the white man and a traitor to the black man. She was, at the same time, responsible for the ‘‘matrifocal family’’ and consequently for the alleged ‘‘general lack of morals among slaves’’ (Bush 9) and freed blacks. In order to understand the reality from which these myths spring, it is necessary to interpret the facts from the point of view of the mythified. Barbara Bush, inspired by Foucault, rea≈rms that 14

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sexuality makes up an ‘‘ ‘articular dense transfer point for relations of power,’ that power is di√use and comes from below in ‘manifold relationships,’ ’’ and that ‘‘black women, despite their (perceived) racial and sexual inferiority, could at times manipulate white men to their own advantage’’ or to the advantage of their kin (111). Hilary Beckles contends that ‘‘the especially disintegrated nature of many slave families did not preclude their ability to function as socially cohesive and emotionally integrated structures,’’ as they relied on kinship solidarity, including the kinship of men, in order to keep these structures alive (120). Women historians recognize that there existed between white masters and some female slaves (a tiny minority) some ‘‘reciprocal relations accompanied perhaps by a√ection and respect,’’ as slaveholders ‘‘often sired and later freed the children of slave women’’ (Morrissey 168). They acknowledge that women and men were treated di√erently and, therefore, that their manipulation of power was marked by contrast: ‘‘Slave men, by virtue of their greater access to resources (skilled positions, hiring out, provision gardens), had status and authority over slave women and children. Likewise, women’s greater access to manumissions, domestic work, sexual unions with masters, and the potential for bearing free children gave them an advantage over slave men’’ (Morrissey 13–14). Marietta Morrissey nevertheless concludes that women in slavery were under a patriarchal yoke that did not favor black men but that did particularly disfavor black women. The white master did not want to emasculate the black man, as this would have made him an ally of the black woman. Even under the most grotesque circumstances, the hierarchy that decrees that women are inferior to men, however ‘‘inferior’’ these men may be, had to remain in place for the good of a certain society. Morrissey writes: ‘‘The findings suggest that slave women were often doubly oppressed, as slaves and as wives and daughters. Two ideal typical constructs, slavery and patriarchy, describe women’s subordination’’ (165). Since women were not just brutalized as producers, like men, but also as reproducers of slaves, one crucial area for the consolidation of slave societies has been scrutinized: the sexuality and fertility patterns of slave women.≤ Let us review two historians’ treatments of pregnancy, birth, and abortion during slavery: a 1974 study of slaves 15

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in the French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Gabriel Debien, a traditional though not overtly sexist male scholar; and the 1989 Slave Women in the New World by Marietta Morrissey, a female historian of women. Both historians agree on many points regarding slave women’s fertility. Debien remarks that there was a numeric imbalance between the sexes: there were fewer adult women than men on the plantations. Both he and Morrissey note that children were scarce on the plantations either ‘‘because of low natality or because of high infant mortality’’ (Debien 348).≥ Debien recognizes that it is impossible to tell from existing records if Creole slaves were more fecund than Africans, but he assumes that newly arrived African women, exhausted by their journey, would not have become pregnant easily. Therefore Creole slaves had to produce more children in order to sustain the population, but not too many because, according to Debien’s tautological explanation, ‘‘the essential characteristic of the slave’s birthrate was to have few children’’ (348). He does add that this low birthrate ‘‘was perhaps a reflection of African mores’’ (348), that is, the practice of polygyny and the sexual taboos associated with lactating, menstruating, or menopausal women (Gautier 43). It is true that reproductive ‘‘skills’’ could be rewarded: in his chapter ‘‘Mortalité, natalité’’ Debien mentions that midwives were allowed to practice their art far from their plantations of origin. They did not work in the fields. Some were granted an uno≈cial liberation (liberté de savane) and had five or six children. Still, the numbers are there and seem to indicate that women, for whatever reasons, were not willing or able to perpetuate the state of slavery. Both Debien and Morrissey agree that the low birthrate and the high infant mortality rate were due to the fact that women were, just like men, overworked and undernourished and to the fact that postnatal care for children was very poor (Debien 369; Morrissey 165). Abortion, states Debien, was another important cause of the low birthrate; slaves were familiar with abortive methods they had learned in Africa. He says that it is impossible to know if newly arrived African women aborted more often than Creole slaves and that even if this were ascertainable, the reasons for the termination of pregnancy could not be interpreted: ‘‘Could one explain African practices as a protest against slavery and the more numerous births 16

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by Creole women as a sign that they had become accustomed to slavery, as the result of a more pronounced spirit of resignation?’’ It cannot be determined, he says; pretending otherwise ‘‘would be a fantasy’’ [ce serait faire du roman, 364–65]. Debien quotes contemporary observers such as administrators who in 1764 were entrusted by the king to find out the causes of Santo Domingo’s depopulation, which they blamed on abortions and the ‘‘frenetic libertinage’’ of slaves and whites. According to o≈cials, slave women aborted because they did not want their ‘‘pleasure’’ impeded by the care of babies. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, who resided in Santo Domingo at the end of the eighteenth century and did not own a plantation, wrote in Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingo that abortions were a way for women to protest against slavery and seek revenge against their masters (qtd. in Debien 365). Further, the abolitionist Lecointe-Marcillac in 1789 accused masters of directly encouraging abortions among their slaves because they did not want mothers to take the time to care for their children. He also stated that women slaves, knowing the kind of life to which their children would be exposed, saw it as a duty born out of tenderness and sensitivity to abort: ‘‘Most say with frankness that it is because of an excess of love that they kill their children before the pregnancy comes to term rather than contribute to a painful existence’’ (qtd. in Debien 366). The very traditional nineteenth-century historian Lucien Peytraud quotes le Père du Tertre to show that even in the ‘‘vilest state,’’ delicate and noble feelings can be felt and expressed. A young female slave, he relates, was to be married to another slave but told the priest, ‘‘No, Father, I do not want him or any other one; I am content to be miserable by myself, without having any children who might be even unhappier than I am and whose sorrows would make me feel much sadder than my own do’’ (209; my translation). Nevertheless, Debien does not think these testimonies are conclusive and believes that more research on the subject is required if the reasons for which women chose to abort or to abstain from sex altogether are to be understood (366). Contemporary testimonies acknowledge that slave women were conscious of their oppressed state, were not eager to have children, and preferred to avoid sexual relations. Marietta Morrissey, however, 17

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questions the assertion that abortions were common practice in the West Indies, ‘‘a means of political resistance for slave women.’’ She suggests that the ‘‘frequency of these practices has been exaggerated’’ (115), but she does not say who has been exaggerating. Have black feminists and writers exaggerated in order to emphasize the resistance of black women in reproducing the slave system? Or have these exaggerations come from the white establishment, eager to validate the stereotype of the black woman as a whore and therefore devoid of any maternal feelings? Morrissey asks, ‘‘Why are there not more female deaths recorded from bleeding or fever if abortions were common, especially with the highly unsanitary conditions in slave quarters and in light of Schaw’s comment that abortion was often fatal to the mother?’’ (116). She suggests that the ‘‘European and North American fascination with African women’s reputed sexual and healing powers’’ is at the root of the ‘‘popular and scholarly acceptance of the hypothesis that West Indian slave women controlled births.’’ Just like Gabriel Debien, she cites evidence that ‘‘disease, malnutrition, and illness resulting from overwork were important contributors to male and female subfecundity’’ (119). These factors undoubtedly explain to some extent the low birthrate among slave women, yet this positivist insistence on logic, reason, and common sense at all costs results in an ideological reading on the part of the two historians in the sense that it obfuscates an important dimension of women slaves’ daily lives and attitudes: resistance. Resistance is a modus operandi that has been denied to women slaves because of the assumption that the only form of resistance to slavery was to maroon, a heroic gesture accomplished more often than not by men, as historians have duly remarked. Barbara Bush, in the introduction to Slave Women in Caribbean Society, emphasizes the notion of female resistance and recognizes that women who were treated like men in the fields also reacted like them: they rebelled sometimes and resisted all the time. This discretion kept them alive. But black women at home became ‘‘women,’’ ‘‘womanish,’’ that is, ‘‘uppity’’ or imperious. According to Bush, this phenomenon was reminiscent of African cultural traditions the women were trying to maintain while fighting white influences. In this sense the black woman was indeed a resister. Hilary Beckles alludes to the fact that the notion of black women as preservers of the 18

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African cultural heritage is a stereotype frequently used by historians and social scientists in order to explain the Caribbean and African American peoples’ cultures and societies. But if black women were conduits of slavery, as historians claim, they were also conduits of resistance to slavery. Beckles contrasts this notion with historian Lucille Mair’s ‘‘rebel woman,’’ a cultural icon created by an ideology that embraces an ‘‘elitist leadership in the tradition of divine authority’’ (129). Maryse Condé, in her novel I Tituba, parodies this ‘‘natural rebel,’’ a ‘‘woman in the fields . . . who possesses no claim to distinct individuality and is therefore one of the masses’’ (Beckles 129). Some feminists have used the myth of the strong black woman in order to claim for her a sort of phylogenetic tendency toward resistance, a notion that has been pushed to its outer limits mostly by male critics, who have refashioned this figure as the black female, castrator of black males. But some black women resisted in response to an unfair, brutal, and hypocritical system. Bush states that the resistance of women to slavery – resistance such as ‘‘shirking work, shamming illness, lying, stealing and even openly defying and abusing overseers’’ – has been employed by the white master, in contrast to the myth of the strong black woman, as further proof that Africans, whether diasporic or not, male or female, were naturally lazy and not to be trusted (45). Hilary Beckles faults historians of women for ignoring recent critical developments such as gender studies, deconstructionism, and poststructuralism, claiming that these historians ignore the role of language in slave societies. Gender among slaves was constructed for the most part by the white masters to their (un)conscious advantages. The uncovering of ‘‘woman’’ as a social construct, not a given of nature, has passed unnoticed by historians of women, and Beckles believes that this inattention reveals ‘‘an insensitivity which says a great deal about the theoretical state of this recent historiography. . . . The tendency then, has been for historians of Caribbean slavery to subject women’s experiences to investigations with respect to caste, class, race, color and material relations rather than to explore how much representations and discourses are internally organized by patriarchal mobilizations of gender ideologies’’ (128). Beckles does, however, recognize that implicit in the research of historians of women such as Arlette Gautier, Barbara Bush, and 19

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Marietta Morrissey ‘‘are the sign posts for the crossing from ‘women’s history’ to ‘gender history’ ’’ (127). As limited as this type of literature may be, its identification of the oppression of women in the time of slavery suggests that women did find empowerment and ways of resisting (128). Historians have started to research the condition of enslaved women, and the social sciences are revising accepted notions concerning Caribbean women. Even contemporary psychoanalytical discourse seems intent on finding a group of people among the ‘‘wretched of the earth’’ who can share in the guilt of the enslavers and colonizers. Who is at fault when it comes to the allegedly ine≈cient way in which Caribbean men, black men of the diaspora, deal with familial problems? Who is responsible for the Caribbean family model, which is so foreign to the nuclear one? A psychoanalytical current has crossed the Atlantic coming from France, a barely modified Freudian and Lacanian discourse. The traditional actors are in place: the Father, the Mother, and the Son. For good measure, the Father is white and the Mother and Son are black. To this triad the analysts add the black father, only to withdraw him immediately, along with the black daughter. The play is ready to unfold, a mixture of Greek tragedy and Caribbean voodoo. The black Mother lurks in the center of a very tight net of obedience and rebellion, threats of (dis)pleasure, rage and bitter irony, deception, death in life, life in death. She is the feminine principle who has not yet known defeat; she is horror incarnate, the petrifying Medusa. The white Father is a French socialist and liberal who has never in his wildest dreams fathomed his superordinate importance within the Caribbean feminine Imaginary. The black father has been castrated by the Mother, and the daughter is the Mother’s favorite putty after the black son. The daughter is modeled by the Mother as a future m/Mother, the son as a rooster, the Caribbean equivalent of a stallion or stud. Nevertheless, one psychoanalyst of Metropolitan origin, Jacques André, has shown that the perceived virility of the Son is but a cover for his homosexuality. Frantz Fanon was one of the first to analyze the alienation of the Caribbean woman. In ‘‘The Woman of Color and the White Man,’’ a chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon claims that the Caribbean woman wants to ‘‘save’’ the race, that is, to make it disappear by 20

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whitening it through sexual intercourse with white or ‘‘light’’ men. Fanon illustrates this point with conversations he has had with women students in France and with two books by Mayotte Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise and La Négresse blanche. Clarisse Zimra notes Fanon’s feigned naiveté when he reads these novels as autobiographies in order to attack their author ad feminem. She also states that he does not make the slightest e√ort to understand ‘‘the raw survival imperative befallen the woman (of any caste or color) in a patriarchal society’’ (‘‘Négritude’’ 60). The Caribbean woman, far from gratefully accepting the position Fanon grants her next to him in his fight against the white world, humiliates the black man with her desire for ever-whiter children. When she is black, she wants children by a lighter man; when she is light-skinned, she wants children with an even lighter man. Interestingly, in this same chapter Fanon illustrates the alleged ‘‘lactification complex’’ of the Caribbean woman with the example of a black man who is in love with a light-skinned woman. But this man is never suspected of wanting to save the race; rather, he is portrayed as a well-educated victim of the indignant ‘‘silly little mulatto typist,’’ who has a high opinion of herself because she is lighter than her suitor. As we accompany Fanon on an expedition into the real world, we soon find out that Caribbean women show no respect for the Father: Césaire. One exasperated woman ‘‘throws in [Fanon’s] face’’ the following question: ‘‘If Césaire is so eager to claim his color, it is because he thinks it is a malediction. Do white people claim theirs?’’ (38). Years later, in 1974, Maryse Condé echoes the same distrust toward Césaire when she states that Césairian Negritude is based ‘‘on a lie, the worst lie of colonization, that of the existence of an inferior being made to function as a subaltern’’ (‘‘Négritude ’’ 414). According to her, Césaire, in his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, initiates for himself and his people a total acceptance of the self as a Negro (un nègre). But the Negro does not exist. This notion was invented by Europe to legitimize the slave trade (‘‘Négritude’’ 413). In another chapter of Black Skin Fanon scrutinizes the position of Jean Veneuse, a West Indian character in the novel Un Homme comme les autres (A man like any other), by René Maran. A colonial civil servant in Africa, Jean Veneuse was brought at a very young age to live in Bordeaux. He is in love with a Parisian woman, but instead of 21

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acting ‘‘normal’’ and marrying his beloved, as his French friends urge him to do, he decides against marriage in order to save her, despite herself, from the shame of being associated with a black man. According to Veneuse, this is how the French, and specifically the French who live in the colonies, see the black man, therefore binding him within a set of emotional defenses: he is not allowed to ‘‘shout, to laugh, to cry, to love, to do foolish things, to be the prey, like everybody else, of the most contradictory feelings of a human soul’’ (143); he is not allowed to have ‘‘états d’âme.’’∂ As Veneuse is stepping on the boat bringing him back to his post in Africa, he notices that ‘‘it is not me who is leaving but another me, almost a stranger to me, who does not possess my soul, although he resembles me like a brother’’ (15). The reader has to overlook the romantic rhetoric in order to salvage the implications of the latter part of the passage: ‘‘I have become double, depersonalized’’ (16). In this postmodern Middle Passage that carries the black man from France back to Africa, one part of Jean Veneuse stays in France as an assimilated, cultured, and refined Frenchman, while the other part leaves for Africa. It is di≈cult for the reader to identify the other Jean Veneuse, the one who returns to Africa: is he a ‘‘phenomenon’’ on the boat, as one of his friends is fond of repeating? A black man who writes and dreams? A man who unceremoniously beds a French woman because he senses that she is tempted by ‘‘sick curiosity’’? Is he a typical colonialist, this man who reads Kipling in Africa and lives with an African woman he considers charming and childlike? Is he an early anticolonialist, as he states that colonization and civilization represent ‘‘forces that come before legality, murder celebrated and honored’’ (136)? In any event, Jean Veneuse falls prey to the ideology of the white Frenchman: in order to justify the happy ending – the black man and the white French woman reunited at last – Veneuse chooses to accommodate his French friends when they convince him that he, Jean Veneuse, is ‘‘like us’’ – that is, cultured, refined, ‘‘French.’’ Instead of vilifying Jean Veneuse, who he states is René Maran, Fanon diagnoses him with empathy. According to him, Jean Veneuse su√ers from a neurosis of abandonment. Fanon does not take his analysis to its logical conclusion. If he had, he would no doubt have concluded that Jean Veneuse was abandoned by his mother because ‘‘Jean Vene22

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use is ugly. He is black’’ (Fanon 80). Fanon does warn the reader that he would lack objectivity if he thought Jean Veneuse’s neurosis typical of the ‘‘man of color as such’’ and states that he cannot generalize here anymore than he would in the case of Mayotte Capécia (81). Yet in ‘‘La Femme de couleur et le blanc,’’ (‘‘The Woman of Color and the White Man’’) the woman of color’s perverted agenda is universalized, becoming emblematic of a whole race. There is no e√ort on Fanon’s part to theorize a Caribbean ‘‘feminine’’ behavior other than the lactification complex, a regretful rejection on his part of Caribbean women. Despite his attacks against the woman of color in her relationship with the white man, Fanon stops short at the black family, which for him is an oasis for the black man, whose problems start only when he ventures into white societies. Two Lacanian psychoanalysts, Fritz Gracchus, from Guadeloupe, and his French counterpart Jacques André, who has lived in the French Caribbean, want to detribalize the Caribbean man, remove him from the African sphere, and, just as Freud did for his wealthy Viennese Jewish women and girl patients, find the origins of his ‘‘problems’’ in his family.∑ Both Gracchus and André claim to want to go beyond the empirical approach of the social sciences and reject the culturalist theory, according to which slavery is to blame for the alleged irresponsibility of the Caribbean man toward his family. For Gracchus slavery, colonialism, and imperialism hardly provide the only explanations for the outrageous behavior of the black lover and father. He asserts that the ‘‘matrifocal’’ family in the Caribbean is not a result of a failure of the black father or of the roles slave men played in the reproduction economy of the plantation; it results instead from the forsaking of the black man by the black mother, who can only love and honor the white father-master. As long as the symbolic Father is fantasmatically present, the presence of the biological father is unnecessary (Gracchus 103). The black father has been deserted by the black woman not because he is a black man but because the expression black man is an oxymoronic figure of speech. As a result of the mother’s desertion, the black son is unable to confront the law and live in society, since the postemancipation white father will never be a rival and will never be confronted with his son’s murderous desire. Jacques André notes that Fanon, in order to avoid having to attack the black mother directly, explains the black man’s 23

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‘‘neurosis’’ through his confrontation with an exterior and racist world. For André, Fanon’s analysis is strongly marked by a ‘‘Jungian and culturalist’’ type of influence (Inceste 247).∏ Gracchus, in his 1980 study entitled Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétés afroaméricaines (The locus of the Mother in African American societies), states that the social sciences have not been blind to what I have described [the alleged privileged status of women on the plantation], but they have refused to understand why women had a privileged status within the slave and colonial machine, preferring to find in the social position of women the heritage of an African matriarchy. The concept of heritage is a magical concept that can be used to prove almost anything. . . . The privileged condition of women on the plantation had nothing to do with any ‘‘heritage’’ but came about because power found its profit from this situation. . . . If slavery has left African American societies an inheritance, it is to be found in this web of relations [between the black woman and the white man], not in an alleged destruction of the family. . . . The name of ‘‘maman’’ that the black woman received on the plantation made her a site of education, a mouthpiece for the master. (228; my translation)

André, who comes to the same conclusions as Gracchus concerning the relationship of the black mother to the black father and the black son, adds to Gracchus’s analysis the relationship of the black mother to the black daughter. According to him, in African American societies the ‘‘feminine’’ behavior to which women must conform is not enforced by men but is formed within the privileged locus of the mother-daughter relationship, where the feminine learns to be silent (Inceste 89). The mother forces her daughter to be quiet and acquiescent and her son to be boastful about his virility. As soon as the son manifests any kind of emotionality or feelings not associated with sex, the mother, states André, puts him back in rank by calling him a makomé, a queer (Inceste 165). And we’ve known since Fanon that a Caribbean man simply ‘‘cannot’’ be a makomé, as Jacques André (Inceste 158), James Arnold, and others have remarked. This sharp division made by André between the two genders and their ensuing respective freedoms and duties is also noticeable at a linguistic level: the girl should not use Creole, as it is vulgar and sexual, but the boy’s 24

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use of Creole is a display of strength and triumphant sexuality (André, Inceste 63–65). Creole is also the language of the Mother. André remarks that, under the law of the Mother, the daughter is not free and the boy is also deprived of freedom. The boy does not choose to be an aggressive heterosexual; the mother forces him to behave that way. In contrast to the identification process that occurs in ‘‘normal’’ families, she has usurped the role of the father as potential castrator. Yet André goes on to write that the boy, not having encountered the law, cannot comply with the edicts of society (Inceste 67). The symbolic Mother can only be a Father up to a certain point: she can train her daughter, but when she applies her law to her son, it can only fail. Jacques André devotes a chapter of L’Inceste focal, ‘‘Men – Nonrivalry – Homosexuality,’’ to this socialization process. He questions the accepted and traditionally feared virility of the black man. He points out that in habitual nuclear families, the father and the son share the same love object: the body of the mother. Rivalry is one of the detours that allows for a homosexual bond between father and son. In Caribbean families, however, according to André, the rivalry between father and son never happens, ‘‘not for lack of hostility but for lack of love’’ (143). The black father, denigrated by the black mother, cannot be his son’s rival: the son cannot desire the father’s position, as the father is not desired by the mother. The black man’s desire can only find satisfaction away from his wife and his son, within those groups of men that gather on the streets of Caribbean cities. What binds these men together is not a political ideal or a desire to change the society in which they live. Rather, these groups request from their members a brilliant verbal ability to express sexual strength and aggressive virility. A libidinal type of logic is at work here. André argues that the father has not been eliminated from these groups; the rivalry between father and son has simply been displaced onto the brother, the peer. Rivalry within these groups is verbalized and acted out. Who is the first to speak of virility? According to André, it is the mother, who cries, ‘‘Coq en moin détô, maré poul a zot!’’ [My rooster is out, keep your hens in! 155]. In this performative statement the mother ‘‘shows her son the way to compulsory virility, opposing the plurality of other women to the Oneness of the mother’’ (155). Virility 25

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reintroduces the maternal figure, the obvious absence within the group. The men are in fact acting, showing o√ for their mothers. The performance enables the son to delude the mother concerning his homoeroticism and also provides an outlet for his homosexuality. When the son narrates his sexual exploits to the fraternal group, he identifies with the object of love, the mother, who is the one who opposes the homosexual orientation. Thus the group is a ‘‘formation of compromise’’ between ‘‘the fixation with the mother and the creation of a distance from her brought about by the angst associated with this incestuous fascination’’ (André, Inceste 170). Although and because he performs his virility, the son cannot become a father. The mother takes the place of the father – she is a mother-father – and here things can only go awry, since the mother has usurped the symbolic realm of the Father or at least believes she has. But couldn’t one envision the likelihood of the Mother moving from the Imaginary chora to the order of the Symbolic, of language, of society when needed, without incurring any damage? As one Caribbean woman stated most simply in a 1980 interview: ‘‘I am the Father and the Mother’’ (Alibar and Lembeye-Boy 1: 184). According to André, while the mother forces her son to take the road of sexual and social irresponsibility, she traps her daughter in a complex web of interdictions and acceptance. The mother warns her daughter not to come back with a baby, but according to André, as soon as her daughter does so, the relationship between her and her mother becomes positive again. In that sense a ‘‘maternal continuum takes place,’’ writes André. This maternal continuum, once a baby is born, allows the mother ‘‘to relive her own story.’’ According to André, this situation has to reproduce itself from mother to daughter in order for Caribbean societies to stagnate under the law of the mother: ‘‘Because familial logic and the social code do not so much recognize two di√erent type of sexualities – male and female – as they oppose the masculine, the sexual, to the feminine, the nonsexual, the junction of the feminine and the sexual can only happen under the auspices of ‘undoing’ ’’ and even of death (André, Inceste 83). In other words, if Caribbean daughters sometimes practice infanticide (very seldom, according to the records), it is not because they want to kill a child but because they want to save one: theobedient-daughter-who-has-never-yet-displeased-her-mother. 26

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Fritz Gracchus compares the regime of matrifocality to Medusa and himself, a Caribbean man, to Perseus: he isn’t able to confront the power of the mother directly because it would transform him into stone. He has to use a detour, in this case illegitimacy, which he claims is one of the constituents of matrifocality (49). In the same vein Jacques André can only address this matrifocality through allusions to incest. Although the examples of incest that he gives in his case studies are ones of stepfather-daughter incest, one can infer from his reasoning that incest is what structures the Caribbean family, whether it be mother-son or mother-daughter. Mother-daughter incest has to do with the reunion of the mother and the daughter, the rebellious daughter who becomes pregnant and therefore shames her mother. (But can we call a young girl who, according to André, is totally innocent as to sexuality ‘‘rebellious’’?) When the prodigal daughter comes home – that is, home to her mother – the two women become equal, so to speak: the daughter has become what her mother used to be, a mechanism (rouage) in the creation and maintenance of this vicious feminine circle: the production of fatherless babies (André, Inceste 82). The daughter makes babies with (for) her mother in order to perpetuate the myth of the male-oppressed black woman. Thus the daughter reintegrates the ‘‘mother’s bosom’’ as she reunites with her mother. The son never leaves this bosom, his multiple conquests and fathering of fatherless babies perceived by the mother as an homage to herself. The real incest, according to André, has been anticipated by the mother, the ‘‘inevitable’’ sexual relation between her live-in lover and her daughter. In fact, even this is not really incest, according to André: the man, having so little authority within the Caribbean family, does not act like a father seducing his daughter; this is, rather, a mutual seduction. The mother’s lover does not so much take the young girl as put himself in a ‘‘regressive position’’ (André, Inceste 135). Gracchus and André are to be lauded when they criticize a certain discourse of the social sciences as it concerns the Caribbean family. This discourse posits the man as weak, violent, and irresponsible, while the mother is presented as the paragon of all maternal values: hard working, self-sacrificing, and combative for her children. ‘‘The more a mother is admirable, the more the father is irresponsible,’’ 27

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notes André sarcastically (Inceste 324). Gracchus and André are certainly justified in pointing out that most sociologists have evaluated the Caribbean family from within the parameters of the nuclear, Northern European family and have therefore judged the Caribbean family as deficient. André’s observations about latent male homosexuality in the Caribbean could lead to other readings and interpretations of Caribbean societies, but he chooses to keep these observations within the realm of a Freudian type of explanation. Gracchus’s and André’s psychoanalytical discourse, just like the social sciences they claim to challenge, posits the Caribbean father as both subservient and tyrannical. They have also found a culprit for this state of a√airs: the black mother. According to them, the black mother is not trying to emulate the mother in the white family; rather, she subconsciously wishes that she were at the center of her own family. She nevertheless deludes herself; the father cannot be eradicated since in this case the black father has been replaced by the white Father. According to Gracchus and André, a Caribbean woman hopes for a light-skinned son with ‘‘good’’ hair not because he will have to survive in a racist society (nothing is said in this respect about a daughter), this type of discourse being much too empirical for the two analysts, but because the black mother has had, from the beginning of slavery, an inexplicable libidinal attachment to the white man. In fact, libidinally speaking, the black mother’s advantage lies in perpetuating a racist society. André admits that the ‘‘matrifocal arrangement goes back to slavery, to a plantation-type economy,’’ but says that this going back to the origins ‘‘explains’’ the situation without ‘‘comprehending’’ it. According to him, the type of reasoning o√ered by the social sciences presents a familial arrangement that made the best of ‘‘an insupportable historical situation,’’ but he fails to account for a situation that has not changed although the original conditions that allowed for its creation have disappeared (Inceste 282). Of course, although slavery has been abolished, the French Caribbean still finds itself in ‘‘an insupportable historical situation.’’ The main explanation André provides for the ‘‘failure’’ of the Caribbean son is that, despite numerous assurances to the contrary, in no known society can ‘‘my mother father me’’ (Inceste 244). Jacques André concludes his dense study by admonishing his readers that the black man has to become the subject of his own 28

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desire and his own discourse. How can he do that? ‘‘By leaving the place of assistance, mothering, and reassuring’’ (Inceste 280), André suggests. The message is both psychoanalytical and political: in order to become men and citizens, Caribbean men have to separate themselves from the black Mother, who is in league with the Metropole (the inaccessible white Father). The Metropolitan colonial power benefits from the black man’s ‘‘personality’’ as long as it fits its own interests and as long as the Mother also reaps certain benefits, power having ‘‘dissimulated itself in a body where motherhood is not so much the desire to procreate another autonomous body but rather a repetition or even a desire to reproduce oneself in the other’’ (Inceste 234). It is obvious, then, that independence in Martinique and Guadeloupe will only happen at the cost of the divorce of the Caribbean Mother from the French Father! Furthermore, Jacques André, though familiar with the work of American theorists of the Caribbean, does not acknowledge the development since the end of the 1970s of a new social sciences discourse that seeks to modify the structural-functional model that has prevailed in studies of the Caribbean family. Without denying the Caribbean family’s alleged inherent instability, these Caribbean and American anthropologists, such as A. Lynn Bolles, are interested in exploring not only the relationship of the Caribbean woman to her family (in its narrow meaning) but also the support she builds with her kin, a very widespread net that includes her in-laws, their children, and any individual who is part of her economic web and/or gives a hand with the care and socialization of the kin-children. Moreover, the kinship theory disrupts a crucial psychoanalytical element, the mother/son dyad. Anthropologists such as Bolles are anxious to acknowledge the notion of kinship since they are interested in portraying the role of Caribbean women in the formation of Caribbean nations and societies objectively, with neither stigma nor idealization. A Caribbean woman is not ‘‘just’’ a mother (in the nuclear sense of the word); she is also a provider for her children and an entrepreneur. Erna Brodber, in a 1986 article quoted by Bolles, interviewed four Jamaican women who told of ‘‘the ways men mediate into their lives from the turn of the century to the present. These men were outside of the women’s household, but o√ered them labor . . . guidance . . . and emotional sustenance [that was] considered so 29

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important to [the women] that [it] could cure physical illness and provide the opportunity for [their] bodies to make children.’’ Bolles concludes, ‘‘Clearly, this interpretation shows how men fit into the lives of women and vice versa without the assumption of impropriety or disorganization’’ (7). Men, therefore, can also be kin. Writer bell hooks answers Fanon, Gracchus, and André indirectly. Gracchus and André dismiss the notion of cultural African legacies in explaining the behavior of slaves in the New World, but they also dismiss the influence of the culture of white slave owners and their families. The slaves, both women and men, could not help internalizing, however reluctantly, the ways of living and the morals of the class they served. As hooks writes: ‘‘Enslaved black people accepted patriarchal definitions of male-female sex roles. They believed, as did their white owners, that woman’s role entailed remaining in the domestic household, rearing children, and obeying the will of husbands’’ (47). Far from wanting to be castrators, black women ‘‘from slavery to nowadays . . . espoused the notion of this ideal woman [the white wife and mother] and, far from wanting to steal power from their men, or castrate them, wanted to come as close to that ideal as possible’’ (47). In a surprisingly cavalier way, hooks nevertheless blames enslaved women and their descendants for not having been or not being feminists: ‘‘By completely accepting the female role as defined by patriarchy, enslaved black women embraced and upheld an oppressive sexist social order and became (along with their white sisters) both accomplices in the crimes perpetuated against women and the victim of those crimes’’ (49). I have lingered on the psychoanalytical theory of the black mother not only because it is a very persuasive type of discourse for Metropolitan French scholars but also because it imprisons Caribbean societies in an eternal state of infantilism and releases Metropolitan France from engaging in any kind of political or economical changes with its last remaining colonies. According to Clarisse Zimra, Caribbean writing is a ‘‘meditation on history’’ (‘‘Righting the Calabash’’ 144). The term meditation is crucial here, as histories of slavery have not provided much meditation but have been mostly interested in interpreting the ‘‘facts.’’ The writing of Caribbean history has been, for the most part, a white fiction under the guise of a positivistic interpretation of the events. 30

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Counterhistories of the Caribbean and slavery have not yet appeared. Novelists and poets in the Caribbean have been writing the history of the Caribbean since Aimé Césaire; they have given a voice to the man and the woman in the fields, and they have shifted the main focus from the master to the slave. How does it feel to be torn from one’s country and loved ones and plunged into hell? How does it feel to be a slave or a descendant of a slave? How does one survive and create as a slave? How can one remain a man or a woman when one is a slave? Literature is a performative act: it creates history as it enunciates it. History should be not the fictionalization of certain ‘‘real’’ events but a (re-)creation, with ‘‘conceptual concerns’’ (Beckles 128), of past cultural practices and ways of thinking. A new history, a new social science of slavery, would also scrutinize past representations of slaves and slave owners, men as well as women, and question the purposes of these representations. I do not believe, however, that this ideal representational historiography would give its readers what I will call an a√ective knowledge of the lives of the slaves and their descendants, that is, the vécu (lived experience) of slave owners and their descendants, indentured workers, the Chinese and Indians, or the Haitians who work in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Even an enlightened and imaginative historian such as Hilary Beckles who questions the systems of representation that have encoded the institution of slavery can only help us deconstruct these systems. We still cannot experience slavery and postslavery. Only novels and poems can accomplish the di≈cult task of apprehending this experience because they do not require univocal types of reading. The dialogic text demands to be read creatively, that is, with insight, boldness, and ambiguity. Such a reading does not necessarily accept the text at face value but questions its obvious limits, marginalizes its centers through a series of revolutions that bring the borders to the center. Reading, needless to say, just like creative writing, is a process. The reading questions the writing; in turn the writing disrupts the reading of the center of the text and its perceived margins. The more artistic the text – be it Metropolitan French, African, Caribbean, or American, written by a man or a woman – the more infinite the movement. In the following chapter I will show how Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé meditate on history while incarnating it and how their 31

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characters negotiate with the legacies of their histories. I will also explore the ways in which Michèle Lacrosil’s novel Cajou challenges us to reconsider the intricacies of a Caribbean unconscious that has been deemed collective since Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In what way do these three writers question the assumptions of history and psychoanalysis? How do they use and misuse them? How do they bend them and redress them, revitalize them to their advantage and to our surprise?

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Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Michèle Lacrosil, each differently, avail themselves of the social sciences but shake them up to their very core. Glissant engages with them cogently and questions their assumptions: what type of historiography is required for writing the ‘‘nonhistory’’ of the Caribbean people? History assumes a continuum, linking one area of time to another in a causal, consequential manner, but the experience of the break, the brutal rupture from Africa, was not recorded or, rather, was recorded by slave merchants and was therefore treated by historians as just useful data. In its clinical description of the machine of slavery, this information holds no pain, no blood. Glissant gives life to history, passion, and commitment from the perspective of a descendent of slaves. He contextualizes the nonhistory of the Caribbean, gives it flesh and blood, makes sense of it. He shows us that a certain historiography, which starts from an origin, corresponds to a certain type of teleological narrative called realist. Notwithstanding Sartre and his 1947 notion of littérature engagée as a literature ‘‘without style,’’ Glissant practices a committed literature, politically and aesthetically, and questions aesthetic assumptions such as the belief in a Balzaciantype character, rooted, grounded, rebellious. Glissant the creator lets his own creatures challenge him as he matures as a writer. Glissant engages the notion of marronage on many levels: historical, political, and aesthetical. Let us remember that Césaire, in a poem, challenged the younger René Depestre, the budding Haitian poet, who was a communist at the time, to maroon the rules of traditional lyricism, as Aragon after the war enjoined poets to write for the masses according to these binding rules. How does the notion of marronage in 33

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traditional history compare with what happens to it in Glissant’s work? How does Glissant maroon the very notion of marronage? Glissant’s oeuvre as a novelist dates from 1958, when Sartre’s notion of engagement in literature was starting to be seriously challenged by the writers of the Nouveau Roman, when his notion of a unified, free, and responsible subject had to contend with the linguistic equations of structuralism and later with Michel Foucault’s slippery notion of power. Glissant was, of course, aware of these ideological and aesthetical shifts a√ecting the Parisian intellectual and artistic scene.

Of Masters and Maroons The phenomenon of marronage, or escape from slavery, started even before the first slave ships arrived in the Caribbean from Africa, when Arawak Indians fled to the mountains to escape their captors. It still exists today. This chapter explores the phenomenon of marronage at a historiographical level, that is, as a field of strategies and discourses that I will call French or Occidental (the Occident understood not in a geographic sense but as an ideology), and at the level of ‘‘lateral’’ strategies and their discourses, which I will call Caribbean or Martinican. As a working terrain, where the forces of Occidental history contrast with those of Caribbean nonhistory, I have chosen certain novels by Edouard Glissant, from Le Quatrième Siècle (1964) to Mahagony (1987). The first questions asked here about the avatars of marronage in Glissant’s fiction are also perhaps the easiest to answer. Who are the maroons running from? Who are the masters? Certainly not the plantation owners, or békés, as Edouard Glissant repeatedly shows us. At least the slaves and maroons never believed in the indomitable power of the béké. Glissant does not attempt a Hegelian synthesis between master and slave, as the true master, like the master of Kafka’s castle, is unapproachable. The real master is Metropolitan France under its various guises since 1635, the year of ‘‘le rattachement à la France’’ [the reunion with France], which Glissant refers to as ‘‘the rope’’ (Caribbean 18). Republican France conceded to the abolition of slavery, first in 1794 and then again in 1848, and is now doling money to its overseas departments and transforming the inhabitants of the French Antilles into dependent and passive con34

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sumers. France has been a master of multiple masks since 1635 and, now that the plantation system has disappeared, is the almost unmediated master of the Caribbean people. The only clearly identifiable plantation masters in Glissant’s novels appear in Le Quatrième Siècle: La Roche, who has ‘‘the head of a crazy Negro’’ [tête de nègre fou, 58]; and Senglis, his hunchbacked, decadent, and pitiful rival.∞ These stereotypical masters are clearly a dying breed and are thrown by Glissant, in his subsequent novels, into the trash can of history. The abolition of slavery included the abolition of two royal castes: the békés, lords of the plantations, and the maroons, lords of the woods. Both sides mourn this demise, as it signals a world of bargaining, the end of a world of absolutes. Such is the meaning of the unexpected encounter in the novel between Longoué, the maroon, and La Roche, the master. Each of them speaks in his own tongue, French and an African language, respectively. Neither is willing to speak the language of compromise – that is, Creole – because Longoué understands that the real masters are not the békés and because La Roche has a romantic longing for the first and the ‘‘last’’ maroon, whom he sees as a ‘‘worthy enemy’’ (54). Other questions, however, require more complex answers: What is marronage? Who is a maroon? What definitions or descriptions have historians given to the phenomenon of marronage? Richard Price, in Maroon Societies, reflects on the etymology and history of the word maroon: ‘‘The English word ‘maroon,’ like the French marron, derives from the Spanish cimarron. As used in the New World, cimarron originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola and soon after to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards as well. By the end of the 1530s, it was already beginning to refer primarily to Afro-American runaways, and had the strong connotation of ‘fierceness,’ of being ‘wild’ and ‘unbroken’ ’’ (1–2). But a shift in the meaning of the word appears with the French Father Labat, who spent twelve years (1693–1705) in Martinique and wrote Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique: ‘‘The name maroons was given to fugitive blacks who escaped their masters’ houses to avoid either work or punishment for something they had done’’ (qtd. in Gisler 196). A rhetoric of duty and punishment has here obfuscated notions of fierceness and wildness: the maroons are not to be feared but chastised for not fulfilling their obligations as 35

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rightful slaves to rightful masters. For Labat there could only be a petit marronage (running o√ temporarily but staying close by), which fits in well with a certain ideology that Africans are naturally lazy and subhuman. Jean Fouchard, who has written a book about the maroons of Santo Domingo, consulted the announcements concerning runaway slaves in the island’s newspapers from 1764 to the independence of Santo Domingo: no witness of the time mentions the desire for freedom as a reason for escaping. Some historians such as Yvan Debbash and Gabriel Debien, who have tried to banalize the phenomenon of marronage, have focused primarily on petit marronage. According to Leslie Manigat, the term petit marronage is an oxymoron and should be replaced by the expression ‘‘short-lived absenteeism’’: ‘‘To go for a run, to go on the loose, to play truant, to feign, to go on a spree, that is not really ‘partir marron.’ . . . If the word maroon must have content, it must mean something else, something better related to the etymologic sense of ‘savage,’ conveying the wild life in the woods and the idea of running wild. ‘Grand’ marronage is a planned action, a determinate move. The fugitive slave, as much as possible, joins with his fellow maroons to constitute or strengthen the band and to adopt a hit-andrun tactic in a guerilla war against the plantation order’’ (423). Manigat distinguishes between two schools of interpreters of marronage. The first, the French school, places itself at a microlevel – that is, it studies the phenomenon as a series of isolated incidents, thus denying it any political signification. The other school situates itself at a macrolevel and sees in marronage an act of organized rebellion against the colonial system. Manigat notes that this opinion was shared by the local French authorities of the time, who saw in marronage an absolute plague that threatened the very foundations of the plantation world. This second school does not consider marronage an individual act but ‘‘a cumulative total social process’’ (425) and is mainly, though not entirely, Haitian.≤ Where does Edouard Glissant’s notion and depiction of marronage fit in with these two schools? Glissant is not Haitian, and as most of the work of historians has centered on Haitian marronage and on the maroons who formed independent republics in Surinam and Jamaica, he feels that he has a role to play in the constitution of the history of the maroons in the ‘‘Lesser’’ Antilles, which did not gain 36

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independence. For this reason he gives maroons specific faces and bodies, something that French history has not done and that Caribbean history has only accomplished up to a certain point. In Le Quatrième Siècle, through the life and adventures of his ‘‘first’’ maroon, he gives us a synchronic view of marronage, from the time Longoué escapes from the boat to his settling in the mountains. He also gives us a diachronic view of the phenomenon by having his character found a family that will provide the juncture of the individual and the social and that, through its name, will establish a legitimacy that was denied to plantation slaves. To found a family is an act of defiance against the colonialist regime, as he ‘‘who bears a name is comparable to he who learns how to read. . . . He starts to know who his mother, his father, his children are. . . . He enters time. . . . He conjugates verbs, while up till then one single uncertain form covered the possible modes of action and inanity’’ (180). Longoué, the ‘‘first’’ maroon, is a contemporary both in time (1788) and ideology of the French Revolutionaries and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (André, Caraïbales 129). He is the one who has refused to wear the shackles of l’antique esclavage and who is willing to risk his life to defend his right to be free. He provides a direct answer to the French historians who do not want to acknowledge that Africans could have a yearning for freedom. He is also the negator; Glissant keeps coming back to the fact that Longoué is someone who refused the yolk of slavery immediately, not someone who ‘‘at long last balks’’ (Malemort 52).≥ For the other slaves he is the devil; he has said ‘‘non serviam’’; he has placed himself at the center’s periphery and thus acknowledged the forces of opacity. If Longoué, on the very deck of the slave boat, had a fight with one of his companions – who will later become Béluse, who has accepted his enslavement – it means that these men have a story, that Africa is historical. This establishment of history is an indirect rebuttal of Hegel’s assumption (to which Glissant comes back time after time), which subsumes the European racist and justificatory ideology. So Africans, even though they have been torn from their countries, are historical creatures linked by a common experience and trauma: the Atlantic Ocean crossing, which made them, in contrast to the first two categories of colonization, the ‘‘Discoverers’’ and the ‘‘Discovered,’’ the ‘‘Transported’’ (Mahagony 217). The Transported must be 37

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taken into account in order to deconstruct the dichotomy Discoverers/Discovered. The Transported are linked by the smell of ‘‘vomit, blood, and death,’’ the tortures that the history books do not talk about. They are especially linked by a ‘‘submarine unity,’’ as the Jamaican poet Edward Brathwaite notes, referring to the fact that after the slave trade (not slavery) was declared illegal, boats had to permit inspections. If there was a threat of a visit by inspectors, the black ‘‘cargo’’ was silently and swiftly thrown overboard. The future slaves, however diverse they may be, do have a common bond, albeit a negative one. They have a common ‘‘collective and submarine unconscious,’’ as Glissant notes under the guise of allegory in Mahogany: the boat is a womb, a tomb, an open wound that spits out its children. The di√erence between the African slaves and the indigenous peoples, di√erences that some Antilleans would like to forget, lies in ‘‘the trail through the sea,’’ its traces so ephemeral that writing about the Atlantic crossing and subsequent enslavement becomes problematic.∂ Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, often refers to a nonhistory that was su√ered by the slaves and their descendants, that is, a nonlinear history that starts with a brutal uprooting, the slave trade, which has not been recorded from the point of view of the slave.∑ The history of the French Antilles is also the history of France: 1635: the ‘‘rattachement à la France’’; 1794: the abolition of slavery by the French Assembly; 1802: the reinstitution of slavery by Napoleon; 1848: the final abolition of slavery; 1935: the tricentennial of the reattachment to France; 1946: ‘‘la départementalisation,’’ which made Martinique and Guadeloupe part of France, with statuses similar to Metropolitan departments such as Seine or Lot et Garonne. Glissant is quick to point out that these dates and events did not work to the Antillean people’s advantage but constituted more victories for the colonialist order: ‘‘It is in France that things change: when the Republic replaces the monarchy, suddenly your lot improves’’ (28). He calls this ‘‘the chronological illusion’’ (13): ‘‘Once this chronological table has been set up and completed, the whole history of Martinique remains to be unraveled. The whole Caribbean history of Martinique remains to be discovered’’ (13). In Caribbean Discourse Glissant reproduces in extenso the 28 March 1848 announcement of the impending abolition of slavery by Louis 38

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Thomas Husson, provisional director of the interior for the French Republic. This condescending and deceitful announcement addresses the slaves as ‘‘my friends’’ and ‘‘my children’’ even as it tries to keep them out of history. Its mixture of French Republican legal righteousness, ecclesiastic unction, deceptive social concerns, and naked threats tells them that they remain ‘‘slaves until the law is o≈cial’’ and urges them to work ‘‘until then . . . according to the regulations in the law for the benefit of your masters.’’ The slaves, according to this announcement, will be their own worst enemies if they do not understand that freedom means ‘‘work’’ and abstention from ‘‘disorder.’’ (In contrast, the Declaration of the Rights of Man states that ‘‘freedom consists in doing anything that does not harm others.’’) Curiously enough, this representation of a fiercely secular republic calls religion, one of the surest allies of the colonial system, to its rescue: ‘‘The priest is there to tell you that you must work and marry to gain the rewards of the other world. . . . Remember, it was religion that first preached freedom when the whites were not free themselves.’’ The slaves must ‘‘deserve their freedom,’’ and the best way to deserve it is to continue to act like slaves. In this announcement it is also apparent that the o≈cial view of marriage among slaves has changed: seen before as an opportunity for a slave to start thinking positively about the future and therefore discouraged as potentially dangerous, marriage is now viewed as a stabilizing influence that will prevent disorder and rebellion. The announcement ends thus: ‘‘When you wish to show your joy, shout: Long live Work! Long live Marriage! Until the time when I come to say to you: ‘the law is o≈cial! Long live freedom!’ ’’∏ ‘‘What has changed since then?’’ asks Glissant. ‘‘The good news,’’ he answers, ‘‘still comes from elsewhere’’ (Caribbean 31–35), somewhat overlooking the slave revolts that preceded and followed this proclamation. The Antillean people are thus dispossessed of the making of their own history. This is what Euloge, the first black commandeur (managing director of a plantation), in La Case du commandeur (The commander’s cabin), understands when the proclamation is pasted on the door of his cabin. He says that the slaves do not deserve freedom as they have not fought for it. It is Euloge whom the so-called abolition of slavery drives to become a maroon ‘‘in these woods that he had never been tempted to explore during all these 39

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years when he had applied himself to building his character as a commandeur’’ (87).π France has isolated the Antilleans from their own history by trying to assimilate them; according to the o≈cial ideology, the Antilleans are as French as the Bretons and the Alsacians. This ideology denies these groups their own history as it aligns itself with the universalist theories and centralizing movement of the French Revolution, which unified France politically, economically, and linguistically under the banner of the secular republic. Cross-cultural contact, which is what Glissant and those like him strive for, has been perverted and has become an argument for assimilationist propaganda. Young Martinicans are told in 1980 that ‘‘we’’ are in the age of ‘‘cultural exchange,’’ which, as Glissant notes, implies this threatening piece of advice: ‘‘Do not isolate yourselves therefore in an outmoded and inflexible nationalism, etc.’’ (Caribbean 141). Assimilationist tactics have also isolated Martinicans by separating and balkanizing the islands, a process that was set into motion by the arrival of Columbus. These islands could benefit from the knowledge of a common history and common heroes such as the revolutionary Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture or the Martinican Delgrès, who had himself and his troops blown up in 1802 at Fort Matouba, Guadeloupe, rather than accept the return of slavery, but such facts have been obliterated. There is a recurring lament, an interminable mourning, a melancholia, in all of Glissant’s works: ‘‘Where is Toussaint, where is Delgrès?’’ A female character, Mycéa, shouts, ‘‘Odono, where is Odono?’’ referring not to her dead son but to a possible ancestor (Case 222). Regarded as mad by her community, she tries to circumvent her reputation by speaking directly to the other islands: ‘‘Answer Dominique . . . yo answer Jamaica . . . join in, Haiti yo Haiti’’ (Case 215). The Martinicans do not know of these other islands, as they have been excluded from Martinican history. Glissant sees the adoption of ‘‘Caribbean heroes everywhere in the Caribbean, including Martinique,’’ as a way of attaining ‘‘legitimacy’’ (Caribbean 68). As I have noted, Le Quatrième Siècle’s Liberté Longoué, a true contemporary of the French Revolutionaries and the ideologists of the time, does not understand why they have let themselves be enslaved, why they do not all maroon. Liberté and Mathieu, to whom the 40

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history of the first maroon is recounted, are ‘‘modern.’’ They believe that history is progressive and linear and that it can be changed and molded according to the will of a few strong men. For them, as for Vico, men make history, and freedom implies the ability to say no to enslavement. Longoué is a historical being, in the Hegelian sense of the term, because nothing after him will ever be the same. The search for origins and filiation is a fundamental and ambiguous quest in Glissant’s oeuvre. Liberté Longoué appears to be the first (of his line), as the quimboiseur (medicine man and storyteller) says: ‘‘The two ancestors disembarked from the ship the Rose Marie to start the story that is really, for me, history’’ (Quatrième 23). He is repeatedly referred to as ‘‘a maroon of the first day, a maroon of the first hour’’ (45), who ‘‘in any other language [than Creole] would have been called ‘the Ancestor’ ’’ (Malemort 61). Glissant takes care to append, at the end of Le Quatrième Siècle, a genealogical tree of both the Longoués, the maroons, and the Béluses, who have ‘‘accepted their fate’’ (59). The di√erence between the two families is that the Longoués have a self-given name (we are told in Le Quatrième Siècle that Liberté the son owes his name to his father, who ‘‘refused to vegetate in slavery and escaped to the mountains’’ [56]). The Béluses, on the contrary, owe their name to the neurotic wife of a plantation owner: the ‘‘first’’ Béluse was one of her pet slaves, and she derived his name from bel usage (of beautiful use) (André, Caraïbales 121). In La Case du commandeur, a later novel, the genealogical tree has become an ‘‘essay in clarification on the relationships’’ among four families; the trees have started to become a forest. In Le Quatrième Siècle, when the abolition of slavery is proclaimed, the maroons, in a grandiosely grotesque scene, state their names to the bureaucrats of the Etat Civil, a typical French institution. The mass of slaves were incapable of doing this, however; since they had no names or filiation they had to let bureaucrats invent names based on the saints of the calendar, antiquity, or their own whims (178).∫ ‘‘The founding action of Christian imperialism is a christening,’’ notes Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions, his book on Columbus’s encounter with the New World. He writes: ‘‘Such a christening entails the cancellation of the native name – the erasure of the alien, perhaps demonic identity. . . . It is at once an exorcism, an appropriation, and a gift’’ (83). Greenblatt shows that Columbus’s 41

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act of taking possession on behalf of the Spanish sovereigns of the ‘‘very many islands,’’ as he recounts in a letter to Luis de Santangel, displays ‘‘the reassuring signs of administrative order,’’ although these ‘‘bureaucratic formulas’’ are ‘‘deceptive’’: ‘‘Consciously or unconsciously, they draw us away from a sense of all that is unsettling, unique and terrible in the first European contacts with the peoples of America’’ (52, 54). The people in this context have changed: they are now African slaves, or people of African ancestry, who are about to be ‘‘rediscovered’’ as free men and women by the newly proclaimed Second French Republic, whose representatives unwittingly, and without any ‘‘reassuring signs’’ of order, mimic Columbus’s historical speech act of renaming the island, as if the first European encounter with the New World has to be constantly replayed in its grotesque horror. Nevertheless, this renaming scene in Le Quatrième Siècle is also to be taken as a demythification of the notion of origin. As time goes by, the notion of the name itself starts to come apart in Glissant’s works. For instance, in Malemort three characters share the same three-part name, Dlan-Médellus-Silacier. One cannot tell if these are first names or family names. They are a ‘‘three-sided volcano’’; they are men-landscapes. Likewise, in Mahogany the three maroons owe their name to the mahogany tree – Gani, Maho, Mani – as the name links them to it and to each other throughout the years. We are also informed, in particular, that Maho is the ‘‘neighborhood name’’ [nom de voisinage] of the plantation manager Beautemps, though this fact is concealed from us in Malemort. This name is not given by the father but by neighbors and friends, linking its bearer to the community rather than to a particular family. In Malemort the quest for origins is ridiculed and shown for what it is: a legitimation of power. Here, a mulatto voice extols the virtues of the first elected colored mayor: ‘‘He is our original mayor [maire, mayor, is a homonym of mère, mother] and our lifelong father. All our actions aim at finding his trace and reviving his secret. . . . He brought our caste up . . . high toward the despising béké and far above the scummy Negro. . . . Whoever is elected is not a Negro. . . . He is a citizen of the Republic; we are not Africans’’ (74–76). We have seen Liberté Longoué declared the ‘‘first,’’ but it appears that the boat he arrived on was not the first boat and that Longoué is 42

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not the first to have marooned, chronologically speaking. He is, however, the first to have refused enslavement from the beginning, without really even knowing what he was refusing. Again, Glissant returns to the fact that Longoué bypassed the slave experience, as this seems more important to him than any chronological priority. The claim that Longoué is at the origin is also challenged in subsequent books; in fact, in La Case du commandeur and Mahagony the name Odono, with its echoes of ‘‘nothingness’’ and ‘‘origin,’’ plays a significant role. A passer-by devoured by his nonhistory shouts ‘‘Odono’’ – not really as a word, just as a ‘‘sound’’ (Case 17). The story of Odono or, rather, of the two Odonos is told through a tale Ozonzo relates to his adopted daughter, Cinna Chimène. According to the legend, the two Odonos, who were brothers, loved the same woman; one betrayed the other and sold him to a slaver, who then took all three. The three of them eventually found themselves in the fish’s belly. One brother escaped with the woman as soon as the boat landed, and the other was enslaved. Which brother betrayed the others? Which brother escaped? Which brother accepted? Nobody knows, but he came from the land of Ayiti (Case 66–67). Later on in the book, Liberté Longoué, the niece of the second Liberté Longoué, reveals that there had been another negator, ‘‘so similar and yet so di√erent from the first Longoué, the first known negator, that one could not even tell which one had been the first.’’ When someone screamed ‘‘Odono, Odono,’’ it was impossible to know which one of these two brothers was being invoked (125). Later on one character tells another that the original land is not Ayiti but Guinea. The very notion of origin, whether anthropological or territorial, like Derrida’s écriture, remains elusive and deferring. Stories of origin proliferate throughout Glissant’s novels, such as the story of the man who named himself Aa because he thought Aa was the first word of the whites’ language. He befriends the Arawaks and the Caraib Indians, who despise the Africans for having accepted slavery. He is captured and tortured by the French, to whom he recounts, in his native tongue, the story of his origins: he was a warrior in his country, on the boat, and in this new land. His last vision is of the Indians, children, women, men, throwing themselves down the cli√, marooning into death (Case 163). Who is the first maroon? Longoué? One of the Odono brothers? The Arawaks or the Caraib Indians? The true origins are constantly deferred. 43

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Glissant notes that ‘‘people who are most ‘manifestly’ composite have minimized the idea of Genesis (the only traces of ‘genesis’ identifiable in the Caribbean folktale are satirical and mocking)’’ (Caribbean 141). Just as the Creole tale, with its redundancies and repetitions, seems to cut against the grain of a certain French style established in the seventeenth century, so the idea of genesis, Glissant believes, is Occidental. Glissant has shown that genesis is the first operation through which Occidental myths are created. The PreColombian epics, the African epics, and those of Occidental antiquity display what Glissant calls an ‘‘ideology of wandering’’ [une pensée de l’errance], revealing no desire to take root. It is in the Occident that the idea of origins, of roots (enracinement), begins to take on a totalitarian meaning. Unfortunately, books that signal the birth of a collective consciousness, such as the Old Testament, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, have been perverted, emphasizing the notion of genesis and origin and becoming a justification for conquest and subsequent ‘‘taking root’’ (Poétique 26–28).Ω Neither the people of the plantation nor the maroons can find their identities through the notions of genesis and filiation, as they cannot delude themselves about these notions. They are condemned, so to speak, to an unmediated postmodernity, short-circuiting the mythic and epic ages, which are grounded in the idea of genesis and filiation, and the age of modernity, from which sprang the notions of progress, conquest, and linear history. It is useless to try and get to the bottom of the abyss, to try and find origins from which to spring forward. This is a movement that aspires to transparency, while the only way that those victimized will gain consciousness of their own identity is through the presence of an Other who does not call for this reciprocal type of understanding. The Caribbean identity is based not only on roots and origins but also on a network of cross-cultural contacts. The maroon has recognized his roots as African but dismisses the fact that he is American and is in a constant process of creolization. Creolization accounts for multiple cultures; it is not just the sum of their parts but an original creation. Therefore, it cannot spring from a strong adherence to a particular root. The idea of marooning is based not only on the idea of supreme acceptance of one’s origins (however defiant the son may appear toward the father, he is defiant because he wants to replace him, reinforcing the idea of 44

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genealogy) but also on a reaction to and escaping from them in order to enter into a world of contacts (relations) with the Other whom the maroon already harbors in himself. Mahagony is among other things a reevaluation of Glissant’s preceding novels. Mathieu, Glissant’s literary alter ego, realizes that in Le Quatrième Siècle the storyteller (Glissant himself ) tells only the story of Liberté Longoué, the son of the first maroon and a ‘‘man of noble stock,’’ rather than that of Gani, a child-maroon with supernatural powers who is Longoué’s contemporary (32). He further realizes that Mani, the rootless assassin and maroon of 1978, knew Odono Celat, a descendant of one of the very first aristocratic maroons. In other words, the writer, in trying to give history a unique origin, has ultimately made it more linear and Hegelian. Mathieu criticizes ‘‘Edouard Glissant’’ for having superimposed an Occidental model onto their history, which has served to disembody it (Mahagony 32). How can the history of the Transported be accounted for? ‘‘How to track on so many ocean surges the trace of something, of the howling heap of raw meat . . . ? How to spot, how to find, where, through which calculation, and with what measuring instruments?’’ asks the narrator of La Case du Commandeur (17–18). The trace disappears as soon as it has been formed. How can slavery, how can the Holocaust, be recounted? As Glissant says, ‘‘One cannot completely describe the state of slavery (this minute and irreducible element of reality that no description, no analysis can ever include)’’ (Quatrième 101). A new form of historiography has to be created to account for this unique experience, and it must be based precisely on these fleeting traces. Papa Longoué tells Mathieu: ‘‘The past is not in what you know for a certainty; it is also in everything that passes like the wind and that nobody stops’’ (146). In this new historiography, contrary to what Hegel a≈rmed, nature must be seen as historical. Nature is the keeper of history. The Mathieu of Mahogany knows that three ebony trees surround the moss in which Anne Béluse hid and in which he forgot the cutlass that he used to kill Liberté Longoué, son of the first Longoué. He also knows that the mahogany and the three ebony trees echo ‘‘the same scream uttered in successive order by two men. Yes, two mouths one after the other. . . . For Liberté was not the only one to haunt the ebony trees. But he never met Gani. Their unique scream branched o√ ’’ (20). 45

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From then on Mathieu tries to find links between maroons: he wonders for instance if the story of the young maroon Gani, killed in 1830, which was recorded by an old slave, is the same as the one told to him a century later by the quimboiseur about the rebellion of Beautemps, the plantation manager, in 1943 and if they share the same life and death as Mani, whose exploits are related by an amateur reporter in 1979 (21–22). He finds the organizing rule that permits the link between these maroons: the four syllables of the name Mahagoni. The Caribbean landscape is ‘‘not saturated with a single History but e√ervescent with intermingled stories’’ (Caribbean 154). Mathieu, after conjuring up the death of Gani, has an epiphany: he hears Papa Longoué’s ‘‘long soliloquy’’ for the first time in Le Quatrième Siècle (93). Papa Longoué’s declamation in Le Quatrième Siècle comes to him not in a Proustian elongated form but as ‘‘one shout,’’ as everything is finished and everybody is dead – Gani, Tani, Maho, Mani. This mnemic trace flashes up at him like a fresh wound. Glissant tells us that Caribbean history has not had the time to form sediments and that therefore the Antillean people cannot go in search of lost time (temps perdu) since they live in an exalted time (temps éperdu) (Mahagony 26). Truth does not light up the past like liberty leading the people in one of Delacroix’s most celebrated paintings; on the contrary, it obscures it, despite the desire of the Mathieu of La Lézarde (The Ripening) and Le Quatrième Siècle. In Mahagony Mathieu rebels against his creator and accuses him of having portrayed him, in Le Quatrième Siècle, as a traditional historian, an archivist, impatient with Papa Longoué’s nonlinear, digressive, opaque way of creating history. But even at the end of La Lézarde Mathieu reacts by becoming sick and refusing to continue to write the history of the Antillean community. His literal su√ocating is the symptom of a body rebelling against this Occidental way of writing history. In Mahagony Mathieu criticizes his creator for not having taken into account his Caribbean déraisons (unreasonableness) in Le Quatrième Siècle and La Lézarde (156). As early as Le Quatrième Siècle, marooning is characterized as a ‘‘vocation,’’ a negative religion, an ‘‘obligation,’’ an ‘‘irresistible tendency,’’ a ‘‘rapture of the whole body’’ (142), which seems to bring it close to the ecstatic experience of some mystics. In the much later Mahagony, Gani, a seventeen-year-old maroon, a contemporary of the ‘‘first’’ 46

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maroon’s son, declares at the moment of his execution: ‘‘I recognize that I am in like manner the master and the slave. I have been transubstantiated’’ (89). The Hegelian synthesis does not occur here, but one of the strangest rites of the Catholic religion is parodically reenacted: the transformation of the bread and the wine into the body and the blood of the Redeemer. The maroon is master and slave through an operation of transformation and substitution that has nothing to do with dialectics but with Caribbean mysticism. Hégésippe, who records Gani’s story in Mahagony, is a ‘‘syllabary maroon’’ [un marron du syllabaire]; that is, he has learned to read and write, actions that can lead to the death of the culprit. He thinks of his literacy in terms of a religious sacrilege: ‘‘A congo slave who can read-write . . . is an o√ense to the Almighty’’ (32). His diabolical, dialogical thoughts seem to confirm this belief: ‘‘She told her body that this black water is the blood of Bezelbuth. But it is more than blood, it is ink’’ (32). He thus reveals, without lengthy dissertations, the collusion of state and church, whose mission is to instruct the slaves only up to the point of trying to instill into them the fear of the Christian God and a repulsion for the devil, that is, for the power of negativity (Fouchard, Marrons du syllabaire 44; Gisler 170). Maroons take di√erent forms in Glissant’s oeuvre and do not always directly confront the issue of oppression. Some of them, the ‘‘postmodern’’ maroons in particular, use what Glissant calls in Caribbean Discourse a practice of diversion. For instance, Medellus, a character in Malemort, practices a form of marronage when he engages in word debates with Monsieur Laenec, an English teacher who is enamored of the universalism of the French language and who speaks French ‘‘as well as a white man.’’ Without being really conscious of it, Medellus, with his word games, challenges the ‘‘prestigious universalism’’ of the French language (154). In their study of Creole literature Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant also suggest that the Caribbean storyteller, like Papa Longoué, has installed marronage in the very heart of the plantation. His speech (parole) is even more subversive as it is not immediately understood. During the day he is discreet, anonymous, but at night in his own domain he becomes opaque to the master. The new Caribbean historiography will have to consider the fact that this historical nature is linked to legends, customs, orality. It is 47

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through oral transmission from generation to generation that the history of the slave trade and the maroons has been accounted for: it is, for example, the only way that one can remotely experience the smell of ‘‘vomit, blood, and death’’ pervasive on the slave boats (Quatrième 23). Caribbean folktales, in which the hold of the ship where the Africans were transported has allegorically become the belly of a giant fish, have kept alive the memory of the passage by forcing tellers and listeners to relive it over and over again. The process of historicizing calls into question the status of the written. The ‘‘written record [is not] adequate for the archives of collective memory,’’ writes Glissant (Caribbean 64). The written word is a harness that restricts the body through which orality expresses itself: ‘‘The written requires non-movement. . . . The oral, on the other hand, is inseparable from the movement of the body. . . . The move from the oral to the written is to immobilize the body, to take control (to possess it)’’ (Caribbean 122–23). Gani (1830), Maho (1936), and Mani (1978) practice an expanded form of writing that takes into account the scream of the maroon and the traces that link him to future maroons and to nature. The trace succeeds the shout in the maroon’s escape into the woods. The maroon himself is all-writing: his body bears the traces of his history. It is for the generations to come to decipher this ‘‘entanglement of scream and writing’’ (Mahagony 29). For Glissant Creole oral literature is such writing. He sees in it the antithesis of Occidental realism, especially the French, Balzacian kind in which characters are a reflection of the decor in which they live. Occidental realism and exoticism, one of its by-products, function within a tight and closed system; they claim to be exhaustive and transparent because they describe ‘‘everything,’’ and they are, by the same token, a masked apology for the status quo. Creole literature, through the use of symbols, hides and reveals at the same time the unsayable ‘‘thing’’ (the experience of slavery) in its opacity. Glissant believes that this practice of diversion resembles marronage. While Glissant’s particular type of writing does not try to emulate Creole tales, he says that his ‘‘language attempts to take shape at the edge of writing and speech . . . that it is a synthesis of written syntax and spoken rhythms . . . of the solitude of writing and the solidarity of the collective voice’’ (Caribbean 147). It is or, rather, has become 48

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dialogic and polyphonic. The institution of marooning, from Le Quatrième Siècle to Mahogany, is thematically deglamorized, but the writing, closely pursuing the maroon’s traces, becomes more and more the essence of diversions and opacities. In Mahagony Mathieu reproaches his creator for having ‘‘monologized’’ speech (parole) and for having portrayed him as the possessor of a dialectical mind. In the later novels speech, however decentered or contested it may be, does not belong to a single subject but to many di√erent voices. In Mahagony the predominant mode is the rumor (‘‘it is said’’), which allows the voices of the Occident, of Africa, of Pre-Colombian America, to be heard almost simultaneously. Thus the voice of the master, the voice of the slave, and the voice of the maroon overlap each other, contradict each other. Nothing is determined: Edouard Glissant lets the Caribbean voice speak for itself. Glissant does not deal with the ‘‘truth’’ of marronage but rather with its ontological emergence. Glissant’s marronage, like Victor Segalen’s notion of exoticism, demands not just a departure from the plantation but a ‘‘departure from oneself,’’ a rapture.∞≠ Yet, at least as it is conceived in Le Quatrième Siècle, it still falls within the parameters of the rational individual from which it springs. Gani is Liberté Longoué’s baroque Other. Longoué, at least as he appears in Le Quatrième Siècle, is relatively classical and somewhat theatrical, like his French contemporaries. Gani, compared to this transparency, this rationality, is a ‘‘diversion,’’ a term Glissant uses to characterize baroque art in relation to classical art. While rationalism tries to know the world through penetration and conquest, baroque art, with which Glissant identifies, envelops and favors extension rather than depths, the horizontal ‘‘rhizome’’ (a term Glissant borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) rather than the vertical root (Poétique 92). He writes: ‘‘The root is unique; it is a stock that takes all upon itself and kills everything around. . . . The rhizome . . . is a multiple root, stretched out in nets in the earth or in the air. . . . The notion of rhizome maintains the fact of rooting but challenges the idea of a totalitarian root. The epistemology of the rhizome is at the heart of what I call a cross-cultural poetics, according to which each identity extends out in contact with the other’’ (23). Glissant refuses the ‘‘rooted’’ Hegelian and Sartrian ideology ac49

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cording to which the only contact with the Other is combative and murderous. Rather, he thinks of himself as closer to prolific South American writers, such as Gabriel García Márquez, or to writers from the southern United States, such as William Faulkner. He does not feel this a≈nity with writers whose narratives end ultimately in silence, such as Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, or the adepts of French avant-gardism. While despair seems pervasive on the thematic level in Glissant’s later novels, these works generate, at the level of the writing and the apprehension of Martinican culture, a tremendous marooning energy. This energy springs from a grim referentiality that serves not to confront reality or to escape it but to address it in a mediated, centrifugal way. Jean-François Lyotard claims that in postmodern cultures the question of the legitimizing of knowledge by metadiscourses poses itself di√erently from traditional discourse because ‘‘the grand narrative has lost its credibility’’ (63; my translation). If this is so, then Caribbean cultures can be called postmodern, since the grand narrative, in this case the narrative of discovery and appropriation, never fooled the Caribbean people. La Lézarde and Le Quatrième Siècle are characterized by a unique metanarrative: the constitution of a nation guided by an elite in the first book and in Le Quatrième Siècle a faith in the ‘‘hero’’ as role model. Glissant has evolved from a writer who was somewhat tempted to create a grand narrative for his people into an artist who, in the very fiber of his writing, gives space to the multiple voices of his people, the ultimate act of marronage. Glissant practices a dynamic and hybrid writing of history. He shatters the accepted monolithic voice of history not only by endowing its grand narrative with flesh and blood but also by showing how his own conceptions of history and writing have changed from book to book, how the ethics of writing and the writing of history engender each other.

King Béhanzin and Antillean Memory The lure of grand marronage has been dealt a mortal blow in Edouard Glissant’s work, as we have seen. I propose that we now look at how a Caribbean woman, Maryse Condé, puts to rest the lure of Africa in 50

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one of her novels, Les Derniers Rois mages (The last of the magi).∞∞ On the night of 25 January 1894, after having resisted the French invasion for five years and having set fire to his capital, Béhanzin, the last ruler of the kingdom of Dahomey, escorted by seven of his spouses, surrendered to Captain Privé, who had come to fetch him in the village of Akajakpa, twenty miles north of the capital, Abomey. At 6:30 the next morning Béhanzin arrived in Goho ‘‘wearing a Dahomeanshaped silk bonnet and a luxurious loincloth and smoking a long pipe’’ (Garcia 249).∞≤ General Doods, a ‘‘mulatto’’ born in SaintLouis de Sénégal, came to greet him, but the king refused to shake hands with him, since Béhanzin did not believe that he had been vanquished by the French king. He wished to meet with the president of France, Sadi Carnot. The next day three of the oldest princes told the king that he had been deposed and excluded from the royal family; his name was to be stricken from collective memory and his kingdom to be considered null and void (Garcia 249). On 28 January he arrived at Cotonou, the kingdom’s only outlet to the sea, while the victorious Doods was being congratulated by the French government. On 11 February he embarked for Martinique with four of his spouses, three of his daughters, his son Ouanilo, his cousin and friend Ayizouno Adandéjan, and one interpreter. The French were therefore free to reorganize the kingdom, declare it a protectorate, and later integrate their new colony into the federation of French Occidental Africa. Béhanzin’s health deteriorated because of the unfavorable climate of Martinique, and he asked repeatedly, and in vain, to go to France to rest and take care of his health. In 1903 he did return to Africa: he was transferred to Blida in Algeria, where he died in 1906. His funeral was very simple, and he did not receive military honors. His son asked in vain for his father’s body to be transported to Dahomey (also called Abomey) to respect the custom that forbade burying, even temporarily, the body of a king in a foreign land. The French refused because they were afraid that the return of his ashes would turn Dahomey into a center of pilgrimage and resistance. In 1928 the king’s co≈n arrived in Cotonou. Béhanzin was finally considered safe. He never did meet the president of France (Garcia 249–54). The French, fearful of Béhanzin’s power, dismissed him and understated his resistance in their reports of the war. African his51

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torians have rewritten the story of Béhanzin. For example, Joseph Amegboh’s Béhanzin: Roi d’Abomey was published in 1975. Amegboh shows, in a flowery and romanticized way, that the kings of Dahomey – descending from the mythical Panthers themselves – were not only divine in the eyes of their subjects but were also considered sons of the people, since only a woman of nonroyal blood could perpetuate their lineage. He also shows that Béhanzin’s resistance to the French was based on a strong nationalistic current for which he was responsible. In 1988 Luc Garcia, a historian from Bénin (the new name for Dahomey), published a study of Dahomey’s resistance to colonial penetration and showed that Béhanzin was one of the great opponents of colonial conquest. Taking into account not only the written French documents, which distorted some events, but also African oral sources, war songs in particular, he shows how the king, with his mastery of guerrilla tactics, managed to outsmart the enemy rather than attack him directly. Béhanzin’s struggle with the French and his subsequent exile have inspired both Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé. In La Case du commandeur Glissant devotes a few pages to the discovery of Béhanzin’s story by a character named Pythagore, who is searching desperately for his roots. In this work stories of origins proliferate, all the better to be challenged and undermined. The spirit of the novel is in harmony with Glissant’s notion of crosscultural poetics; the Antilleans are urged not to try and find an identity based on origins but to position themselves for ‘‘rhizomatic’’ encounters with others (Poétique 23). Pythagore wants to know ‘‘the country from before’’ [le pays d’avant] not so much as a place in space but as a place in time: the country from before slavery. He does not call this country Africa but Guinea or Congo and projects it onto the maps of Brittany and Alsace illustrating his daughter’s schoolbooks (Case 33): ‘‘He did not know . . . that books have never stopped lying for the benefit of those who produced them and that the country that he wanted to know was to be found in himself,’’ writes Glissant (34). One day Pythagore hears about the famous ‘‘Black King’’ and fantasizes that Béhanzin arrived in Martinique in 1902, the year he was born, and more precisely on the day that Mont-Pelée erupted, destroying Saint-Pierre. Pythagore decides to ‘‘follow’’ his 52

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king: ‘‘He would not need books anymore. . . . He would open the book written on earth by this man who had turned in the [limited] space of the island like a bull in a paddock’’ (39). The collective narrative voice is quick to point out that Pythagore also turns in circles. He tries to find information about the king in town, but a voice from the Franco-Martinican bureaucracy stops him: ‘‘This field Negro, this cane cutter, has the pretension to want to do research. Why doesn’t he declare himself to be an archivist or a paleographer? And if so, of what? Of an African prisoner . . . who has left the memory . . . of a puppet wearing a dress with God knows how many women he had the audacity to call his wives’’ (41). According to the narrative voice, Pythagore is wrong to follow the trace of the exiled king, as he loses the ability to distinguish between the infinity of the country from before, Africa, and the country of today, which opens up on another infinite space, America. He was condemned to err in a dream. Whereas Glissant devotes only a few pages of one novel to the Béhanzin episode, Maryse Condé, in Les Derniers Rois mages, builds the lives of three generations of Martinican, Guadeloupean, and North American families around it. The magi are the ironic and fictitious Caribbean descendants of the African king – rois mages or, rather, decadent rois-fainéants who are incapable of either earning a living or making their wives happy, as they are, and want to remain, blinded, basking in the glory of their royal ancestor. The fictitious son of Béhanzin, fathered with a young Martinican woman, is left behind at the time of Béhanzin’s return to the African continent. He is another artifact belonging to the father’s collection of objects that have become relics: a photograph of the king and his family in Martinique, a pipe, a pair of sandals, a hair net made of blue pearls. Djéré, Béhanzin’s Martinican son, records his childhood memories of his father in his notebooks. Djéré’s son Justin, after reading them, enshrines Béhanzin. Debbie, the African American wife of Justin’s son, Spéro, mummifies the king by turning him into a politically correct ancestor, conveniently forgetting that the Dahomean kingdom was known for human sacrifice. Ironically, Spéro, who has become very ambivalent and skeptical as far as the mythification of his ancestor is concerned, will experience a feeling of exile after moving with his wife to the United States, a feeling just like Béhanzin had in Martinique. 53

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Glissant and Condé agree that the fascination of Antilleans or black North Americans with Africa leads to a dispossession of one’s self and one’s history and to a refusal to ‘‘conquer’’ one’s own America. Glissant’s narrative voice does not question the behavior of Béhanzin, who is called ‘‘the last victim of the slave trade’’ (Case 38), but Glissant is interested in showing how the few intangible traces Béhanzin left behind can impact those who follow them without a sense of their own identity. Maryse Condé questions the event itself, that is, Béhanzin’s stay in Martinique, and modifies it by giving the king an illegitimate Antillean son in order to make the following point: ‘‘African king or not, Djéré’s father had acted like any other Negro in the world. He had not taken care of his child’’ (18). In other words, she treats the event itself as a monument, bypassing the document. As Foucault notes, the document is not a static piece of evidence through which historians try to reconstruct the past. The task of the traditional historian was to make these often nonverbal traces speak. Today, however, history transforms documents into monuments, entities that demand to be questioned for themselves in their very opacity (Foucault, Archéologie 182). The dimension of the Imaginary, which historical studies have neglected, must be accounted for in the reworking of documents, as art and literature are keys to unfolding past, present, and future. In Les Derniers Rois mages one hears the voice of an Antillean man discussing the myth of Africa as it is paradoxically reenacted on the North American continent. The legend, the sensuality, and the violence of Béhanzin’s story, as recorded by Djéré and experienced by his mother, have been sanitized by a pervasive puritanism and smugness. Conversely, Spéro, who has ‘‘royal blood,’’ is quick to see how complacent the Charleston founder of the ‘‘African Ballet Theatre,’’ Jim Marshall, is, how nostalgic he is for the days when African kings were kings and all-powerful. According to Spéro, who has been cured of his youthful fascination with Béhanzin, Debbie and her politically correct friends use Béhanzin to dismiss the here and now, just as they despise people who do not pose as heroes, such as the Guadeloupean husband with a funny accent whom they see as a disgrace to his royal ancestor. The workings of the myth of Africa manifest themselves in North America within a contradictory and 54

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competitive form of alienation among members of the black community. Debbie and Jim Marshall consume the myth as it is presented to them, whereas Spéro is the creator of a ‘‘secondary production,’’ as Michel de Certeau would have it, and can therefore escape the dogma without leaving it (de Certeau 12). Spéro adheres to belief in the legendary devotion of the Dahomean kings’ wives, who willingly descended with the kings, when the time came, into their burial chambers; at the same time he mocks this belief by overemphasizing it and inserting it into his everyday life as an unloved and despised husband: ‘‘This is the way black women used to behave with their men!’’ (142). But how is one supposed to ‘‘conquer’’ one’s own America? In Glissant’s body of work the original voice is one of refusal and negation. It is, in Le Quatrième Siècle, the heroic voice of the maroon, of the negator named Longoué who refuses slavery. Glissant creates, in Le Quatrième Siècle, a maroon counteraristocracy to set against the béké aristocracy, the plantation owners. However, this aristocracy is also a ‘‘countermyth’’ (to borrow one of Françoise Lionnet’s expressions) to the myth of the African king that serves as the yardstick against which some Antillean men evaluate themselves. As we have seen, the myth of the maroon in Glissant’s later work seems to be superseded by a cross-cultural poetics in which Antilleans should acknowledge their ‘‘Americanness’’ and their ties with the rest of the Caribbean world.∞≥ In Les Derniers Rois mages three generations of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans live lives of delusion. Béhanzin provides an excuse for the men to drink, loaf, and chase women. An anonymous voice relentlessly subverts the virile myth of Negritude. This voice is definitely feminine, as it recognizes the ability of men to generate unhappiness: ‘‘Men are not made like women. In the bottomless calabash of their heads, they nurture ambitions, absurd notions that make their lives even more di≈cult to bear’’ (18). How then are Guadeloupean and Martinican women supposed to inhabit their own America? Condé has no ready-made solutions, no glorious African past or marronage to propose. Indeed, in the third volume of her African saga, Ségou, the narrative voice suggests that the original and legendary Jamaican maroons may have from the beginning compromised themselves with their English masters, re55

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counting how desperate and senselessly violent their descendants have become. In Les Derniers Rois mages, Maryse Condé short-circuits the African myth and the cult of the hero by giving Béhanzin an imaginary Antillean descendant and focusing on the daily tactics with which her humble men and women negotiate with ‘‘Béhanzin.’’ She creates an ‘‘ethnotext’’ (Le Go√ 55) that witnesses these daily actions. Michael Fisher notes that ethnic autobiographies deploy a ‘‘psychoanalytical language and/or logic to describe or model ethnic processes’’ (203). Indeed, Hosannah’s story, in Les Derniers Rois mages, manifests a different sort of logic than is found in most of the novel: it displays counterlegendary but poetic qualities with psychoanalytical resonances, illustrated by the sexual encounters of the King-Panther and Hosannah, the beautiful young bread seller. The story of Hosannah’s union with the king is a response to Djéré’s recording, in his notebooks, of the original myth – the creation of the Panther Dynasty of the kings of D’Abomey. But the dynasty – in whose foundation Hosannah unwittingly participates – is the scorned Balthazar dynasty, the magi dynasty of ill reputation: ‘‘A beautiful Magus, really! A king without a crown or heirloom! A king without any presents of incense or myrrh!’’ (116). Myth, like history, returns under the guise of parody. Some of Condé’s women in Les Derniers Rois mages seem tempted by an easy form of universalism. Amanda, for example, one of Spéro’s mistresses, claims that ‘‘black or white, men make love in the same way . . . and that under their skin their blood flows red’’ (275). Condé’s narrative voice seems to advocate the power of human love over abstract constructions. Simone Schwarz-Bart also shows – in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, for instance – how much strength and happiness love between a man and a woman can generate. Would this therefore be the ‘‘woman’s’’ solution to the historical and political dilemmas of exiled Africans – true love? Neither Condé nor Schwarz-Bart is naive enough to believe this. Condé relies, at least temporarily, on the cohesiveness of the often contradictory and incoherent forces of the individual, their power to question and subvert accepted truths. She knows that the price to be paid is solitude and often scorn: there is no solution, but life must go on. A person of African ancestry should be allowed to live hedonistically in the pres56

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ent if he or she is so inclined. I do not think that I betray Maryse Condé by stating that, for her, intercultural and/or interracial encounters are doomed to fail without a basic understanding of and respect for cultural workings within what, for linguistic and practical reasons, I call the individual. Cross-cultural poetics has to take into account individual bodies traversed and transformed daily by contradictory needs and desires. A response to the African myth of origins, Les Derniers Rois mages could also be read as an indirect and very concrete warning against another potential myth: Glissant’s cross-cultural poetics. Marginalized cultures do not necessarily nurture each other when they come into contact. The couple formed by the Guadeloupean Spéro and the African American Debbie shows how many misunderstandings can arise when cultural and historical borrowings are not negotiated with enough patience or imagination. Spéro in particular recognizes that he is guilty of having ignored his wife’s history: she was not born at the time of their encounter in Guadeloupe; she was anchored ‘‘to a family, a past, a people’’ (208). Negritude seems to have failed in the Antilles, except on a literary level. Likewise, neither métissage nor antillanité has proven successful in gaining ideological popularity in the French Caribbean islands. Jack Corzani notes that cultural liberation and political liberation must happen together; it is impossible to have one without the other. As long as Martinique and Guadeloupe remain under French dominance, antillanité and métissage will remain cut o√ from mass consciousness, but a wishful ideology of the intellectuals. Both Negritude and antillanité recognize the crucial role that a consciousness of the past has to play in the construction of a Caribbean identity. But what past? There is, on the part of French Caribbean intellectuals, a refusal of what New Historicists call the idol of origins, since ‘‘men resemble more their time than their father,’’ according to an Arabic saying quoted by Jacques Le Go√ (44). There is also a desire to be attentive to the relationships between past and present. Scholars wish to understand the present through the past, of course, but they especially, and this is obvious in Condé’s novel, want to reevaluate the past from a modern position. The Antilleans and African Americans in Les Derniers Rois mages, for instance, because they are fascinated by their 57

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African past, do want to forget that Béhanzin exchanged slaves for German arms in his noble struggle against the French. At its most extreme the ‘‘glorious’’ African past can completely obfuscate the unnameable experience of slavery altogether. The task of Antillean memory, according to Glissant and Condé, is not only to unearth the past that has been hidden from its legitimate heirs but also to question certain notions of origins, as well as the transmission and conservation of the past. Pythagore’s type of traditional documental curiosity, a mimetic attitude that condemns Condé’s characters to act and think according to models that were constructed ‘‘before’’ and elsewhere, should be replaced by Foucault’s notion of archive, wherein heterogeneous practices are at play, following specific rules (Archéologie 169). Today’s Antillean intellectuals are witnesses to and participants in a discursive shift. They are caught within a di√erent ‘‘enunciative field’’ (Foucault, Archéologie 160) than, for example, Aimé Césaire. An ideological change has taken place in the African diaspora: the concept of Negritude, the return to Africa, which displaced in the intelligentsia’s consciousness the fascination with France, must now give way, for various reasons, to di√erent strategies. In this sense Condé and Glissant, though distinct in their means of reaching similar goals and in their expression, belong to the same archival space. Thus the notion of archive no longer denotes verticality, but transnarcissistic forms of relations among multiple practices. Ethnicity, notes Michael Fisher, is a process of interrelations among multiple cultural heritages, and the dynamics of intercultural exchanges provide a way of ‘‘renewing human values. . . . Ethnic memory is then, or ought to be, future, not past oriented’’ (201). Between the fascination for Africa, which does not allow the characters of Glissant’s and Condé’s novels to leave the labyrinth of their delusions, and the derision for Africa, which is apparent in the hybrid question posed by the Caribbean doxa in Les Derniers Rois mages: ‘‘Un roi Africain? Ka sa yésa?’’ [An African King? What is that? 75], other ways have to be found to make other voices heard. Glissant in particular would like to see the creation of a particular locus for the formation of what he calls a ‘‘Caribbean discourse,’’ which would owe little to the traditional logos but would stem rather from a counterpoetics that acts as ‘‘a network of negativities recognized as such,’’ a cultural and intellectual marooning (Discours 185). 58

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Africa, in Condé’s and Glissant’s discourses, could therefore act as a paradigm for a fragment of a new type of archive: not a gold mine from which the Caribbean man or woman can freely draw to find dignity and reasons for living but a set of conditions for the formation of a plurality of discourses and counterdiscourses about Africa. This type of archive would find a working space between the oppressive weight of tradition and the anesthesia of forgetting. This ‘‘archaeological’’ discovery of Africa, which is a questioning and evaluation of the role of Africa within the Antillean conscience and unconscious, is probably one of the most important conditions for the French-speaking West Indians’ occupancy (rather than occupation) of America.

Cajou’s Bent With the available bent tools of psychoanalysis, feminism, and black studies, I would like now to ‘‘practice’’ a di√erent sort of reading of Cajou – di√erent from those o√ered by critics – to highlight not a Caribbean neurosis but the workings of an idiosyncratic Caribbean Imaginary. At the beginning of Jensen’s Gradiva Freud wonders about the interpretation of dreams that were never truly dreamed but were attributed by novelists to their imaginary characters. The critics of Cajou find themselves in the same predicament as does the young archaeologist Norbert Hanold, fantasizing his Gradiva: however talented and imaginative they may be, they are blinded, like him, by tradition and isolation and fail to recognize the upheavals of desire, here of feminine desire. It is this lack in the criticism of the novel to which I wish to bring attention; I hope to point the way to a more holistic type of analysis that does not separate but brings together various disciplines. I want to show how my own interpretation of Cajou springs from Cajou’s previous criticism, how the repressed feminine desire that I wish to unearth emerges from the repressing instance of criticism itself. In other words, I, along with Cajou, will try to maroon the prevalent body of criticism about Cajou. Cajou is a novel published in 1961 by the Guadeloupean writer Michèle Lacrosil, of whom very little is known biographically. She was a professor of literature in Paris and has not published anything since her third novel, Demain Jab-Herma (1967). The critical accounts 59

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of Cajou, which are not very numerous, explain Cajou’s behavior in psychoracial terms. For the most part they show that Cajou is representative of a ‘‘neurotic’’ collectivity. In an early academic article published in the French Review in 1974, Robert Smith Jr. evokes his stay in Guadeloupe in the summer of 1962, when the book, according to him, created a sensation in Guadeloupe. While he acknowledges that the ‘‘world’’ was grateful to Lacrosil for having exposed racism, he states that in the ‘‘islands’’ themselves reactions were more nuanced and divided. According to Smith, some found Lacrosil’s depiction of Guadeloupe ‘‘unfair and untrue.’’ Others praised the ‘‘intensity’’ of the novel but manifested reservations about the one-sided vision of society she portrays. Others ‘‘find no fault whatsoever with the author’s facts or fiction’’ (783). At the beginning of his article Smith usefully points to the notion of what we now call ethno-classes, a notion that is only very indirectly hinted at in Cajou. It is therefore easy for the astute reader to induce that the first opinion Smith cites is endorsed by the whites, who represent the ‘‘ruling class,’’ while the second and third opinions are endorsed, respectively, by the ‘‘mulattoes,’’ who are ‘‘middle class,’’ and by the blacks, who form the ‘‘subordinate class.’’ Interestingly enough, Smith does not say whether there were any comments about Cajou’s stay in France, which is textually predominant in the novel: Guadeloupe is only ever evoked through a series of analepses that are supposed to furnish motives for her seemingly extraordinary comportment. Smith raises the question of whether Cajou ‘‘is a neurotic who is by coincidence black’’ or a ‘‘neurotic because she is black.’’ As for himself, he believes that ‘‘Cajou is a neurotic and [that] color obsession is just one of the aspects of her psychic structure,’’ though he does not seem interested in what the other aspects may be. On the contrary, he chastises Cajou for her ‘‘lack of courage and selfconfidence’’ and her ‘‘aberrant a√ection’’ for a ‘‘few white female friends’’ (787). He seems to miss the link between race and desire – as if black people cannot feel desire because of their race; as if, if they do indeed feel desire, whether revealed consciously or not, they are somehow pathological. According to Jack Corzani, Lacrosil has ‘‘deliberately’’ chosen to represent a ‘‘pathological case’’; he claims that ‘‘most of the Carib60

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bean complexes found in Cajou will be inordinately aggravated’’ (Littérature 248).∞∂ He does not identify these complexes, assuming they are obvious. Furthermore, he is suspicious of Lacrosil’s claim that she wanted to treat the ‘‘general problem of ugliness (imaginary or real) outside of any consideration of race’’ but had to modify her character to obey the ‘‘commercial demands’’ of Editions Gallimard. According to Corzani, for Cajou race came first. Having ‘‘divinized’’ her white mother, she feels that she is ugly. Because she cannot accept herself, she becomes a stranger to her mother and, ‘‘thus unbalanced, . . . indulges in a kind of masochism that ba√les even her friends. . . . She feels a passionate and unhealthy friendship for one of her playmates, admiring her smooth hair, stroking it, combing it, dreaming for a while that it belongs to her.’’ For Corzani this is an ‘‘aberration.’’ He goes on to mention Cajou’s ‘‘morbid feeling of inferiority,’’ claiming that her friendship with Marjolaine, like her friendship with Stéphanie, is pathological (249). Nevertheless, he seems to look at Cajou from outside this racial perspective when he writes that ‘‘she places her whole happiness in the gaze of the Other’’ and that ‘‘she does not fight.’’ Indeed, according to him, the die has been cast; race is, from the beginning, her Nessus’s tunic, which will slowly burn her to ashes. This is why Corzani believes that Cajou is a tragedy but not quite a ‘‘Racinian tragedy’’ (250). He apparently forgets that Cajou is not a tragedy but a novel. It is also, for him, a Proustian-type ‘‘psychological novel’’ that throws a very crude light ‘‘on the world of Caribbean neuroses’’ a√ecting men and women collectively, without regard for gender, class, or shade of skin. He thus ends with a strict racialist reading of the novel, which, according to him, is a hybrid of a seventeenthcentury French tragedy and a psycho-pathological study. Maryse Condé, in La Parole des femmes, an essay on French West Indian women novelists, emphasizes the problem of ugliness (laideur) in the novel. Nevertheless, she does not find this ugliness credible, in the context of Cajou, as she recalls the exotic and erotic myth of the mulâtresses, who have been deemed, in Condé’s words, ‘‘the most beautiful women in the world . . . more sensuous than white women and more attractive than black women, to whom ‘perfect bodies’ are just about granted’’ (21).∞∑ Somewhat disingenuously, she implicitly chastises Lacrosil for failing to inform her heroine of her 61

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lucky star. Condé herself fails to identify the beholders of such enthusiasm, white colonialist men. However, a little further along in her essay, she notes paradoxically that ‘‘the world produced by the media, cinema, and advertising forms a whole in which black beauty has no place, cannot exist’’ (22). On the one hand, Cajou, a brilliant and highly respected chemist in a prestigious laboratory in Paris, is faced with the myth of the mulâtresse as an exquisite, always willing lover who harmoniously combines the alleged refinement (that is, ‘‘modesty’’) of white women with the unbridled sexuality attributed to black women. On the other hand, as a black woman she is barred from the arena of Western sexuality. How could a character such as Cajou rejoice in such a state of a√airs, let alone take advantage of it? Furthermore, why can’t a mulâtresse be ‘‘objectively’’ ugly? Nowhere in the work do any of the white characters ever tell Cajou that she is beautiful. Not once does Condé mention Cajou’s sexuality, her attraction to white women, although she does mention that Caribbean writers have di≈culty portraying a white man because behind him ‘‘you can see the hateful profile of the slave master, to whom everything was owed and who had complete freedom to satisfy his lustful whims. . . . The Caribbean woman remains a prisoner of suppressed taboos’’ (33). What Condé finds particularly ‘‘striking’’ is that Cajou never tries to compose (negotiate) with her looks in order to confront life and the gaze of others. She contrasts Cajou with another Caribbean novel, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, where ‘‘beauty is defined by other criteria than physical ones.’’ She counterposes Cajou with Télumée, who has inherited from her grandmother another type of knowledge: that of ‘‘interior beauty’’ (23). In the same essay Marie-Flore Pelage, the author of the autobiography L’Echo des mornes, tells Condé that she can understand the psychology of Michèle Lacrosil’s heroines (123). She too was called ugly by her mulatto father’s family. Just like Cajou, she looked for ‘‘compensations’’ in her studies. Just like Cajou, she did not feel ‘‘valorized’’ despite her scholarly accomplishments. She left for France to go to the university but realized that she had been a victim of the ‘‘myth of France.’’ She felt particularly alienated when she got a job. She had, she says, a nervous breakdown but, unlike Cajou, recovered, thanks in part to her husband and, although she doesn’t mention it, to the writing of her autobiography. 62

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Patricia Barber-Williams compares Cajou to Jean Rhys’s Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, seeing the former as an ‘‘inverted Antoinette.’’ She aptly points out that the two stories are ‘‘testament[s] of the experiences of the West Indian woman’’ and reveal the dilemma of cultural and racial métissage, adding the notion of culture to that of race (10). She mentions the importance of identity for the two heroines, who cannot identify with a community. Indeed, Cajou bemoans knowing nothing of her roots, unwittingly responding to Glissant’s creation and celebration of rhizome theory: ‘‘I dream about the orchids in tropical forests whose roots hang from the branches of the tall acoma tree, remaining suspended between sky and earth. They float, they flounder, they ignore the stability of the earth, me I know almost nothing of my roots’’ (qtd. in BarberWilliams 12). Barber-Williams notices the importance of mirrors in the two novels and the feeling of alienation the two heroines experience when they see their reflections. She quotes Cajou: ‘‘I was an inverted Narcissus, ashamed of himself, deploring his reflection’’ (12). While she acknowledges Cajou’s ‘‘almost sexual attraction for the hair of her Caucasian friends’’ (14), she does not inquire deeper into this (almost) sexual attraction. What I would like to show in my reading of Cajou are the workings of a hybrid and individual fictional psyche where issues of race, gender, and class force its possessor to submit to the reality principle but sometimes converge in order to satisfy the pleasure principle. Postcolonial critics are now arguing that psychoanalytical theories might be useful for our understanding of the concept of race. Jean Walton asks herself in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ‘‘How might a psychoanalysis of race complicate the apparent preeminence of a psychoanalysis of sex?’’ (395). David Mariott, in the same collection, echoes her preoccupation when he contends that institutional violence cannot entirely fathom the ‘‘mechanisms and structures’’ of ‘‘racially violent fixations and obsessional neuroses’’ and that ‘‘the e√ect of fantasy and identification’’ is needed ‘‘to explain racial identity’’ (421). In other words, as Claudia Tate brilliantly demonstrates in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, race and desire are not incompatible. If black studies can benefit from psychoanalysis, the field can reciprocally bring to psychoanalysis a keen awareness of the workings of external oppression and internalization, as Fanon demon63

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strates in ‘‘The Negro and Psychopathology,’’ a chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. Feminist psychoanalysis, furthermore, brings a gendered perspective to black studies. Cajou is not ‘‘just’’ about race; race and feminine desire are intertwined in the novel. While it addresses a feminine ‘‘mulatta’’ desire, Cajou is not just any mulatta: she is a woman born of a white mother and a black father. Cajou would be a very di√erent text if Cajou had a black mother and a white father. Furthermore, she was brought up in an exclusively white neighborhood on her island and is a very successful professional woman. We therefore have a very delicate and potentially explosive mix, and a very individual one. Cajou cannot represent a whole diaspora. Let us therefore enter the maze of Cajou and Cajou. A young mulatta is brought up by her white mother in a white neighborhood of a French West Indian island. She cannot reconcile her white mother with herself. The neighbors and merchants have made her conscious of her ‘‘ugliness.’’ She feels an unhappy passion for one of her female school friends. She goes to France, studies brilliantly, and finds a job as a chemist, but she refuses to be rewarded and promoted. She meets an old fellow student, Marjolaine, and falls in love with her but has an a√air with Marjolaine’s boyfriend, Germain. She is expecting a baby. Germain is very eager to marry her and to see her become ‘‘Madame le Chef de Travaux’’ (93). She turns down the marriage proposal and the promotion and throws herself into the Seine. Cajou is set in Paris, in the form of an autobiography of Cajou, although the narrator never mentions Cajou writing it. It recounts, in a series of analepses, her childhood experiences on her native island and conversations with her lover and her friends, which she recalls when she is bed in order to try and find an ‘‘an explanation for what is happening to me today and to prepare for what is waiting for me tomorrow’’ (12).∞∏ It is made up of four ‘‘evenings.’’ ‘‘The First Evening,’’ which seems to be the beginning of the writing of the autobiography on a certain Tuesday, 4 October, recalls an unpleasant discussion with Germain in which she tells him that she is refusing her promotion and seems very reluctant to become his wife. It also recalls her relationship with Stéphanie, which she deems a ‘‘failure.’’ The end of ‘‘The First Evening’’ brings together Stéphanie and Germain. Cajou 64

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consoles herself: ‘‘Poor Cajou, always one step too late! Go to sleep. Forget Stéphanie. And get ready to forget Germain’’ (48). ‘‘The Second Evening’’ includes the continuation of her discussion with Germain about her promotion and an admission of her relationship with Stéphanie, followed by Germain’s confession of his ‘‘perversions.’’ It ends with an evocation of her departure for France and the subsequent death of her mother. ‘‘The Third Evening’’ recalls Cajou’s unsuccessful ‘‘a√air’’ with Marjolaine; her meeting with Germain, who seems to be romantically involved with Marjolaine; and his brutal seduction of her. ‘‘The Last Evening’’ ends with her suicide. It evokes the events of the day, notably her interactions with her two female colleagues and with the ‘‘Patron,’’ who invites her to a cocktail party to celebrate her promotion, to which she has no intention of going. It recounts her firm and ultimate refusal of Germain’s marriage proposal, although she is pregnant by him; a sudden obsession with the word ‘‘diaspora’’ (a Jewish rather than an African one, interestingly); her nightly walk to the quays; and her descent into the water as she confesses to an unspeakable humiliation. My Ariadne’s thread in this analysis will be Cajou’s relationship to girls and women, to parts of their bodies, and to their hair in particular. Three women – her mother, her childhood friend Stéphanie, and Marjolaine – are involved in her life according to a very similar scenario in which she invariably finds herself rejected after trying to take possession of parts of their bodies: Stéphanie’s arm, which she fantasizes has been severed (43), and Marjolaine’s hair. White women’s hair quickly takes on the function of a fetish in Cajou’s psyche. The only poetry we find in the book appears when she describes hair or parts of the body related to it – for instance, the nape of Jacqueline, another schoolmate: ‘‘When she leaned forward, I stopped working because along her neck, prolonging the line of her hair, a hint of blond flu√ descended and lost itself and became pale. It was less than a flu√ – an iridescence, yellow as straw, then pastel and platinum blond – whose smooth feeling I imagined under my fingers instead of the hardness of my pencil. What then did ice, the glaciers, the rubble, mean to me?’’ (74).∞π Likewise, the first time she reconnects with Marjolaine she focuses on her hair: ‘‘In the fawn-colored thickness of her hair, some paler locks resemble the belly of a deer; it appears deep and soft’’ (116). 65

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Like the breast in Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytical theory, the female genitalia, for which the hair serves as both metaphor and metonymy, evoke feelings of ambivalence for Cajou: ‘‘She was sitting very close to me, and her hair flowed in my neck. The trap was working; I caught my fingers in it; I could not let go. . . . I plunged in the bounty of the gold and the red; here and there, pastel locks reminded me of young corn; their paleness made me dizzy; my fingers sank, then came to a stop, asleep in the warmness of her hair. . . . To slyly take possession of it. . . . My bold fingers went up as far as the secrets underneath where their color and power were born’’ (132, 144).∞∫ Cajou’s descriptions recall Baudelaire’s celebration of the mulâtresse Jeanne Duval’s chevelure: Drunk, and in love with drunkenness, I’ll dive into the ocean where the other lurks, and solaced by these waves, my restlessness will find a fruitful lethargy at last, . . . For hours? Forever! Into that splendid mane let me braid rubies, ropes of pearls to bind you indissolubly to my desire – . (30–31) [ Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d’ivresse Dans ce noir océan où l’autre est enfermé Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse Saura vous retrouver, ô feconde paresse! . . . Longtemps! Toujours! Ma main dans ta crinière lourde Sémera le rubis, la perle et le saphir, Afin qu’à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde!] (208)

Baudelaire has been panned as racist and narcissistic for these superb verses. Cajou is no doubt narcissistic, but how does race come into play in her obsessions? Cajou could be called a fetishist, but as far as she is concerned, the fetish is not, as it is for the male fetishist, a substitute for the mother’s phallus, although this could be argued in Baudelaire’s case. For Cajou the fetish represents a substitute for what male psychoanalysts have called the female ‘‘lack,’’ her sex ‘‘which is not one.’’ The hair fetish would therefore be a way for her to both accept and refuse the mother’s alleged lack. Feminine fetishism has only recently started to attract attention from feminist scholars such as Naomi Schor, Emily Apter, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler. ‘‘As defined by the 66

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early psychoanalysts, fetishism was the decadent creation of a male erotic imagination spurred by castration anxiety or repressed homosexuality, ’’ notes Apter (102). For Schor the fetish can be a substitute for ‘‘other infantile objects’’ besides the phallus (103). Grosz, in ‘‘Lesbian Fetishism,’’ states that ‘‘female fetishism would not be a denial and acceptation of the mother’s castration, as it is for the male fetishist. . . . Like the male fetishist, the female fetishist ‘disavows’ women’s castration, but this castration is her own, not that of the phallic mother. And like the fetishist, she takes on a substitute for the phallus, an object outside her own body . . . another woman – and through this love object is able to function as if she has rather than is the phallus’’ (114). According to Grosz, the fetishist woman does endow an outside object with a phallic value, but as she does not fear femininity but loves it, this object turns out to be another female subject, which does not a√ord her protection, as would an inanimate object or a male subject, but rather ‘‘introduces her [among others] to the e√ects of widespread social homophobia’’ (114). Thus Cajou, by fetishizing parts of the white female body, accepts her homosexuality and her desire for social change but also denies them, as her fetishism, unlike Grosz’s lesbianism, does not involve full subjects, but partial feminine and animated objects. Furthermore, issues of race complicate Grosz’s paradigm of lesbian fetishism: Cajou cannot identify with her white mother and so has no choice but to actively desire her. When Cajou’s love objects interact with the outside world, Cajou does not recognize them: ‘‘Signs could lie. The same perfume, the same voice, and I was not sure! The more we love someone, the more we want to set traps for that person’’ (40). When Marjolaine and Stéphanie mingle with society they change, just like her mother must have changed when she was out in the world. Cajou’s strategy for coping with her friend’s absences reflects her attitude toward these disturbing changes: she creates an imaginary Marjolaine, ‘‘exact and deceptive as a portrait. When she comes back, I confront the imaginary absent Marjolaine with the live one standing on my doorstep. There is a moment of hesitation; the adjustment takes a few seconds; the image, first out of focus, becomes, little by little, more precise; in order for the two Marjolaines to superimpose and coincide, my friend has to let go of the reflection left on her face by outside 67

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excitation and the conversation of her friends. She finally takes o√ her mask and resumes, as one puts on casual clothes, her own likeness’’ (122). She says that she requires from Marjolaine ‘‘a desire to readapt,’’ a proof of her love for Cajou, and that she requires from herself an e√ort to ‘‘readjust’’ to her presence. These two operations make Marjolaine ‘‘infinitely precious’’ to her (122). As for the little boy in the Freudian ‘‘Fort-Da!,’’ Marjolaine appears to represent the apparition and reapparition of Cajou’s mother. Freud’s little boy’s father is absent, fighting a war; Cajou’s father was killed during a colonial war. Just like this little boy, she does not seem to miss her father but shows that she does not want to be disturbed in her exclusive possession of her mother. An interpretation for the game of ‘‘Fort-Da!,’’ writes Freud, could be that children reenact in a game the harm that has been done to them by an adult, a doctor for instance: ‘‘But we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience [in Cajou’s case the absence of her mother] to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute’’ (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 17). In Cajou’s case, however, more pressing societal issues come into play. She is singled out by her neighbors as an impostor, an outsider, either because of her ‘‘ugliness’’ or because of the color of her skin: ‘‘She cannot possibly be your daughter, Madame Kébaire!’’ [Elle, votre fille Ma’ame Kébaire, c’est pas possible! 63]. Cajou plays with Stéphanie and tries to inflict on her the su√erings she cannot inflict upon her white mother, who is ‘‘responsible’’ for her predicament. Since her black father has been foreclosed, she will have to hallucinate him in the mirror. According to Grosz’s reading of Freud, the similarity between the psychotic and the neurotic lies in the fact that they ‘‘share disavowal and a rejection of a piece of reality.’’ Their di√erence ‘‘seems to lie in opposition between hallucination and substitution’’ (Grosz 108). Cajou hallucinates her black skin, and when she looks in the mirror she misrecognizes (méconnaître) herself in the first sentence of the book: ‘‘I turn the light on and cross the vestibule. At the other end of the hall, in the mirror, a shadow is moving. It fascinates me; I go to meet it’’ (11). Later, she says: ‘‘I go in search of the truth in the mirror. My eyes are burning. I catch 68

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a glimpse of a dark silhouette. The image is blurred; it is only a shadow with fuzzy outlines’’ (225). According to Grosz, repudiation or foreclosure ‘‘involves the rejection of an idea that emanates from external reality rather than from the id. It is a failure to register an impression, involving a rejection or detachment from a piece of reality. The psychotic’s hallucination is not the return of the repressed . . . but the return of the real [ironically for Cajou, her image in the mirror] that has never been signified, a foreclosed or scotomized perception. What is internally obliterated reappears for the subject as it emanates from the Real, in hallucinatory rather than projective form’’ (108). The repudiated black father insistently haunts the mirrored image of the daughter. For Cajou, however, the return of race is not to be equated only with psychosis. She will masquerade as her black mother by hystericizing her black skin in a defense against the desire of white men and, up to a certain point, in a defense against her continuing desire for white women even after they have been socialized, or exposed to the outside world. But she also practices black womanliness as a masquerade, in order to create and preserve the black body of the foreclosed black mother. She puts on the mask of the black female slave not only to preserve the body of the foreclosed mother but also to deflect the envy or jealousy of white men toward her brilliant intellect and professional recognition – or, as Joan Riviere puts it in ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’’ ‘‘to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from [white] men’’ (35). Her masquerading as the submissive black female slave for white men who are the key to her professional success is a ‘‘compulsive reversal of her intellectual performance’’ and, in the case of Cajou, her active seductive role with white women (Riviere 38). Thus the hair that is Cajou’s fetish could signify not the hiding of a feminine lack but ‘‘the possession of masculinity and [the averting of ] the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’’ (Riviere 38). Ultimately, the mask of black womanliness, as Cajou envisions it, will stick to her skin, so to speak, and push her to commit suicide. Grosz notes that ‘‘disavowal is by no means unique to men. . . . Disavowal can be seen in the narcissistic woman who disavows her own castration by phallicizing her whole body, while the hysteric disavows her own castration in a lesser degree than the narcissistic 69

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woman by hystericizing (phallicizing) a part of her body’’ (114). The hair fetish in Cajou’s case might be a way of disavowing women’s ‘‘castration,’’ but it could also be seen as a social protest against a society that reduces women to submissiveness because they lack a phallus. In other words, as Butler so cogently demonstrates in Gender Trouble, the female body and its alleged lack are constructions of a patriarchal psychoanalysis that creates this lack in order to assert the wholeness of its own principles. The ‘‘masculine woman,’’ a≈rms Grosz, is not just a lesbian; she is a feminist, ‘‘insofar as feminism, or any appositional political movement, involves a disavowal of social reality so that change becomes conceivable and possible’’ (114). In other words, the position of the ‘‘masculine woman’’ does not just involve her sexuality but also calls for a deeply political belief in change. Thus, according to Grosz, feminine disavowal does exist, but it is based on social protest: ‘‘Its operations do not necessarily signal psychosis but function as a form of protection, not, as in the case of boys, against potential loss but against personal debasement and the transformation of the woman’s status’’ (112). Another e√ect of this disavowal of castration might be retaining the ‘‘maternal figure as the model on which to base her later object attachments, in which case she will continue to love a female mother substitute’’ (112). By hallucinating her dark reflection, Cajou points to the powerful e√ect of the sociopolitical on the individual psyche, as Fanon does in ‘‘The Negro and Psychopathology,’’ but she also makes it obvious that, through various substitutions, she functions according to the workings of her own desires. She substitutes the exotic-sounding ‘‘Cajou’’ for her real first name, Monica, not so much out of submission, as she and critics claim, but in order to seduce Marjolaine: Where to find the exotic and singing sounds that she is expecting. . . . I am dreaming; I can taste the flavor of the purple icacos. My eyes lowered, I can see the fruits of long ago in the orchard where Stéphanie used to play: gnarled corossols bristling with tender shoots, sapotillos that melt in the mouth, syrupy and sour tamarinds with their four-sided seeds with which we used to make necklaces. Even more colored and juicy than the icaco, here is the cashew nut, or cajou – a strange fruit, it looks double; indeed it symbolizes my own ambiguity. It possesses an edible stalk, a fra-

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Performing Caribbean Histories and Déraisons grant ‘‘apple’’ from which hangs the most important part of the fruit, a nut whose dark green shell becomes black as it ages. A little worried, I propose: — Cajou Marjolaine falls into the trap: — Cajou-ou! She draws out the last note so as to modulate the call of a belated sailor. I can hear fishing boats returning in a little port crushed by the sun – and the echo brings the promises of the sea to the hills. ‘‘A-ou-ouh!’’ the fishermen sang, blowing in conches. ‘‘A-ou-ouh,’’ the wind repeated as the sun, plunging suddenly in the ocean, made the twilight disappear (118-19).

Far from being an impediment to Cajou’s attempted seduction of Marjolaine, race becomes a lure, a sensual trap. Michèle Lacrosil, in fact, got to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted to challenge the place to which she was assigned: that of a black woman writer preoccupied only with the black ‘‘thing.’’ Seemingly submitting to the laws of the white academic and publishing establishments, she creates an extraordinary multidimensional character whose analysis requires its reader to question the authority of a monolingual voice, be it that of black studies or white psychoanalysis. One cannot of course separate the political and the cultural from race, gender, or class, but it is essential that we do not read literary texts only in light of these issues. Claudia Tate shows in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels how ‘‘a black text negotiates the tension between the public, collective protocols of race and the private, individual desires,’’ forming an ‘‘enigmatic surplus,’’ what she calls a ‘‘textual enigma,’’ which most critics are not eager to grapple with, as the ‘‘transgressive force of desire’’ complicates a monolithical racial perspective (13–14). The Western novel, of which the Caribbean novel is partly an heir, has created individual characters caught up, in vastly di√erent ways, in the web of sociopolitical and cultural interactions. It is this particularity that individualizes the trilogy racegender-class and prevents the reader from constructing a ‘‘Third World’’ in the way that the ‘‘Orient’’ was constructed in the nineteenth century (Butler 3) or in the way Norbert Hanold reconstructed his childhood friend Zoé Bertgang as Gradiva. 71

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I hope to have shown that analysis of Caribbean texts demands that the tools o√ered by history, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences in general be poeticized and transported, if not enchanted (rendered inimical to the Enlightenment project?) – that is, be informed by the workings and creativity of Caribbean individuals caught in the web of a nonhistory and a nonapparatus of desire. In the next chapter we will see Suzanne Césaire responding to the enchantment of ethnographic Surrealism and Edouard Glissant, after marronage, grappling with the complexities of representing and creating antillanité.

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The Island Walkers and the Forest Wanderer

Suzanne Césaire and André Breton André Breton and Suzanne Césaire were contemporaries. Breton and Aimé Césaire met for the first time in Martinique in 1941. The meeting was a shock for both of them. Breton, to his surprise and delight, met the artistic and intellectual elite of Caribbean society. Césaire was struck by the freedom and beauty of Breton’s dream, saluted him as a brother in poetry, and from then on bore the mark of the Surrealist revelation. Suzanne Césaire, Aimé’s wife, as beautiful as the ‘‘punch’s flame’’ (a Bretonian metaphor), was a witness to and participant in this encounter between, in her words, ‘‘André Breton, the richest, the purest’’ (‘‘André Breton’’ 37), and Aimé Césaire, ‘‘un grand poète noir,’’ as Breton titled his preface to the 1947 edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land).∞ From the first available writings by Spanish conquerors, which describe America and especially the West Indies as a rediscovered paradise, to the 1988 edition of the Guide bleu, the laudatory expressions concerning the archipelago have barely changed. Thus Amerigo Vespucci ‘‘discovers’’ the West Indies, these islands ‘‘of marvelous beauty and fertility’’ covered in part by a ‘‘forest . . . thick with trees’’ that ‘‘gave o√ a marvelous odor’’ (Antoine 17). In Marvelous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt shows how the discourse of the marvelous served to legitimize the conquest of the ‘‘New World’’ and to dispossess the Native Americans in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel and discovery narratives. The marvelous in Christopher Columbus’s logbook serves as a ‘‘mediator between outside and inside, spiritual and carnal, the realm of objects and the subjective impressions made by those objects,’’ and the shock produced by the encounter with ‘‘that otherness’’ (Greenblatt 75–76). 73

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When the French took stock of their possessions in the seventeenth century, pragmatism and self-justification replaced their previous enthusiasm. In his Histoire générale des Antilles (General history of the West Indies), published between 1667 and 1671, the Reverend Father Du Tertre of the order of the Carmes equates the will of God with the colonialist project: the colony ‘‘floats on the sea just like Moses’ cradle on the Nile; it is guided by the care of an eternal providence’’ (qtd. in Antoine 31). The Reverend Labat, a pragmatic thinker, above all sees in the fauna of the West Indies an endless supply of edible and succulent products, which he relishes in retrospect in the detailed recipes of his Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique (1722). Beyond the first wonder of discovery in these texts ‘‘a common feature remains: an objectified nature more exuberant than in Europe and the colonizer’s gaze’’ (Antoine 378). Later the slave revolts and the abolition of slavery will monopolize, so to speak, the focal points of interest in the literature on the West Indies. The reader will have to wait for the white Creole writers of the first half of the nineteenth century and later for Saint-John Perse to again experience this first insular amazement.≤ André Breton, in 1941, at the end of a trip almost as trying as that experienced by the first colonizers, will rediscover in Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Martinique, snake charmer) the Martinican landscape, just as he finds the same face among the di√erent faces of the women he loves. Not only is this approach di√erent from the approach of the island’s first discoverers, but it is also at odds with the Surrealist exploration of the Parisian landscape, where familiar surroundings are deliberately portrayed as strange. In Martinique the landscape is marvelous because it is simultaneously familiar and exotic, like a drawing by André Masson or a painting by Henri Rousseau. In this tropical landscape Breton and Masson converse about the respective merits of the two palettes: that of the painter and that of the forest. One of the main questions for Breton, which he finds worthy of being posed at an ‘‘advanced exam,’’ is the following: ‘‘Are Rousseau paintings proof enough that he knew the Tropics or not?’’ (20–21). Martinique is the ‘‘Rimbauldian dream of thwarted endeavors’’ (18), the Eden of Rousseau’s exotic paintings, which display the nostalgia that ‘‘civilized’’ man feels for the ‘‘primitive.’’ In contrast to the tales of the first discoverers, however, Martinique is devoid of innocence and acknowledges the experience of slavery. 74

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Breton had read Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, Aimé Césaire’s account of his awakening to the alienation of his island, and in Martinique he notes the havoc brought about by three centuries of colonization: ‘‘Behind this chirping lies the misery of a colonized people’’ (101). However, he had not yet read the work of Claude LéviStrauss, with whom he was sailing on the same boat toward New York, with a stop in Martinique. For Lévi-Strauss, the nostalgic and, at times, Baudelaire-like author of Tristes Tropiques, ‘‘The perfumes of the tropics and the freshness of human beings have been polluted by a suspiciously smelly and unpleasant agitation which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only corrupted memories. . . . The first thing that shows up when we travel is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind’’ (37–38; translation modified). As for Breton, he is hesitant to find in this landscape the tragedies of history and the economic depredations to which it has been subjected, and he does not want to mix the morals of the Vichyists with the ‘‘imprescriptible poetry of the island’’; he does not want ‘‘to give to those who deface it even the shadow of the perfume of these forests’’ (Martinique 82). Both discourses, the discourse of wonder and that of virtuous indignation, remain parallel and impervious. In Martinique, charmeuse de serpents Breton confesses that his ‘‘eye is divided’’ (7): ‘‘This is how we were led,’’ he writes, ‘‘throughout the following pages – to use on the one hand a lyrical language and on the other a language of pure information. We were madly seduced, and at the same time we were hurt and indignant. Hence the deliberate use of these two forms’’ (8-9). Indeed Martinique is composed of such poetic texts as ‘‘Antille,’’ by André Masson; ‘‘Le Dialogue créole,’’ which takes place between Breton and Masson; ‘‘Des Epingles tremblantes’’ (Quivering pins), a collection of short pieces, in particular one entitled ‘‘Pour Madame Suzanne Césaire’’ that extols ‘‘les petites Chabines rieuses’’; the poem ‘‘Anciennement Rue de la liberté’’; and the famous preface to Aimé Césaire’s Notebook. It also includes the rather long text ‘‘Eaux troubles’’ (Troubled waters), which conjures up the arrival in Martinique of passengers fleeing occupied Metropolitan France and denounces the police harassment they had to endure, as well as the Vichyist and colonialist politics of the island and the collusion of the békés with these politics. 75

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Martinique, charmeuse de serpents presents itself both as a rupture from the colonialist discourse and as a repetition of it. It is a rupture in that it denounces this discourse in a text written ‘‘in a language of pure information’’ – that is, ‘‘Eaux troubles,’’ which is, according to Breton, an ‘‘exterior,’’ ‘‘ephemeral,’’ and ‘‘social’’ text. It repeats the colonialist discourse as it paradoxically enunciates it in a discourse that strives to be ‘‘interior,’’ ‘‘eternal,’’ and ‘‘individual’’ (8–9) – that is, among other texts, ‘‘Le Dialogue créole.’’ Indeed, when Breton and Masson believe that they are the most authentically free from all ideology, they appear most wrapped up in a reverie that stems from the most exotic conventions. For a brief moment Breton seems to mock the Eurocentrist gaze upon Martinique when he relates the anecdote of an old priest who had spent his whole life in Martinique and was away from the island shortly before Mont-Pelée erupted. He refused to believe that a catastrophe had taken place and insisted that ‘‘there is no volcano in Martinique’’ (27). But the reader feels compelled to notice that Breton and Masson practice the same kind of conjuring when they compare the objects ‘‘deformed’’ by the eruption, on display in the ‘‘volcanographic museum’’ of Saint-Pierre, to the objects created by Art Nouveau: ‘‘One wonders which one was first, which one is responsible for the other, the ‘modern style’ or the earthquake’’ (28). I am not trying to poke easy fun at Breton’s and Masson’s colonialist discourse but to show that even ‘‘great men’’ cannot escape the European field of inspiration, ‘‘the source and the meadow’’ in which Ernst Robert Curtius, in his book on European literature and the Christian Middle Ages, sees the origins of European poetics.≥ ‘‘We are far from the Avenue du Bois,’’ notices Masson without any apparent irony (30).∂ What is the connection among Suzanne Césaire, André Breton, Aimé Césaire, and the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam? What remains of this eternally young and beautiful woman whose melancholy and piercing look interrogates and responds simultaneously? Her photography graces the flyleaves of the first volume of Tropiques, the review that she and her husband published in Martinique during the Second World War and that has been reissued by Jean-Michel Place. She could be the seer, the one who sees and starts walking again after a short pause to look at us, men and women of her islands’ future. 76

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The second volume of the reprint concludes with an essay by her that is enigmatically entitled ‘‘Le Grand Camouflage’’ (The great disguise).∑ Our contemporary minds, attuned to post-Negritude and postmodernism, are inclined to think that this disguise would consist of playing at the docile slave during the day, just as the Creole storyteller does. When night falls, according to Patrick Chamoiseau, the storyteller becomes the voice of those who do not have a voice, while dissimulating his message of revolt. Chamoiseau, quoting Edouard Glissant, writes that the purpose of the Creole storyteller is to ‘‘hide while revealing’’ (Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres créoles 50–61). However, the commentators of Tropiques emphasize the role played by Suzanne Césaire in the ‘‘promotion’’ of the paradoxically transparent Negritude. Indeed, in Tropiques she twice comments on the writings of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, one of the sources of inspiration of Negritude; she celebrates, in ‘‘Malaise d’une civilisation’’ (An uneasy civilization), the remains among the inhabitants of Martinique of an ‘‘Ethiopian heritage,’’ that of the ‘‘Plant-Man’’ who has invented nothing but lets himself be carried away by ‘‘the rhythm of universal life’’ (45–46). In ‘‘Le Grand Camouflage’’ we discover a di√erent Suzanne Césaire, more original and therefore more combative. What stands out in this text is first of all a ‘‘way of thinking to come,’’ as when Edouard Glissant says that his readers are ‘‘yet to come’’ in his theory of an antillanité and a créolité yet to come. In ‘‘Le Grand Camouflage’’ it is a peasant from the land ‘‘where Negritude stood up for the first time’’ (267), Haiti, who discovers antillanité. The various islands of the archipelago are linked to one another and to North and South America first by their geography and climate. Suzanne Césaire chooses, as an emblem of antillanité, the cyclone that ‘‘sweeps through the halfcircle of the West Indies with its beautiful tail’’ (267). The cyclone is a means of communication between the West Indies and Europe via the Atlantic Ocean, which ‘‘flees toward Europe through great ocean waves’’ (‘‘Camouflage’’ 267). It links the West Indies to America because it unwaveringly steers toward Florida. This connection, however, does not open up to anything but brings about a painful awareness. North America is a creation of Europe; the West Indies and black America are, at the same time, the conditions for its creation and its by-product. The marginalized of Europe have created 77

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a counter-Europe: ‘‘It was necessary first and at all costs, even at the price of the infamous slave trade, to create an American society wealthier, more powerful, better organized than the abandoned – and desired – European society. It was necessary to take one’s revenge on the nostalgic hell spewing onto the new world and its islands, its demonic adventurers, its convicts, its penitents, its utopians’’ (269). The Americas and the West Indies ‘‘are not yet liberated from the grasp of the old continent’’ (269). It is at the cost of slavery, this holocaust that lasted three centuries and that continues today, that America’s capital was and is still being accumulated. Suzanne Césaire goes even further than Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau when she takes a stand against the future complacent form of créolité presented by Jean Barnarbé, Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant in Eloge de la créolité.∏ Suzanne Césaire’s créolité is not idealized in any manner. What is a West Indian according to her? It is a being endowed, because of his European and African ancestors, not with an innate wonder at the diversity of the universe and humanity but with a ‘‘double ferocity’’: ‘‘Here is a West Indian, the greatgrandson of a colonizer and a black slave. In order to ‘turn in circles’ in his island he is using up all the energy formerly needed by the greedy colonizers, for whom the blood of others was the natural cost of gold, and all the courage necessary to the African warriors who constantly earned their living upon their death’’ (‘‘Camouflage’’ 271). Here Suzanne Césaire, like the writers of the review Légitime Défense, exposes a particular species, the ‘‘bourgeois de couleur,’’ an accursed creature: ‘‘He will not accept his Negritude; he cannot whiten himself. Cowardice takes hold of his divided heart and with it comes the habit of tricks, the taste for schemes’’ (271).π It is in this passage, in which Suzanne Césaire mentions Negritude, that she shows her most conventional side. I believe, however, that one can read between the lines of her text the idea that every West Indian participates, to varying degrees, in this double strength and double ferocity. Suzanne Césaire’s view di√ers from W. E. B. DuBois’s notion of a double consciousness that tears the Negro soul apart, in the sense that these ‘‘two warring ideals’’ team up, albeit for a mocking result: turning around in circles on one’s native island.∫ Suzanne Césaire’s créolité is, for Europeans, disturbing, proliferating like a jungle. Europe is also part of what makes a West Indian: 78

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‘‘They [Europeans] do not dare recognize themselves in this ambiguous being, the West Indian man. They know that crossbreeds share their blood, that they belong, just as they do, to the Occidental civilization. They were not expecting this odd budding of their blood’’ (‘‘Camouflage’’ 270). In this passage Suzanne Césaire show us how, in the European psyche, civilization and whiteness are inseparable. Can one be a savage, an African, and at the same time a civilized white man from France? The European feels ill at ease because the very existence of the crossbreed forces him or her to question, first of all, the old typology of races and, second, the very notion of civilization, invariably attached to the Occidental. In order to discover antillanité, one has to place oneself at the right height. From too far above, from a ‘‘Pan American Airway System’’ plane, for example, one will see nothing but ‘‘the easy love-making of fishes.’’ ‘‘Our islands seen from very far above,’’ writes Suzanne Césaire, ‘‘take their true dimension of seashells’’ born from the sea (‘‘Camouflage’’ 268). But this gaze is that of the new conquerors, the tourists. Details disappear: first the women, then the cannas, then the ‘‘frangipanis and the flamboyants,’’ then the ‘‘palm trees in the moonlight’’ and ‘‘the sunsets unique in this world’’ – all that makes ‘‘our islands’’ special and di√erent. To experience the ‘‘revelation of the West Indies,’’ to know the beauty of Martinique and of the other islands, one must go to the ‘‘east slope of the Pelée,’’ as Suzanne Césaire had herself fifteen years earlier (268). But this beauty is ‘‘intolerable’’ (269), tormented – ‘‘convulsive,’’ according to Breton, who nevertheless, says Wifredo Lam, felt ‘‘squeamish’’ at the sight of the bleeding rituals of Haitian voodoo (Fouchet 206). Nothing is ever innocent with Lam or with Suzanne Césaire; nothing is purely ‘‘poetic.’’ As Lam notes, while comparing his painting La Jungle to those of the douanier Rousseau: ‘‘I think that from childhood there had been something in me that was leading me to this picture. Le Douanier Rousseau, you know, painted the jungle, in The Dream, The Hungry Lion, The Apes, with huge flowers and serpents. He was a magnificent painter, but not the same kind of painter as I am. He does not condemn what happens in the jungle. I do. Look at my monsters and the gestures they make. The one on the right pro√ering its rump, as obscene as a great whore. Look, too, at the scissors in the upper right-hand corner. My idea was to represent the spirit of 79

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the blacks in the situation in which they were then. I have used poetry to show the reality of acceptance and protest’’ (qtd. in Fouchet 99). Acceptance and protest are not separated as they are with Breton, who in certain texts accepts the natural jungle and in others protests against the political jungle. Nature and politics are inseparable for West Indians. A cyclone in the West Indies does more than manifest itself; it actively demonstrates: ‘‘At the heart of the cyclone all breaks, all tumbles with the ripping noises of great demonstrations’’ [Au coeur du cyclone tout craque, touts’ écroule dans le bruit de déchirure des grandes manifestations, 267].Ω In what manner is this metaphor from Suzanne Césaire di√erent from a Surrealist metaphor? One recalls that in the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism Breton quotes Pierre Reverdy, who states that ‘‘the image cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’’ and that ‘‘the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’’ (20).∞≠ Breton cites as an example an image by Reverdy: ‘‘Day unfolded like a white tablecloth’’ (36). For Breton the ‘‘greatest virtue’’ of Surrealist images ‘‘is the one that is arbitrary to the highest degree’’ (38). But are these Surrealist images always so innocently arbitrary? Breton expresses his indignation in the 1930 Manifesto about a metaphor by Roger Vitrac, whom Breton calls ‘‘a veritable slut of ideas,’’ whose ideal ‘‘as a man of the theater,’’ Breton recalls, ‘‘was to organize spectacles which could rival police roundups when it came to beauty’’ (134). This indignation calls our attention to fascism, the temptation of all arbitrariness.∞∞ Fascism is inherent in the definition provided by Breton in the same Manifesto of ‘‘the simplest Surrealist act,’’ which would ‘‘consist of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly into the crowd, as fast as you can pull the trigger’’ (125). ‘‘Total revolt,’’ ‘‘complete insubordination’’ (125), if they are not guided by an ethic, will lead to an ideology of hatred and contempt. As for Suzanne Césaire, she succeeds in reuniting ethics and aesthetics in her metaphor, and she denounces two dangers that threaten the Surrealist metaphor: a certain frivolity of arbitrariness as found in some metaphors by Breton, such as, ‘‘On the bridge the dew with the head of a cat was lulling itself ’’ (Manifestoes 38; translation modified); and the arbitrary violence of fascism. 80

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In ‘‘Le Dialogue créole’’ Breton states that ‘‘one will finally come to the realization that the Surrealist landscapes are the least arbitrary’’ (18). It is in the West Indies that this revelation becomes obvious for him: arbitrariness and ‘‘primitive’’ nature are linked; in ‘‘these lands,’’ writes Breton, ‘‘in no way has nature been bridled’’ (18). Nature, for Breton, is ahistorical. This is precisely what Wifredo Lam and Suzanne Césaire dispute: the jungle is at the same time nature and technology. The jungle is a factory: it produces, destroys, transforms, and changes in Lam’s paintings. Conversely, in Suzanne Césaire’s text, the factory is a jungle. ‘‘Instinctively,’’ she writes, ‘‘thousands of young West Indians have appraised steel, found joints, loosened screws. Thousands of images of bright factories, of virgin steel, of liberating machines, have filled our young workers’ hearts. An invisible vegetation of desires grows in hundreds of squalid sheds where scrap iron is rusting. The impatient fruits of Revolution will spring from it, unavoidably’’ (271; my emphasis). Thus will be reborn Gun, god of blacksmiths and farmers in Africa, who has changed caste in the West Indies and has become the god of scrap iron, as he is represented in a 1945 painting by Lam entitled Gun, dieu de la ferraille (Gun, god of scrap iron) (Fouchet 200–201). Breton and Masson consciously apply the geometrical grid of European man, explorer and colonizer, to the jungle: ‘‘If man’s spirit,’’ Breton points out, ‘‘is satisfied with certain constructions, certain geometrical forms, it is probably because they comfort him’’ (Martinique 31). His last retort in the ‘‘Dialogue’’ ends with a question: ‘‘We are indeed enamored of the forces of nature, but what could be more significant than the imperious need we felt to talk about regular forms in a part of nature where precisely the lack of definite forms, I mean the lack of a frame, seems predominant?’’ (Martinique 32). What does Breton mean by ‘‘significant’’? What is ‘‘significant’’? The realization by Breton of the ‘‘geometrical’’ and colonizing ‘‘frame’’ of mind of the European, or the triumphant acknowledgment of the will to civilize and of its guaranteed victory against a nature that has no definite form, that has yet to be landscaped? The final image that the ‘‘Dialogue’’ leaves us with is that of Breton and Masson precariously positioned in a Surrealist landscape framed according to the parameters of colonial discourse and imagery. 81

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We do find in Suzanne Césaire’s text a concrete configuration of Breton’s and Masson’s dilemma: ‘‘A few ‘Metropolitan civil servants’ were standing on the beach,’’ she writes. ‘‘The newcomers do not adapt well to our ‘old French territories.’ When they look into the malevolent mirror of the Caribbean, they only see a frenzied image of themselves’’ (‘‘Camouflage’’ 270). To be sure, Breton and Masson do have the ‘‘conviction’’ lacking in the Metropolitan civil servants, but they too refuse, in their own way, to see themselves in the mirror of the Caribbean, to acknowledge that they too are strangers to themselves as they superimpose, onto the reflection of this chaotic nature, the harmonious geometrical forms of European reason and aesthetics. In the Predicament of Culture James Cli√ord writes aptly about Surrealism: ‘‘Below (psychologically) and beyond (geographically) ordinary reality there existed another reality. Surrealism shared this ironic situation with relativist ethnography’’ (120–21). Indeed, as we have noted, the Surrealists did strive to defamiliarize a certain vision of Paris. But here Breton and Masson force an unfamiliar reality, Martinique, into an essentially Parisian mold. In contrast, Suzanne Césaire points to the ‘‘Poetics of Relation’’ that is at the center of Caribbean identity – not only to its positive energy, as Glissant does, but also to that which this poetics never ceases to confront, its otherness and its nemesis: a ‘‘Poetics of Absolute Nonrelation.’’∞≤ Thanks to Suzanne Césaire’s text ‘‘Le Grand Camouflage,’’ we understand that in ‘‘Le Dialogue créole’’ Martinique puts on a camouflage for Breton and Masson, that the ‘‘great game of hide and seek’’ that disguises the ‘‘inner torments’’ of the West Indies from foreigners ‘‘has succeeded,’’ and that on the day when Breton and Masson were wandering in the tropical forest the weather was indeed ‘‘too beautiful . . . to be able to see anything’’ (‘‘Camouflage’’ 273). In an earlier text of Tropiques Suzanne Césaire had indeed admiringly acknowledged the ‘‘wonderful country’’ Breton inhabited, ‘‘where clouds and stars, winds and tides, trees and animals, men and the universe, all cater to his desires’’ (‘‘André Breton’’ 31).

Edouard Glissant Edouard Glissant also explores and gives an account of his native island in a very di√erent way than do the French Surrealists. For him 82

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the notion of landscape is caught up in a network of political, cultural, historical, economic, and linguistic discourses and counterdiscourses. Glissant acknowledges the diversity of his country’s landscapes, as the discoverers did and as tourists keep on doing, but for him this diversity is more a matter of concern than of wonder. Béluse, who in Le Quatrième Siècle has resigned himself to slavery, figures out the ‘‘finiteness’’ of his land of exile and cannot feel the thrust of infiniteness of the ‘‘country-of-before’’ [pays-d’avant], Africa. This land is a ‘‘land of water’’ where, as a new avatar of Sisyphus, ‘‘one has to plough the sea,’’ the ‘‘minute land that escapes’’ (Malemort 27). To Glissant the Antillean landscape is not an object but a ‘‘subject-nonsubject’’ [sujet-non-sujet], an ‘‘infinite void’’ between ‘‘two infinities’’ [deux infinis], Africa and America (Discours 117). The Caribbean archipelago belongs to that other America, that America of plantations, to which Edouard Glissant feels physically and spiritually close and which includes all the Caribbean islands, Central America, a part of South America, and the Deep South of North America, at least as it was conceptualized by Faulkner. Don’t the landscapes of the New World already exist in microcosm on the island of Martinique? These landscapes, which are absolutely historically determined, challenge the narrowness of the European and Romantic Hegelian vision, for which nature is ahistorical. One finds in Glissant’s work a discourse of geographical continuity meant to compensate for the nonhistory of the French Caribbean. This ‘‘other America’’ [Autreamérique] lives through ‘‘three legacies’’: Indian, African, and Western. In the Andes ‘‘Indian passion endures, and although the Indians have been exterminated in the Caribbean, they survive, spiritually, in the forest, thanks to the maroons who have taken refuge there since the first slave ship. Their collective suicide from the cli√s keeps on haunting a few discerning and tormented Antilleans’’ (Discours 229). The mountains and the ‘‘marooning forest’’ were the first obstacles placed by the runaway slave against the colonialist’s desire for transparency: European humanism cannot penetrate the forest shield, even though the planter’s greed is able to clear it (Discours 150). The mountain and the forest take on a ‘‘supreme vocation for refusal’’ (Lézarde 12).∞≥ Not anyone can venture there, out of whim, out of petit marronage. 83

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Supplanted by beetroot cultivation in the Metropole, the sugarcane plantations – where live those who accepted, those who could not maroon in the woods but marooned in their own way – are dying in Le Quatrième Siècle and threatening their inhabitants with poisonous and swampy proliferations (100, 116). They will be replaced by factories, later left in disuse, abandoned in the tropical vegetation. The downfall of the plantation system led to the ruin of oral culture. For it is in the sugar-cane fields that Creole, this language of compromise, in the noble sense of the term, developed, that oral tales and rules of life were transmitted, that ‘‘métissage accelerated’’ (Discours 229). The West, that ideological place, specifies Glissant, has devastated the island and fractured its inhabitants’ psyches more e≈ciently than any cyclone. We have on the one hand an ideological refrain – paradisiacal islands, the antidote to civilization, the sea, the coconut trees – and as a counterpoint the heat and danger of the now mummified plantations: ‘‘Imagine a hundred years later. . . . Martinique is a museum. The museum of the colony. A skylight has been set up over the whole country. . . . Passengers land in paradise. . . . The tourists have been warned. . . . We are proud to introduce to you a colony in its purest state, as they were in the time of the plantations. Nothing has changed, everything is absolutely authentic’’ (Mahagony 178). Then there is the patronizing discourse of economy: ‘‘somivag is a joint company; we work to promote tourism, that is to say, for the common good. . . . somivag, a company set up to exploit the Antilles-Guyana, has its headquarters in the Métropole’’ (Malemort 205–206). Even La Lézarde, Glissant’s first novel, harbors a Rousseau-like narrative: salvation will come from the Lézarde, the river that cuts the Antilles lengthwise, originating in the heights of the forest, gushing down the slopes like a young girl, blooming in the plain like a mature woman, and dying in the delta. Its source was captured by Garin, an Antillean sold out to the colonial authority. Thael, a man of the wild mountain, a man of legend, is assigned by his friends of the plain, ‘‘rational’’ men, to avenge this environmental crime. Martinique owes its life to the Lézarde, which unites various aspects of the country, which saves the town, that mass of scrap, by showing it its link to the earth: ‘‘The Lézarde is what prevents the town from being 84

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a town, what gives it a chance’’ (129). This takes place in 1946. In Malemort we find a laconic note: ‘‘1960: the Lézarde dried up’’ (190). For there is another side to the triumphant discourse of the Metropole: wild industrialization, colonial roads that do not run through the country but link one commercial spot to another, ‘‘in a rush’’ to the factory. They ‘‘do not have the time to penetrate the heart of the land’’ (Quatrième 220–21). This other side of the coin is illustrated by a prophetic and apocalyptic discourse on the future of the island in Malemort, which was published in 1981 but takes place, for the most part, at the same time that the Lézarde dried up. This novel testifies to a change in Glissant’s thinking: he speaks of ‘‘all that damaged vegetation that we have explored, laden with our portable radios, up to the dried-up rivers, the rotten deltas, the dead fish, the burned-up trees, the vanished gardens, in what would soon be a jumble of marinas and of piers grafted on a few thoroughfares traveled by ministers of tourism and endlessly talking delegates’’ (166).∞∂ Gone are the lamentins, those aquatic mammals that Columbus, during his second voyage, mistook for mermaids, though they were not as pretty as in the legends and were more masculine; gone are the turtles, iguanas, parrots, macaws, whose feathers the Caribbean people used to adorn themselves, victims of the colonizers, of carnivorous slaves and deforestation. Entire species have completely disappeared: ‘‘The Pre-Columbian wildlife in the Iles du Vent [which Father Labat describes in detail, having devoured many specimens] belongs only to the past; it has vanished because of the white man, like the Caribbeans themselves, to whom the wildlife seems inseparably linked,’’ writes E. Nonon about the fauna of the French Caribbean in a 1944 issue of Tropiques (52). These are laments for an environmental disaster that did not occur only in Martinique, as Glissant acknowledges, but that is nevertheless probably more painfully felt there than elsewhere since the Martinicans have not been ‘‘given’’ the technical or mental tools necessary for restoration. ‘‘Our forests are dried up, so are our rivers’’ – so should go the nursery rhyme taught to children, Glissant says (Discours 39). The country has even lost its smells, not only those of the ‘‘vomit, blood, and death’’ of the slave ship, foreclosed by the descendants of the slaves, but also those of its flowers, which have become exotic sculptures reserved for export or displayed in public places. The song 85

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‘‘Madina l’île aux fleurs’’ is now a cruel joke. This is not a discourse implying, as in the work of European writers such as Proust, that the only real paradises are those that one has lost, since the Antilleans have always been separated from their land and their surroundings (Discours 117–18). Martinique has always been, for the African descendants, a passing-through land with no cultural hinterlands, a land that they never did possess. This situation is described in Creole tales, tales in which the characters walk, run, magnify out of all proportion the limited space where they hopelessly look for a place of their own and eventually find themselves, like the first maroons, facing the sea. The ‘‘artistic’’ discourse on the Martinican landscape has been used up by colonialism: it has been placed in a showcase and therefore devitalized and degraded. The métros (Metropolitan French) and somivag have replaced the planters. And it is Medellus who desperately tries, in vain, to claim the land requisitioned by that company to create a sort of phalanstery for its inhabitants that, according to the map provided, would include space for a General Assembly of Nations, a railroad, a Fountain of Purification, and a Universal Temple (Malemort 196–214) and that, consistent with Medellus’s very precise plans, would link the ‘‘water of the earth’’ [l’eau de terre] to the community and divide the land according to the merits of each couple and family. Because they never really accepted their country, Antilleans do not claim their land; they are nostalgic for Africa, ‘‘that country-ofbefore [that] drove us out of our bodies, which we have not rooted in this country’’ [ce pays-d’avant nous démarra de nos corps que nous n’avons pas ensouchés dans le pays-ci, Glissant, Case 54]. Pythagore looks in vain in his daughter’s textbooks for the country he wishes to know, the country that, he is convinced, is similar to ‘‘this country.’’ Then, by following the traces of the exiled king Béhanzin, he loses ‘‘sight of those two landscapes’’ and of the ‘‘awareness of the gap’’ that separates them. He cannot see that his country is not Africa but in America (Case 41–42): ‘‘The hope of going back to Africa, to ‘Guinea,’ has not been replaced by a deliberate taking of roots in the new land but by . . . another delusion . . . francisation’’ (Discours 107). The Antilleans do not know their country; they have forgotten their plants and even the Creole names for these plants, being so used to celebrating a white Christmas and congratulating one an86

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other on the first day of spring when they live in a country with only one season. ‘‘Where is Toussaint? Where is Delgres?’’ shouts Glissant. Colonization and the fascination for francisation have balkanized what should be linked, the Antilles and its ‘‘heroes,’’ and have erected their own statues: the corsair Belain d’Esnambuc, the first to take possession of Martinique; Joséphine de Beauharnais; and the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. A series of splits has a√ected the very perception Antilleans have of their physical environment, has covered it up and condemned them to a geographical ‘‘bovarism’’: ‘‘Rupture with the African continent beyond the ocean; rupture with the dream of returning to Africa; rupture with the new and real country, in 1848, when the opportunity to claim Martinican ‘property’ will be lost; rupture in 1946, when assimilation will again postpone a possible recovery’’ (Discours 108).∞∑ James Cli√ord reminds us that in ethnography there are now two great narratives that are not in opposition but in a kind of oscillatory relationship. One is a narrative of the Tristes Tropiques type, of disenchanted tales and cultural monologue, an entropic narrative of mass culture and its trail of evil subproducts; the other is a narrative of invention and creativity, of ‘‘crossculture’’ (Cli√ord 14–15). In my opinion these two narratives meet in the work of Edouard Glissant. We have just seen the first one, which is bleak but nevertheless allows some centrifugal and centripetal forces. Martinique is indeed tiny, but Glissant believes in the future of small countries. To be sure, Martinicans are without a land, but this means they have not su√ered the assaults of the ideology of roots and that they aspire to the rhizome celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari, that horizontal subterranean stem sending up shoots from the upper surface. Paradoxically, the ‘‘deep-rooted’’ have a taste for adventure, for exploration and conquest, while the ‘‘rhizomed’’ ‘‘have not discovered anything,’’ ‘‘have not explored anything,’’ as Césaire claims – not out of deficiency but, on the contrary, because ‘‘the art of exploring an elsewhere can be practiced as well here’’ (Mahogany 24). The collapse of the plantation system that followed beetroot cultivation in France brought about the ruin of oral literature, of Creole, of a whole popular culture linked to that system (Discours 241), but it also, by cruel irony, pointed to its deserted space. It is from a certain landscape that the oral knowledge of the quimboiseurs was transmitted, those Antil87

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lean medicine men and storytellers, close heirs to Africa who are today considered charlatans and illusion mongers by some. The ancestor of the quimboiseur is the maroon who taught himself to observe, smell, speak of, and write of the landscape (Quatrième 46–47). Papa Longoué, the last quimboiseur, has been handed down the voice of the landscape by his forefather, the first maroon, and strives to teach Mathieu the archivist in Le Quatrième Siècle to strip the landscape of its Metropolitan layers. The sea imprisons the island, threatens it inescapably (‘‘all islands are widows,’’ Césaire often says), but one of these seas is the Caribbean – exploding sea, sea archipelago, multiracial sea; multilingual, multicultural, connecting sea – which is unlike the Mediterranean – interior sea, sea that concentrates; cradle of Western civilization, of the great monotheistic religions, of monolithic thought that projects itself onto the world. According to Glissant, this Mediterranean conception of knowledge is tied to notions of discovery and geographical conquest, Western evils par excellence. The Caribbean is a ‘‘counter-Mediterranean,’’ marooning rather than conquering. The maroons have disappeared, but their traces beg to be noticed and deciphered. These traces are di≈cult to spot but are more eloquent than those left by the colonizers. The action of the maroon in nature has not been one of pillage but of participation and listening (Quatrième 100), not for any atavistic reason but because the one ‘‘who no longer had roots’’ has ‘‘peeled’’ the landscape, has ‘‘examined’’ it, has ‘‘weighed’’ it, has filled himself with its ‘‘infinite void’’ (Quatrième 79). The knowledge of the landscape acquired by the maroon is not achieved by predatory techniques but is of a more symbiotic nature: man becomes a tree in an informed, almost metaphysical and sympathetic movement toward that nature that never looked upon him ‘‘with familiar eyes.’’ Glissant’s maroons do not choose to take to the sea, as Louise would like them to do in Le Quatrième Siècle, when she prompts Longoué to join the maroons of Santo Domingo (92–93); they do not run away but choose to take root, by proxy, in that land that does not yet belong to them but that they learn to love and decipher. On the leaves of the mahogany is inscribed the forgotten story of Martinican maroons, of Longoué’s family and his spiritual descendants. Each tree 88

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is a garden, a world of its own linked to others by epiphytes and aerial roots, ‘‘and if we ask what this country is,’’ the answer will be elusive and the branches of the tree will wound us and leave on our bodies ‘‘enduring scars’’ (Mahagony 13). That landscape, that cramped space, is all but history, and the distance between centuries can be measured not with temporal units but with the space between the maroon and the slave who endured. Thus ‘‘the sea that one crosses is a century’’; the slave trade, the marooning forest, is another; the refusal, and the land that ‘‘the one who came down from the heights and the one who waited in the depths . . . hoed in the same way,’’ this land where they meet, is yet another, the space of the Poetics of Relation. The new history, the one written by the Martinicans, now takes into account the tree, the wind, the tiniest weed, and is nurtured by literature. As oral literature is today in a state of restoration, it is up to the writer to partly take over the role of the quimboiseur, as she or he will become the conscience of the landscape, past and evolving. ‘‘I know that I am more and more inclined to seize the remnants of a changing vegetation than to represent human beings whom I had imagined, with their surprising roughness,’’ acknowledges the narrator of Mahagony (28). A writer is, above all, ‘‘the meeting of a landscape and of a stylistics’’ (175). This is Faulkner, whose characters ‘‘are not thick with psychology but with attachment to their soil’’ (Glissant, Intention poétique 175), the baroque dazzlements of the other America. It is Glissant, historian of the landscape of the Caribbean. These are writers whose poetics are ‘‘excessive,’’ belonging to the jungle and to the forest, whereas ‘‘European’’ writers have for topics the source and the meadow, as Ernst Curtius notes. The Americans of the other America, those of the continent like those cloistered in the narrowness of the Antilles, have not learned ‘‘the solid virtues of rural patience.’’ Their land, like their cry, is excessive: ‘‘I do know that, I who could walk around it in a few paces, but who could never exhaust it’’ (Glissant, Discours 276–77). The Martinican writer’s task is to decipher the landscapes, to free them, and to write the infiniteness of the world in the narrowness of the landscape. Thus, the landscape (ill-)shaped by the French, béké or métro, is reclaimed by the writer, re-created. Having su√ered under the yoke of the landscape, the writer spells out the alphabet of the world – not that the 89

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writer thinks, like Mallarmé, that the world is made to lead to a beautiful book or that any work holds the form and the meaning of the world (an equivalence Glissant questions several times) but that it must open the Poetics of Relation to the Other, through what Glissant calls the ‘‘totality world’’ [totalité-monde]. This totality would not be linked to the violence of filiation, of genealogy, of time, but would spread out in space in a ‘‘new area’’ (Poétique de la Relation 150, 158). Glissant gives the Antilleans back that space that Césaire felt was too small, a place of unease: ‘‘this calabash of an island,’’ the latter writes in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (89). That acknowledgment of the Antillean space as open is the essential condition for what Glissant calls antillanité, which is not a forgetting of Africa but is nevertheless a ‘‘farewell to Negritude.’’ Antillanité refuses insular withdrawal, as the upholders of créolité would have it, and opens up to the other America. We should not forget that this optimistic discourse is nevertheless tempered in Edouard Glissant’s work: the Malemort trio, DlanMedellus-Silacier, is a ‘‘volcano with three slopes’’ (28), which allows it to account for the multiplicity of voices and Antillean legacies but above all for the distress, even the schizophrenia, of a people who do not possess their land and whose destiny is still being decided elsewhere. A Surrealist ethnology, however seductive it may be, is not broad enough to encompass the Caribbean in its present and future; the coupling of two realities ‘‘irreconcilable in appearance,’’ of the Parisian scene with the Caribbean ‘‘jungle.’’ Their collage was a daring gesture on the part of the Surrealists, but Breton’s meanderings and wanderings into the Caribbean forest took us back to his wonderland, and Aimé Césaire’s work, at the juncture of Negritude and Surrealism, plunged us into his own volcanic inferno, where ‘‘Africa’’ met France in never-ending violence and mistrust. Glissant rediscovers the Caribbean landscape, maps it, and historicizes it. In this section it was hinted that the demise of the plantation system brought about the ruin of orality and the Creole language. It was also hinted that there could be a link between the dispossession of a land (or rather the ‘‘apossession,’’ as the Africans and their descendents never owned the land of the islands) and the narrative 90

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and thematic structures of the Creole tale. Glissant contextualizes the body and the mind of the Caribbean writer caught between the demands of a dying oral culture and the seductions of the written. Caribbean knowledge and self-reflection are in need of other epistemological landscapes, besides the ones revealed by Creole tales and Negritude. The writer, the marqueur de paroles (speech marker), in Chamoiseau’s words, has taken the place of the Creole conteur. The orality of traditional literature has given way to a literature of orality, as I would like to show in the next section.

Sources and Resources: Orality as Ec(h)o-history In the 1960s, as is well-known, Derrida sought to give writing (écriture), victimized by speech (parole), back its rights. According to him, speech (logos) had confined writing to a secondary role and turned it into ‘‘the supplement of a supplement,’’ since it was, in Plato’s words, further removed from the proximity of the voice and the soul. Derrida sought to show that speech is at the origin of the Occidental epistemological and metaphysical system, from Plato to Rousseau, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss. Only writing could create a text, could become text, and therefore subvert from the inside the obsolete and universalizing dichotomies created by speech. By taking away from speech its ‘‘Sein,’’ its di√erence – its ‘‘opacity,’’ as Edouard Glissant would have it – by turning speech into writing, Derrida in a way submitted speech to the same kind of operation (devaluation) that he denounced as the doing of European logocentrists. The past twenty-five years have seen a valorization of writing, which, at least as far as the French are concerned, had never really been threatened. Writing, under the guise of the text, was, during those years, canonized, and dissent was only tolerated much later because of the weariness that accompanies periods of decadence. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the subject, Michel Foucault the death of the author, and Philippe Sollers asserted that the writer had become a ‘‘scriptor’’ without a body or identity. Nevertheless, Barthes, the ultimate dissenter, as he would transgress the very rules he had set forth, reintroduced the body into his ‘‘text of pleasure.’’ This worship of writing relegated orality to the domain of folklore and regionalism. Orality became the butt of a condescending nostalgia and an object of study for international and domestic ethnographers. 91

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Edouard Glissant, though very knowledgeable about Occidental ideological currents, places himself at the edge of these currents, not because he despises them but because his genealogy and his ‘‘genotext,’’ to use Kristeva’s expression, are distinct from those of Occidental thinkers: ‘‘The Antilles are the place of a history made of ruptures whose beginning is a brutal uprooting: the slave trade. Our historic consciousness could not ‘settle,’ so to speak, in a progressive and uninterrupted manner, as it does with people who have engendered an often totalitarian philosophy of history, such as European people. On the contrary, it aggregated its elements under the auspices of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosion. This discontinuous continuity, the impossibility of surveying it, is what I call a non-history’’ (Discours 130–31). For Glissant it is writing, with its claim to transparency and clarity, that is guilty of reductive leveling and universalism – writing and the French language, in which Glissant writes. Paul Zumthor, in his study of oral poetry, speaks of France’s ‘‘interior colonization,’’ which came with the attempt to eliminate illiteracy and the obligatory use of the French language during the Revolutionary years (6). The victory of the French language, and especially of the written language, over the obscurantist patois spoken in the various French provinces and colonies such as Martinique and Guadeloupe was thought of as the triumph of the nation, reason, and universalism, as Michel de Certeau has shown. It has been said that the theory of Negritude, both racial and Jacobinic, owes a lot to the language, oratorical and written, of the French Revolution and to its ideals, as acknowledged by African Anglophones such as the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, who prefers the term Africanism to Negritude.∞∏ Glissant proposes the notion of antillanité, which takes into account the specific character of the history and geography of the Antillean people. ‘‘The aim of antillanité is to perceive the Antillean civilization in its American space’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 22); to lead the Antillean people away from the fascination with ‘‘Frenchification’’; to enter, as Jean Bernabé and Patrick Chamoiseau write, ‘‘into the meticulous exploration of ourselves, made of patiences, accumulations, repetitions, tramplings, and persistences, where all the literary genres would meet and where all the human sciences would be used transversely’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 22). 92

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This unearthing of the Antillean self is inseparable from a reassessment of Creole in the French Antilles. Glissant knows that colonialism in its ‘‘neo’’ version is maintained in the French Antilles through the power of the French language. Is French Creole an avatar of the French language, or is it an autonomous language, if such a language is possible? Its vocabulary seems to be derived from the French, but linguists disagree regarding its syntax, which could be of African, Breton, or Norman origin. What is important is that this language was created by multilingual and resourceful slaves who had been placed in a tower of Babel by plantation owners in order to prevent them from planning an uprising. The masters thought Creole a composite language, an oral language of resigned slaves, but in reality, says Glissant, it is the result of a ‘‘network of negativities recognized as such’’: ‘‘You want to reduce me to stammering, I will systematize this stammering, says the slave to the master; let’s see if you can understand’’ (Discours 32). It is a strategy analogous to that of resistance fighters who scramble their code in order to confuse the enemy. According to Glissant, unlike other languages the function of Creole is not to communicate, to be useful, but to deconstruct, to undermine: ‘‘Therefore, Creole is the language that in its very structures and poetics has completely taken upon itself the absurd nature of its genesis,’’ writes Glissant (Discours 32). With the collapse of the plantation system, the disappearance of traditional crafts, the decline of fishing, the multiplication of civil servants, and the growth of the metropolitan population, Creole, defeated by the French language and by writing, seems to have lost its reason for existing (Discours 173). Concurrently, writes Glissant, ‘‘the orality of traditional literature’’ (tales, songs, sayings, proverbs) is ‘‘ebbed by the wave of writing that cannot replace it’’ (Discours 181). ‘‘Undeniably we have had,’’ write Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Barnabé ironically, ‘‘our sonnet and Alexandrine verse experts. We have had our fabulists, our Romantics, our Parnassians, our neo-Parnassians, without even mentioning our Symbolists’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 15); we have a mimetic type of writing practiced by Frenchified non-French. Glissant defines what he calls a counterpoetics as the necessity of expressing together with the inability to express. This counterpoetics stems from the realization of a conflict between the tongue that one 93

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uses (that is, one’s means of expression) and a language that is a way of expressing a culture, a collective attitude toward the tongue used (Discours 321). This conflict is found at the heart of the Martinican idiom that it engendered: ‘‘The Creole tongue carries within itself the French tongue, that is, the throbbing of writing, as an internal transcendence’’; ‘‘The oral tongue bears the secret, impossible, and irreparable mark of writing’’ (Discours 240). It is by a detour, a ruse, that language can outwit the tongue installed within itself, as if it were at home. According to Glissant, Creole tales are not, as is commonly asserted, the spontaneous expression of a concrete and sensual idiom but the realization, coming from the Creole speaker, of the presence of the French tongue and also a rejection of it, a rejection that expresses itself in the guise of a refusal to conceptualize (Discours 242). The tales are a form of linguistic marronage, a refusal to assimilate, an act of resistance. Glissant points out that a nation in search of a literature must not only celebrate the community but also reflect on its ‘‘specific expression.’’ Thus literary realism, as practiced by Balzac or Zola, is incapable of accounting for the Antillean reality, under pain of falling prey to a ‘‘simplified folklorization.’’ Conversely, geography is fundamental to the Antillean discourse, particularly since the land of the Antillean community is alienated: the land ‘‘has to be understood in its depths,’’ writes Glissant (198). This understanding a√ects the rhythmic structure of the literary work: ‘‘The cadence of seasons has, perhaps, had an influence, in Occidental literary works, on a movement balanced between zones of neutral writing periodically crossed by flashes and bursts that transport and ‘reveal.’ . . . The unique season . . . is a cause for monotony, for plainsong, whose throbbing provides the ground for a new economy of structures of expression’’ (Discours 198–99).∞π The Parisian reviewers of La Lézarde wrote in 1958 of the novel’s ‘‘dazzling lyricism,’’ and the New Critics called the work a ‘‘challenge to tradition,’’ but Glissant was only trying in this work to ‘‘reestablish contact with the Antillean land’’ (qtd. in Baudot 371). It is interesting to note, nevertheless, that the ‘‘monotony’’ of the rhythm of the Caribbean seasons produced the historical polyphony of Glissant’s second novel, Le Quatrième Siècle. Here the oral past is at work within the present of writing, particularly under the recurring 94

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form of the encounter between the legendary maroon, the negator, who dwells in the mountains, and the collaborator, who because of his qualities of adaptation and creativity has been able to survive the plantation system and become the man of writing. The collaborator dwells in the cities, like Mathieu, for instance, in La Lézarde, who assumes the function of chronicler of his community. Emile Benveniste reconstructs, in ‘‘La Notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression linguistique’’ (The notion of rhythm in its linguistic expression), the slow historical elaboration of the term rhythm, demonstrating that nothing is less natural than this notion and that ‘‘it is not by contemplating the movement of the waves that the Greek Hellene discovered ‘rhythm’; on the contrary, we use a metaphor today when we speak of the waves’ rhythm. There had to be a long reflection about the structure of things, then a theory of measure applied to the figures of dance and the inflections of chant, to recognize and name the principle of cadenced movement’’ (335). Henri Meschonnic, after Benveniste had opened the way, found that a theory of rhythm is a ‘‘theory of the subject in language’’ and that ‘‘language is an element of the subject, the most subjective of its elements, of which the most subjective is rhythm’’ (Critique 71). ‘‘Rhythm shows us that discourse,’’ writes Meschonnic, ‘‘is not just made of signs. That the theory of language extends beyond the theory of communication. Because language includes communication, signs, but also actions, creations, the relationships between the bodies, the hidden unveiling of the unconscious, are events that do not happen to the sign’’ (Critique 72). In this sense one could say that the theory of language also goes beyond what has been canonized under the term text. Rhythm includes what is corporeal about language, particularly orality. In Le Discours antillais Glissant writes: ‘‘Writing implies a lack of movement: the body does not accompany the flow of speech. . . . Orality, on the contrary, is inseparable from the body in movement. What is said is inscribed not only in the best position for its expression . . . but also in the almost semaphoric evolutions through which the body implies and supports speech. The voice draws energy from the body’s position and perhaps, because of that, exhausts that same energy’’ (237–38). Orality is what lets the body speak. 95

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In his study Zumthor insists on the importance of the voice that ‘‘goes beyond speech,’’ that ‘‘speaks of itself at the same time as it speaks,’’ of ‘‘Husserl’s phenomenological voice,’’ of ‘‘the voice that is conscience; of the voice inhabited by words but that really does not speak nor think, that simply talks ‘for the sake of talking,’ molding phonemes, and whose reason for being becomes the uttered discourse’’ (13). In the same spirit Glissant speaks of the noninstrumental way in which the Antilleans, deprived of technical instruments, use language: ‘‘As they never learned how to use tools, Martinicans have never learned to use language as a tool. Therefore, they manipulate it in a fundamentally indirect way and make of it a detour, a ruse. This is the reason why such a numerically small people have so many elites skilled in the art of expression’’ (Discours 278). Martinicans, in other words, do not separate writing from speaking, do not necessarily associate speech with usefulness and writing with art, and, unlike the French intellectuals, speak as they would write, in texts. This attitude opens up the definition of text and has liberating consequences that go beyond the e√orts of the deconstructionists. ‘‘Rhythm in discourse,’’ writes Meschonnic, ‘‘allows for an anthropological definition of orality: it replaces the binary dichotomy of writing versus orality as is seen in Occidental dualism, which is an opposition between logical and prelogical, rational and irrational, civilized and archaic, with a distinction between writing, speech, and orality. . . . From there one has to recognize and characterize a multiplicity of the modes of orality, which have nothing to do with their being recorded in writing’’ (‘‘Rythme’’ 2049). Glissant notes that the Haitians have invented the neologism oraliture to replace the word literature; he himself often uses the expression oral literature, which has the advantage of signaling that ‘‘one can create a written text that would have to be uttered first and that would benefit from oral techniques.’’ Thus ‘‘a scream becomes written without ceasing to be a scream or even a howl’’ (Discours 345). Glissant does not wish, however, to return to a preliterate, original, and innocent time. I will therefore take the liberty of substituting for the term oral literature the expression literature of orality in order to distinguish this type of literature from oral literature in the ethnological sense of the term, including African epics; tales told by griots (African storytellers); sayings; proverbs; riddles; songs; and religious, 96

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medical, technical, and artistic knowledge transmitted orally, often in an anonymous way, from generation to generation, as Lilyan Kesteloot has shown. Nevertheless, some of the features of ‘‘traditional’’ oral literature could counter the e√ects of ‘‘Occidental’’ writing and thus participate in the creation of a truly Antillean and oral literature as Glissant understands it. Oral literature is not obsessed by the universal ‘‘old colonized syndrome’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 52); it is and wants to be regionalist, in the sense used by Wilhelm Nicolaïsen, where the notion of region implies a feeling of belonging to a community, a realization of a shared history and land. It is a spatial and synchronic as well as a diachronic concept or, rather, a coming together of geography and history, an eco-history. To such a domain would belong the story of the Lézarde, the river that rushed down the mornes like a ‘‘young girl,’’ then spread out in the Lamentin region like a ‘‘ripe woman’’ to go and die in the swamps of the Delta, as Glissant describes it in his first novel, which takes place in 1945. Not only does the writer take note of the natural history of a phenomenon, of the collapsing of history and geography as the river flows, but he also highlights the sociopolitical history of the Lézarde, which thirty years later, in Malemort, has dried up due to metropolitan industrialization and pollution. Indeed, there is nothing natural about the Antillean countryside: ‘‘In the Antilles nobody is at home: neither people nor animals nor plants. . . . Everything has been imported, including the sugar cane,’’ notes Dany Bebel-Gisler in her study of the Creole language (56). The mornes are also emblematic of the double and contradictory eco-history of the Antillean landscape. The mornes are, first of all, heavily wooded, providing an ideal refuge for runaway slaves, but they are also infested with poisonous snakes, imported by the masters in order to attack the slaves taking refuge there. Because of acute specialization, this eco-history is becoming more and more remote to everyone; only poet-historians, ethnopoets like Glissant, and maybe a few ‘‘New’’ Historicists can revive it: ‘‘Our countryside is its own monument: the trace that it suggests can be found underneath. It is all history,’’ writes Glissant (Discours 244). The authors of Eloge de la créolité point out that the history of the Antilles is not ‘‘totally accessible to historians’’ because their methodology only gives them access to the ‘‘colonial chronicle’’ written by 97

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the master, whereas ‘‘our chronicle is underneath the dates, underneath the classified facts: We are speech under writing. Only a poetic, fictional, literary knowledge that is artistic will be able to see us, to perceive us, to bring us back, ghostlike, to the vital functions of consciousness’’ (38). And indeed there seems to be, on Glissant’s part, an artistic e√ort to write poetical theory and ‘‘critical’’ novels and poems that help to bridge the dichotomy between theory and practice. The relation to the Other, which requires a mutual transformation, can only be portrayed within a work of art as a ‘‘complete aesthetical justification,’’ in Victor Segalen’s words (Essai 32). One of the duties of this literature of orality is therefore to be absolutely historical. But the nonhistory su√ered by the Antilleans has prevented them from having access to a collective memory. They were not in control of their fate when they were uprooted and taken from their native country, and their history has not been recorded or has been recorded by the masters. In their e√orts to have access to a form of collective memory, they produce an opaque literature, not necessarily ‘‘written for someone, but [meant] to deconstruct the complex mechanisms of frustration and the infinite varieties of oppression’’ (Glissant, Discours 227). Another element that the literature of orality could borrow from oral literature is variability. The role of the individual in the transmission of oral literature is now being rethought by folklorists, the collecting of tales having hidden, for the needs of ethnographic classification, the role of the teller or the singer. The study of the variations of tales returns to him or her a creative role within a community. The community, however, reserves the right to a collective censorship that limits the degree of improvisation. According to ethnographer Veronika Gorog-Karady, the ‘‘developing of oral literature is submitted to the condition of its reception’’ (31). In this sense this literature would be di√erent from Occidental literature, whose e√ects are not immediate and are all the more important because they are deferred. This literature of orality would also then benefit from oral literature in the sense that it would be a symbiosis of individual screams and communal chants. It might also incorporate elements of a certain type of Occidental literature inasmuch as its transmission would not depend completely on the approval or disapproval of an immediate audience. 98

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This literature of orality would be a literature of the Diverse. What Glissant calls the ‘‘Same’’ is not ‘‘what is uniform and sterile’’ but that which ‘‘punctuates the human spirit’s e√orts toward the transcendence of a universalist humanism that sublimates what is particular’’ and that ‘‘needs another’’ as a ‘‘matter to sublimate.’’ On the other hand, the ‘‘Diverse, which is neither what is chaotic nor what is sterile, intimates the e√ort of the human spirit at creating a transverse relation without any universalist type of transcendence. The Diverse needs the presence of di√erent people, not as objects to be sublimated but as projects to be put in relation with each other. . . . The Same is a sublimated di√erence; the Diverse, an accepted di√erence’’ (Discours 190–91).∞∫ Glissant, who wants to replace counterpoetics with a Poetics of Relation, sees in the Creole language one of the more successful instances of the creation of this poetics: ‘‘It is not a language of the Being but a language of the Related’’ (Discours 241).∞Ω It is a language of compromise, not of aggression toward a dominant language, as in the case of ‘‘pidgin’’ languages. This language does not imply a form of diglossia (a situation where one language is considered superior) but is an e√ort to make two languages opaque to each other, as only ‘‘individual opacities’’ can counter the e√ect of the universalism and obligatory transparency of Occidental humanism. As Glissant puts it, ‘‘What is human is perhaps not ‘man’s image’ but the unceasingly restarted weavings of those accepted opacities’’ (Discours 245). The Poetics of Relation implies a dialectical relation between writing and orality; between French and Creole; within Creole; and within even the French language, which, under the action of Antillean writers, will have to forego ‘‘the old clothes of universalizing abstractions’’ (Discours 322) and the unequal dichotomy between writing and orality, not by becoming creolized but by becoming ‘‘oralized.’’ Glissant, who is trying to lay the foundations for a national Antillean literature, claims that there is now a realization by nations with an oral tradition of their strength and an arrival of these nations on the international political scene. As it happens, these societies, because they are oral, ‘‘have had to su√er, without being able to defend themselves against the assaults of the Same’’ (Discours 190). This Same that Glissant sees at work in writing is the ‘‘universalizing trace 99

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of the Same, whereas orality would be the organized gesture of the Diverse’’ (Discours 192). Martinicans and Guadeloupeans who are trying to make ‘‘the often alienated passage from orality to writing’’ must also be very conscious of the passage ‘‘from writing to orality’’ (192). This literature of orality concerns not only the French Antilles but also France and the Occident, as Glissant warns ‘‘that the only way for writing to keep its function is to free itself from an esoteric practice or computerized standardization and to irrigate itself at the sources of orality’’ (Discours 193). ‘‘Enfin Glissant vint’’? Probably, as he brought poetry, beauty, and density to his own island, a di≈dent and defying hope that this mythical ‘‘elsewhere’’ that had sustained the Caribbean people could be overridden by a Caribbean here and now.

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chapter ∂

Créolité and Its Discontents

The term antillanité, forged by Edouard Glissant, was wisely defined by him as ‘‘more than a theory, a vision. The strength of the term is such that anything can be said about it. I have heard more than once antillanité (without any added precisions) proposed as a global solution to real or fantasized problems. When a word becomes such a catchall, it can be assumed that it has caught up with reality’’ (Discours 495).∞ Glissant’s young followers were not as cautious and published in 1989 a triumphant Eloge de la créolité. What is créolité? In this chapter I propose first to unfold and analyze the elements of créolité put forth in the manifesto by Jean Bernabé (a linguist) and Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant (the two young star novelists of the contemporary French Caribbean). I will then contrast this approach to Caribbean culture with that expressed by Maryse Condé in an article she wrote about Negritude, an essay on Caribbean women novelists, and some of her novels. Let us first, for instance, compare two passages – the first from Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A dish of pork with green bananas) (1967), by Simone Schwarz-Bart and André Schwarz-Bart, and the second from Raphaël Confiant’s La Vierge du grand retour (The virgin of the great return) (1996). Martinique, made up of multiple races engaged in an unremitting hand-to-hand struggle where sexual weapons are forged with the steel of contempt! . . . But Raymoninque would beat these ridiculous acts flat. He could not be placed on any level of this ladder of contempt raised upon the island, like a tower of Babel slowly erected by centuries of oppression and crime. With one word he would tear out a rung. He would say for instance: the white man despises the Quadroon, who despises the Mulatto, who despises the ‘Câpre,’ who despises the ‘Zambo,’ who despises the Negro, who despises the Indian, who despises the Indian woman who . . . beats her dog, ha ha. And I Ray

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Créolité and Its Discontents Raymond Raymoninque I look at you all and I laugh to myself; and if you ask me who is my blood brother, I will tell you that it is the dog!’’ (12–28)≤ When night enveloped the earth with its usual savagery, the Couli Indian bowed down, his face on the ground, and stopped moving. Dictionneur cautiously got closer to him. He did not dare interrupt his meditation. A sort of a√ectionate di≈dence paralyzed him. He wanted to clasp his hands, embrace him, feel the touch of his beardless cheek sprinkled by a sparse and frizzy beard like a string of peppercorns. He felt that they had become brothers, Dictionneur, the Negro, and Manoutchy, the Couli-Indian. Not blood brothers but soul brothers, which, he realized now, was the most important. Manoutchy finally raised his head, noticed him, and started to smile. Ou . . . You . . . uttered Dictionneur. — Don’t say anything! You saw me overcome the kalapani . . . — The what? — This malediction that has followed us since our people had to leave their native country, India. Now . . . Now . . . this country, Martinique, this country . . . is my country . . . It is . . . our country . . . — Yes, it is our country! repeated Dictionneur, who took him in his arms. (248)≥

Whereas the first passage highlights blood, race, sex, violence, and scorn, a descent into hell, Confiant, in a Camusian type of humanism, joins two men through a kinship not of blood but of soul. While Raymoninque is barking and biting like a cornered dog, Dictionneur and Manoutchy are singing the aria of créolité. While Raymoninque ‘‘tears out a rung,’’ Dictionneur wants to touch the Other’s cheek. Confiant’s text is an illustration of a moment of créolité: two men, a Negro and a Couli Indian, experience an epiphany of créolité during a Hindu religious practice. Créolité is revealed to them just as God was to Pascal and Claudel. The setting is di√erent, the men are in a cave rather than a cathedral, but the moment itself is similar.

Créolité or Ambiguity? The premise of Eloge de la créolité is well-known: ‘‘Neither European, nor African, nor Asian, we proclaim ourselves créoles’’ (13). We are in 102

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the domain of the linguistic performative, according to Austin, in the ‘‘performative present of cultural identification,’’ to borrow Homi Bhabha’s expression. The proclamation is what makes this nous Creole. Furthermore, créolité is defined as what we are not. And yet, despite any positive pole to counter the triple negativity surrounding its birth, it does come to a dialectical end: the son of a German man and a Haitian woman born in Peking will surpass his mother and father, the Germans, the Haitians, and the Chinese, in sensitivity, diversity, creativity. He will be, as the authors a≈rm, ‘‘in the state of being-Creole’’ (53). While he could indeed be exceptionally endowed with the positive aspects of his German father, his Haitian mother, and the Pekinese, he could alternatively surpass them in brutality, destruction, senselessness. Or he could turn out to be female or, worse, a homosexual, as eugenicists of the nineteenth century feared. In order to deconstruct the notion of créolité, it is useful to briefly recall the concept of modern and postmodern ‘‘hybridity’’ as it has been envisioned by science. In the nineteenth century biological (and cultural) hybridity was deemed apocalyptic; it signaled the end of a race or a culture. Thus, in order to protect a colonizing race and culture from extinction, hybridity was declared impossible and the hybrid (biological or cultural) doomed to sterility, despite evidence to the contrary. Yet, at the same time, as Robert Young and Confiant remind us, Gobineau claimed – ‘‘in a footnote,’’ says Young – that women of mixed race, although ‘‘degenerate’’ and ‘‘degraded,’’ were ‘‘the most beautiful beings of all’’ (Young 114; Confiant, Vierge 130). This statement reveals an ambivalent attitude toward hybridity, rooted in anxiety and desire. The Caribbean is half human, half animal; half French, half slave; half Prospero, half Caliban, and so on. Hybridity is seductive and frightening to the French male bourgeois because it is linked to pleasure and vice if female, to treachery if male. For some Metropolitan French all Martinicans are chabins or chabines. It is interesting to note that Raphaël Confiant, in ‘‘Petit Lexique du pays créole’’ (published with his novel Ravines du devantjour), seems to subscribe, if only dialogically, to the Metropolitan view of the chabin and the chabine. This is his definition of the chabin: ‘‘Quality of a Negro endowed with the unheard-of quality (of which he takes advantage) of turning red with anger or shame because of an influx of white blood dating from the time of slavery. His eyes, 103

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which are often blue or green, shine with suppressed rage, and the chabine, O golden woman, at the height of orgasm, nibbles at your ears until they bleed. [The chabin is] often red-headed (and therefore vicious)’’ (210–11). What therefore is a chabin in absolute terms? A frightening hybrid or a reassuring Creole? What is a chabine? Is there a chabin or a chabine essence? At this point we, as Metropolitan readers, find ourselves truly lost in Confiant’s fictional world. We cannot trust definitions that come from a voice mimicking the tone of our dictionaries; hence we can no longer trust our trusted dictionaries. If we try to grasp the complexity of ‘‘identity,’’ we might be in danger of losing our own. ‘‘We have entered the age of suspicion,’’ declared the New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute in the early 1950s with regard to the reader of nineteenth-century-like fiction and his or her attitude toward traditional characters. We postmoderns and postcolonials are suspicious, as Flaubert was, not only of the capacity of language(s) to express but also of the locus of its (their) enunciation. Let us now enter into a discussion with postcolonial critics such as Robert Young, Homi Bhabha, and Thomas Spear, with Edouard Glissant and the Caribbean philosopher Jacky Dahomey to highlight the complexities of créolité unmentioned by the creolists. The parameters of biological and linguistic hybridity are now being theorized by postcolonial critics. For example, Robert Young sees Bakhtin’s linguistic hybridity as double, a hybrid itself: on the one hand an unconscious ‘‘organic hybridization’’ mixes and fuses languages and gives birth to other languages; on the other an ironic ‘‘intentional hybridization’’ is generated by di√erent points of view pitted against each other in a never-ending conflicting structure that retains ‘‘a certain elemental energy and openendedness’’ (20–22). This is Bakhtin’s principal of dialogism, an aesthetic but also social and political operation. Homi Bhabha sees hybridity not as a conciliatory third term between warring cultures but as a place of negotiation, whereas the creolists see créolité as a moment of fusion. Hybridity is, to be sure, a double-consciousness, and it is also a site of deceit where the hybrid displays signs of ‘‘di√erentiation,’’ which are translated by the colonizers as the e√ects of ‘‘signs of authority’’ over the colonized (Bhabha 175). Thus the hybrid is the embodiment of a revised Faus104

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tian type of contract between the master culture and the slave culture. He or she is the living proof that the oppressed have been tricked again. But the mask of hybridity has also helped the colonized in duping – but ‘‘not quite’’ – the master, who doesn’t trust this ‘‘delirious image’’ of himself. If mimicry is repetition with a di√erence, then the original has been desecrated, copied, deformed; it is the same but ‘‘not quite,’’ according to Bhabha’s expression. Hybridity is a highly performative, postcolonial, postmodern place of estrangement, in the sense that it is estranging for the master, who has come to feel, like Camus’s Meursault, like a stranger within his own culture. It is the place of ‘‘negotiations,’’ not ‘‘negations,’’ according to Bhabha (25), where perhaps all parties can find at least partial satisfaction. As for myself, I believe, contrary to Bhabha’s view, that some form of refusal is necessary for any process to begin. It seems to me that the inhabitants of the French Caribbean will never become Creoles or even hybrids and that the place of negotiation for these ambiguous people, at this point in their history, remains to be determined. While the creolists argue that di√erent forms of créolité exist, such as an African créolité, an Asian créolité, or a Caribbean créolité, the notion of créolité is still totalizing as it implies, according to them, a ‘‘double process.’’ This process requires the adaptation of Europeans, Africans, and Asians to the New World and the cultural confrontation between people placed in a small space that leads to the synergetic culture named ‘‘Creole’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 31). The terms adaptation and cultural are vague and misleading. Could one ‘‘adapt’’ to being enslaved as one adapts to a climate or a culture where one has voluntarily decided to settle, as most Euro-Creoles did? In fact, the Europeans adapted by wiping out the native populations of the islands. Was the confrontation between di√erent people simply ‘‘cultural’’? Edouard Glissant expressed doubts about the term créolité as early as Le Discours antillais and prefers the term creolization, not as an end in itself, because that too would lead to the creation of a new verticality, a settlement, a growing of roots and a solid trunk with arms extended into the sky, a new model fashioned after an old French myth. Creolization should not strive to become atavistic like créolité but 105

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should retain its character of decomposition, destructuration, and conflict. In Introduction à une poétique du divers, Glissant stresses the terms circularity and spirality against the ‘‘arrow-like projection’’ [projection en flêche] of colonization. Chamoiseau and Confiant are, according to Glissant, creating a ‘‘counterverticality’’ (19)(verticality meaning transcendence and universalism). He insists on the unpredictability of Creole culture (16), on a ‘‘conversion of the being’’ [conversion de l’être, 14] that the inhabitant of the Caribbean must endure. From the beginning creolization implies a transformation of the African being, through slavery, oppression, dispossession, and crimes; it is a painful journey. It is an unfair process because the African migrants arrived naked in the Caribbean. Their only possessions were traces of traditions, music, language. But this is also part of their strength: from these traces they created Creole languages and forms of art such as jazz that can be appreciated by anybody, forms that are truly universal. Creolization also entails a spiritual dimension: the simultaneous recognition of the Other and of one’s own otherness. What Glissant calls ‘‘a spirit of traces’’ [la pensée de la trace] is not dogmatic or exclusive like the European ‘‘spirit of roots’’ [la pensée de la racine]. Creolization is occurring in the Caribbean, but as African cultures have been devalued within the process, this creolization also produces a ‘‘bitter and intractable residue’’ [un résidu amer, incontrôlable, 15]. This residue has to be accounted for if one wants to avoid falling into what the Africanist critic Ama Mazama calls a complacent créolité (92). In his essay ‘‘Creolization and Creole Societies’’ Nigel O. Bolland notes that Edward Brathwaite’s distinction between ‘‘Euro-creole’’ and ‘‘Afro-creole’’ Jamaican cultures is indicative of his belief that Jamaican culture is ‘‘deeply divided’’ (52). It could be inferred from this model that Creole cultures are also deeply divided, whatever definition one gives to the term créole, and that créolité can only be pluralistic. Chamoiseau and Confiant teleologically assign to créolité the role of a leveler of races, social classes, and gender that will produce a new type of humanity. They obfuscate the fact that Creole cultures stem from an unequal colonialist class structure that clearly separated the dominated from the dominators and that this structure has not yet disappeared, although it has become more complex with the emergence of what is significantly referred to as the mulatto class 106

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(la classe mulâtre). While Chamoiseau and Confiant confront and play with the notion of ethno-classes in their fictional work, in their theoretical reflections this class structure is but perfunctorily alluded to. By ignoring the fact that colonialism and enslavement are constitutive of Caribbean societies, although not necessarily of all Creole societies, Chamoiseau and Confiant fall prey to a mystifying idealism. For Glissant creolization represents a series of questions rather than answers. Is true creolization – that is, many systems of thought coming together without destroying each other – truly possible? How can one retain a distinct specificity while ‘‘creolizing’’ (30)? It is a question not only of coming together willingly but also of clashing together willingly, that is, of not falling prey to assimilation or, rather, acculturation. In one of his bleakest fictional moments Glissant sees Martinique as a museum, the ‘‘museum of the colony,’’ covered with a glass bubble and filled with gift shops (Mahagony 178–80). Glissant is aware of the dual nature of creolization. It encompasses a ‘‘negative’’ aspect of past enslavement and present assimilation to French culture that is unintentional, if not unconscious. It also comprises a ‘‘positive’’ aspect (and here Glissant gives fresh meaning to the adjective) that has always driven Caribbean people to an ‘‘elsewhere which would always be here.’’ Marcus Garvey, for example, went to black politics in the United States and Frantz Fanon to the Algerian Revolution. This ‘‘elsewhere-here’’ also drove Lafcadio Hearn and Paul Gauguin away from Martinique to Japan and Oceania because it presented an insurmountable obstacle to their search for more permanent and reliable origins and an unadulterated (or so they thought) purity (Glissant, Discours 25). Jacky Dahomey, in ‘‘Habiter la créolité ou le heurt de l’universel’’ (Inhabiting créolité or the clash with the universal), calls attention to the multiple contradictions that compose the concept of créolité and the risks attached to any discourse on the problematics of identity. He addresses in particular the thorny notion of universality, which Glissant’s ‘‘epigones,’’ as Dahomey refers to the creolists, never cease to deride. While Dahomey recognizes that Glissant has broached the problem in his usual complex way, the authors of Eloge have singularly simplified it by equating the universal with French values. They oppose the universalité of the Same and the One (France) to diversalité, without ever specifying what these two notions mean. 107

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Dahomey points out that some Antillean intellectuals praise assimilation (the culture and politics of the Metropole) in the name of universality and therefore put down their own culture, while others denigrate universality in order to assert the identity of the French Caribbean islands. The latter position (and Dahomey also includes Glissant’s reflections on universality) is uncritical of the very notion these writers are attacking. According to Dahomey, Glissant and most Antillean intellectuals are deeply marked by a traditionally modern dialectical philosophy of history, culture, and society. When they try to distance themselves from this predicament, they fall back into a ‘‘phenomenological conception’’ without attempting to critically conceptualize history. Their nationalistic aesthetics of identity are bolstered against a Hegelian problematic that they do not question and that they should not necessarily reject. In particular they do not question their own propensity to attack ‘‘French’’ universalism with Hegelian universalism. They assume that all human experience can be continually propelled forward through the theorization of an Aufhebung (the Hegelian synthesis) without taking into account that certain elements of this experience are not ‘‘dialectisable,’’ as Suzanne Césaire has shown. Furthermore, if francité and Negritude are but positive or negative moments and Glissant’s antillanité their Aufhebung, where does that leave créolité in the dialectical operation?∂ Should we assume, wonders Dahomey, that there is a fourth moment and that the creolists are synthesizing francité, Negritude, and antillanité and therefore coming closer to the Truth? Or are they still in Glissant’s ‘‘moment’’? Will créolité also be submitted to the movement of dialectics on its native island, or will the movement stop? Furthermore, the creolists have not really tackled the question of the Creole encounter with modernity, that is, with the ‘‘rupture of the individual’’ (Dahomey 125). The question of this rupture with traditional cultures is a problem faced by all societies of the Third World. For Dahomey the creolists’ thinking is flawed inasmuch as the creolists are running after a lost unity or are trying to re-create one without seeing the dangers inherent in such a position. He believes that scholars should instead try to conceptualize the conditions of a modern way of living in the Caribbean, which would consist of ‘‘the elaboration of symbolic forms allowing one to live in a country torn between, on the one hand, a cultural tradition that is itself tormented 108

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by its own history and the quest for a common identity and, on the other, the moral and political obligation of constructing a society ruled by modern notions of nations that require an autonomous individualistic subject, a free citizen’’ (126). Because France allegedly presents its own relative values as universal, Glissant and the creolists seem to reject any type of absolute. It is impossible, however, to ask for the right to live freely in one’s own culture without referring to human rights, which transcend any particular culture. A politics of identity can lead to exclusionary practices, and societies are required to take into account these rights and enter into a dialogue with ‘‘universality’’ if they want to inhabit an interdependent world. Moreover, in order to indict the colonialist French Republic, these writers present the Republican ideal as a cause of alienation. But it is in the name of this ideal that people are fighting dictatorships in the Third World. Dahomey vigorously asserts that a democratic regime cannot survive if its citizens accept every element of their own culture. True change requires a critical examination of one’s own culture. This is where freedom comes into play, and it can only be absolute, universal; like human rights, it is neither French nor European. For Dahomey, to be Creole is to accept this encounter with universality and modernity; it is to integrate within one’s own créolité a critical examination not just of ‘‘Occidental’’ values but also of créolité itself. Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé present a fairly ahistorical view of the French Caribbean by ignoring the tormented specificity of their own history and the contemporary political context of the French Caribbean people, who are not free citizens, since Martinique and Guadeloupe are an integral part of France and now of the European community. While French and French Caribbean critics observing the Caribbean intellectual scene tend to stress the clashes within male politics and philosophy, Anglo-Saxon critics are haunted by gender and sexuality, and they have emphasized the masculinist and exclusionary characteristics of créolité. Robert Young notes the fundamental heterosexuality attached to the notion of hybridity: whichever model of hybridity is employed, whether créolité or creolization, ‘‘hybridity as a cultural description will always carry with it an implicit politics of 109

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heterosexuality which may be a further reason for contesting its contemporary preeminence’’ (25–26). Furthermore, within a heterosexist and racist society woman is situated ‘‘as an agent in any theory of production’’; she possesses a ‘‘tangible place of production, the womb,’’ and is silenced. I might add (but not quite) that she acts ‘‘as an agent in any theory of production’’ (Gayatri Spivak, qtd. in Young 19). Thomas Spear points out the numerous instances of male sexual prowess in Caribbean fiction written by men, albeit, he admits, from an exterior perspective on the discursive brutal and grotesque heterosexuality. But, as he notes, Glissant himself seems to corroborate this view of male Caribbean heterosexuality by defending what he sees as the ‘‘real’’ sexuality of Caribbean men. This brutal and selfish type of sexuality, which does not take into account feminine jouissance and which is allegedly typical of Caribbean men, can be explained, according to Glissant, by the legacy of slavery. The (male) slave had to steal ‘‘pleasure,’’ that is, time, from the master. As far as sexuality and many other ‘‘points’’ are concerned, ‘‘the Martinican, dramatically, does not have time’’ (Discours 295; qtd. in Spear 139). One could argue that Glissant consciously ignores the ‘‘dark continent’’ of feminine Caribbean sexuality. James Arnold contests the creolists’ assertion that créolite is transmitted through the male, albeit castrated, conteur: ‘‘Women and any woman-authored competing tradition are excluded from tradition, are e√ectively silenced by an exclusively masculine historiography’’ (32).∑ Thus, the contribution of women to the transmission of an oral Creole culture is obfuscated. Indeed, Chamoiseau and Confiant, in Lettres créoles, see the subversive conteur (storyteller) as the transmitter of the ‘‘daddy-language of the orality of a nascent culture’’ [le papa-langue de l’oralité d’une culture naissante, 56]. In their literary works the creolists assign to the Creole language and to orality an ambiguous and shifting position. Créolité, however, asserts itself through the recognition of the Creole language: ‘‘No Creole creator, in any domain, can come into being without an intuitive knowledge of the poetics of the Creole language’’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 44). Jean Bernabé shows that the Creole vocabulary ‘‘is structured by the lexicon of sexuality’’ (Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres 94).∏ The psychoanalyst Jacques André, as we 110

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have seen, notices that in the French Caribbean women tend to use the French language while men use Creole as a way of asserting an aggressive heterosexuality (Inceste 64–65). The counterdiscourse to oppression and racism has yet to take into account the oppression exerted by men over women and sexual ‘‘deviants.’’ Creolization will remain a vain notion if it does not embrace a true ‘‘conversion de l’être,’’ in Glissant’s terms (Introduction 15). Creolization must include not only a recognition of the plight of the disfranchised descendent of Africans, of the ‘‘Nègre-congo,’’ but also a recognition of women’s specific condition. It must call for a transformation of sexual politics in the French Caribbean. Françoise Lionnet is right to point to the feminine aspect of what she calls métissage. Most women, for various historical reasons, are more inclined than their male counterparts to study the texture of daily life. They readily notice its thickness, its many layers, and are less willing than men to totalize or theorize the complexities of that which cannot be theorized. In Postcolonial Representations Lionnet notes that women writers point ‘‘the way to a new and yet very old concept: humanism’’ or, rather, ‘‘femihumanism, a non-separatist feminism committed to bringing about a pluralistic society based on the rejection of oppression and domination whether globally or locally’’ (19). For instance, créolité, as Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart understand it, is a femihumanism, a recognition of the resemblances among all types of oppression and the particular character of an oppression engendered by oppression. It seems that the creolists have come to an aporia. Having firmly disestablished the Western tradition of identity through their repeated negation of the term (‘‘Neither European, nor African, nor Asian’’), they reenter the same ‘‘tradition of representation that conceives identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plenitudinous object of vision’’ and fail to change ‘‘the very term of our recognition of the person’’ (Bhabha 46–47). Is créolité, as articulated in Eloge de la créolité, another form of humanism, as Sartre proclaimed of existentialism in a vulgarization treatise in 1947? Is it not the e√ect of an ‘‘intentional’’ state of mind, not in Bakhtin’s seditious use of the adjective to mean ‘‘contesting,’’ but as an appeasement, a containment, a sort of ideological death for the inhabitants of the French Caribbean? Are Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant assembling masks of créolité for hybrids to wear? 111

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An Intimist Approach to Créolité Maryse Condé, as we will see in the following section, brings her coy ‘‘two cents’’ to the debate between Caribbean literary ‘‘tenors.’’ She had the audacity to attack Césaire and his very own Negritude as early as 1974 and without fanfare proposes her versions of antillanité and créolité. In 1993, at a University of Virginia colloquium entitled ‘‘Expanding the Notion of Créolité,’’ organized by Maryse Condé, keynote speaker James Arnold noted that Negritude, along with antillanité and créolité, are ‘‘masculinist movements’’ that have pushed literature written by women into the background.π Arnold highlighted the ‘‘phallogocentric’’ nature of Aimé Césaire’s discourse, in particular his play Et les Chiens se taisaient (And dogs were silent), in which the redeeming hero dies for his people though his mother and lover urge him not to. In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, is presented as a ‘‘woman who lies’’ (8), the great Babylonian whore lying in her own ‘‘decay’’ – ‘‘sprawled,’’ ‘‘flattened,’’ ‘‘slack,’’ ‘‘inert,’’ crawling ‘‘on its hands without any wish to pierce the sky with a posture of protest’’ (33). Negritude might therefore be accused of presenting a ‘‘virile’’ ideology of redressement (which means both the redressing of wrong and an erection), which obviously does not provide a satisfying place for women. At the end of Césaire’s Notebook the nègre of Negritude is standing up, free from his chains literally and metaphorically: ‘‘And the ‘poor-oldNegro’ is standing up / the seated ‘poor old Negro’ / unexpectedly standing / upright in the hold / upright in the cabins / upright on the bridge / upright in the wind / upright under the sun / upright in the blood / upright and free’’ (133–35). Maryse Condé, in a 1974 article entitled ‘‘Négritude césairienne, négritude senghorienne,’’ seems to dismiss Césaire’s enshrined masterpiece. She notes that at the heart of the poem stands the problem of a lost identity that is negated, regained, and re-created at all costs. To illustrate this point she quotes this passage from the Notebook: ‘‘I accept . . . I accept . . . totally, without reserve / my race which no ablution of hyssop or mixed / lilies could purify / my race eaten by macula / my race ripe grape for drunken feet etc. . . . / I accept. I accept. / And the flogged Negro who says: ‘Pardon, my 112

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master’ ’’ (411–12).∫ In the Notebook Césaire invites his race to totally accept itself as nègre. Condé, for tactical purposes, does pretend to ignore Césaire’s irony toward the white master/reader and to ignore the fact that, like the hysterical woman, he is masquerading. The masquerade black servitude, just like the masquerade femininity, is the representation of subjection to (white) men and therefore indicates that this subjection must be broken. Representing the masquerade in excess is not only a ‘‘defense’’ against but a ‘‘derision’’ of (white) masculinity (Heath 57). The narrator exaggerates, thereby questioning his very position of subjection and abjection. Condé claims not to understand how the black race, having been reduced to such a state of humiliation, is suddenly transformed into a vibrant mass of erect and proud Negroes. If, Condé writes, for Lilyan Kesteloot, a Césaire scholar, ‘‘everything is clear, the total identification of the poet and his people produces the miracle’’ (412). Condé herself ‘‘will ask permission to refuse this miracle and try and understand logically’’ (413). The word logically here is in itself ironical, as Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese poet-president and one of the ‘‘inventors’’ of Negritude, claims that emotion is nègre, while reason is Greek (Senghor 24). Condé also warns readers not to let themselves ‘‘be carried away by the emotional magic’’ of Césaire’s Notebook, which claims to be a political manifesto and not ‘‘just a poem’’ (412). Condé, a ‘‘femme nègre,’’ appropriates for herself the Western aptitude for reason and logic that has been denied to people of her race and sex. For Condé Negritude is indeed a ‘‘miracle’’ because ‘‘le Nègre n’existe pas’’; it is a European invention that justifies the exploitation and submission of Africans. Negritude is a lie because it is based on a lie, the ‘‘worst lie of colonization,’’ the existence of an inferior being made for subaltern functions (413–14). Indeed, with the discovery of the New World, Occidental ideology, in order to justify the expropriation of the indigenous people, emphasized the secular concept of the ‘‘nonrational,’’ ‘‘inferior’’ nature of these populations. The shift from the primary anatomic model of sexual difference, wherein man is superior to woman, to the physiognomic model of cultural and racial di√erence, wherein blacks are inferior to whites, is illustrated in a magisterial way in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play, within the relation of domination and subordination between Miranda and Caliban, Caliban is the incarnation of a new 113

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category of humanity, the irrational savage, the anti-Prospero, and Miranda is now endowed up to a certain point with rationality (Wynter 357–58). In the very name of Greek logic, Condé, a daughter of Caliban, debunks the Western denial of rationality to Africans, which justifies slavery, a denial endorsed by Senghor, albeit for di√erent reasons. Indeed, Maryse Condé engages, in her creative and theoretical work, in a constant and ironical dialogue with her (male) elders that, more often than not, ends in a refutation of their ideas. In En Attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon), her first novel (1976), she chastises her heroine for not trying to understand modern Africa, but she also blames the prophets of Negritude, who have dreamed of an imaginary Africa. Condé writes, in an article entitled ‘‘Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer’’: ‘‘Not everything can be explained through slavery. West Indian society came to be considered as a Paradise perverted by Europe. Everything prior to colonization was idealized. Consequently, from the image of Africa, the motherland, were carefully eradicated any blemishes such as domestic slavery, or tribal warfare, and the subjugation of women’’ (124; my emphasis). Condé sees Negritude as the heir to a naive and optimistic Rousseauist conception of the noble savage who was corrupted by civilization. She believes that Negritude wants to erase from history anything that might blemish the original idol. Consequently, the discourse of Negritude has been coopted by dictatorial leaders such as Mwalimwana, the novel’s representation of the Guinean president Sékou Touré, who, in his paternalistic speeches, asks his people to compare the situation of the country before and after the departure of the colonizers (77). Negritude, far from being part of the dialectical operation – that is, doomed to disappear, as Sartre suggests in ‘‘Orphée noir’’ – keeps resurfacing within a good/evil type of dichotomy in order to comfort the status quo. Negritude, just like colonialism, has recycled itself as ‘‘neo.’’ Negritude could be qualified as ‘‘modern’’ insofar as it relies on the search for a strong identity based on the metanarratives of selfdiscovery and liberation. And Maryse Condé’s position would seem closer to that of the creolists’ theories in Eloge de la créolité. While Caribbean people have vainly tried to fix their culture within a mythical outside, such as Europe or Africa or America, the creolists have 114

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highlighted a Creole being that is neither African nor Asian nor European. Creolization, which is not unique to the American continent, means the brutal coming together of culturally diverse people in insular or enclosed territories. Placed together, usually within a plantation-type economy, these populations have been forced to invent new cultural models in order to establish a relative cohabitation among themselves (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant 30–31). Unlike Negritude, créolité is based on nonexclusion, so much so that even Condé objects to Chamoiseau’s inclusion of Saint-John Perse in the pantheon of Creole letters (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 39; Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres 159–65).Ω But there is something in créolité that Condé should object to: the notion of unveiling (dévoilement) the real Antillean or Creole self that, according to the three creolists, should be excavated with patience so as not to ‘‘tamper with or lose’’ the self buried under the ‘‘francisation.’’∞≠ They seem to think that under the rubble there is a pure, unadulterated ‘‘Antillean self ’’ – as if the two terms did not form an oxymoron (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 22). Within the parameters of postmodernism, that is, of our present-day ideology, any hint of essentialism, any suspicion of nostalgia for a self-constituted, unified, responsible, and free subject, should be repressed with the utmost severity. Condé, though less theoretical than Chamoiseau and the other creolists (or maybe because of this), is more aware than the creolists of the context in which we live, think, and die. She also displays an acute consciousness that the notions of subject and selfhood have recently been seriously questioned, at least in what we call the West, and nobody can claim to escape the influence of this questioning. Awareness of one’s daily and changing environment constitutes an ‘‘intimist’’ way of experiencing the world and, only much later, of theorizing it. According to Condé, what black women writers ‘‘express is very di√erent than what the men do. It is not a political revindication, it is not an awakening that leads to a struggle, it is not an Occidental type of feminism’’ (Pfa√ 60). She says that these women do not write about ideology, racism, or exploitation but about ‘‘complicated relationships.’’ It seems that they are interested in what are called ‘‘intimist problems that are in fact societal problems’’ (Pfa√ 60). These writers are ‘‘womanists,’’ and the term womanist, according to Alice Walker, comes ‘‘from womanish (opp. of 115

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‘girlish,’ i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious). From the black folk expression of mothers to female children ‘You acting womanish,’ i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.’’ A womanist is ‘‘a black feminist or a feminist of color’’ (xi). The intimist conviction of Maryse Condé seems to me to be very close to Alice Walker’s portrait of a womanist, though less theorized. Walker created this neologism but at the same time related it firmly, albeit ironically and paradoxically, to a black female tradition. Condé seems to view the world from a postmodern perspective, but she also engages in a certain feminine debate, rather than a feminist one, since most types of feminism see the postmodernist position as dangerous for the integrity of the identity ‘‘woman.’’∞∞ Condé does not want to be labeled a feminist; she is quick to point out that she portrays men and women, black and white, ‘‘the way they are’’ (Pfa√ 48), warts and all. Indeed, when one looks at a list of her novels, there is only one truly feminist-realist character: Tituba, the black witch from Barbados. Condé, in La Parole des femmes, says that the role of women within the liberation struggles, both before and after the abolition of slavery, has been obfuscated. But while women lived on the plantations as domestics (cooks, nannies, maids), they were often responsible for collective poisonings of the masters and their families, they participated in setting the plantations on fire in the eighteenth century, and they marooned in considerable numbers (Parole 4). Maryse Condé said in an interview that at the time she invented Tituba, she wanted to turn her ‘‘into a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary ‘Nanny of the maroons’ ’’ and that she hesitated ‘‘between irony and a desire to be serious. The result is that she is a sort of mock-epic character.’’ She warns: ‘‘If one misses the parody in Tituba, one will not understand, for example, why she meets Hester Prynne in jail and why they discuss feminism in modern terms. . . . Do not take Tituba too seriously, please’’ (I Tituba 201, 212). Tituba had been crossed out of history; she had not been rehabilitated like the white witches. Nobody knows what happened to Tituba: ‘‘This seemed revolting to me,’’ says Condé, ‘‘and I wanted to give life to this forgotten woman. As I am not the type to create role models, I was quick to destroy what could be exemplary in this story by making Tituba rather naive and sometimes ridiculous’’ (qtd. in Pfa√ 91). 116

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Condé’s initial enthusiasm and indignation are tempered by an iconoclastic and postmodernist urge directed toward the representation of the strong and independent black woman. In that sense her thought process could be compared to that of Daniel Maximin, another Guadeloupean writer, in L’Isolé Soleil (Lone sun). Whereas Edouard Glissant calls for the honoring of indigenous heroes within the Caribbean, heroes such as the Martinican Louis Delgrès who, rather than accept the return to slavery ordered by Napoleon, had himself and three hundred of his troops blown up at the fort of Matouba in Guadeloupe in 1802 (Glissant, Discours 135– 36), Maximin demythifies this type of heroism. Rather than systematically approving any ‘‘heroic’’ act accomplished by a colonized person, the text asks why suicide holds such seduction for the Caribbean people. In L’Isolé Soleil the statue erected to the dead hero is a lure. The statue is the symbol of historic art as conceived by the Occident since Greek antiquity. The immortalized hero is another version of the liberator turned dictator. Delgrès’s collective suicide, Césaire’s rebel’s suicide, and a certain type of Caribbean poetry suggest that every text that succumbs to the desire to erect statues falls into the trap set by the heroic ideology of the colonizer. Caribbean ‘‘heroes’’ want to be recognized not so much by the people but according to a certain type of heroism created by the enemy (see Rosello 51–60). Condé disparages the statue of the maroon in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, not only in Tituba but also in the third volume of her African saga, Ségou, where some Jamaican maroons are revealed as traitors allied with the English. The Jamaican maroons were o√ered the north of the island by the English if they helped capture the slaves who were fleeing to join the maroons. Condé says that one should tell both sides of a story, the noble one and the ignoble one, and concludes that the history of the Jamaican maroons calls for a reflection on the present, on power, and on freedom (Pfa√ 77–78). While Condé subscribes to the dictates of New Historicism and postmodernism, as far as monumentalized ‘‘great’’ men are concerned, she nevertheless firmly and ironically takes into account the plight of Caribbean women. Glissant, the main proponent of antillanité, a notion that precedes créolité, displays at times the same condescension toward women as the creators of Negritude. For instance, in Le Quatrième Siècle he places the kingdom of the maroons in 117

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the mountains and the woods, in opposition to the flatness and femininity of the plantations. The plains, where the plantations lie, are to him the domain of feminine sensitivity and sexual accommodation, just as Fort-de-France is to Césaire. But the maroon does not compromise; he is a traditional African warrior. Condé notes how virility and the image of a victorious Africa are intertwined in masculine Caribbean imagery. Episodically present fathers become ‘‘messianic heroes coming back to revolutionize their societies,’’ she quips (‘‘Order’’ 133). Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s women do not compromise with their sexuality; they enjoy it. It is in fact because of their irrepressible and guilt-free sexuality that they assimilate and that a daughter of the fierce maroons, in Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean l’horizon, is attracted to the lowlands and to the men who have toiled on the plantations. These women are the purveyors of a ‘‘true créolité,’’ compromises and all. In Condé’s novels, in particular in En Attendant le bonheur, feminine sexuality is ‘‘put into discourse,’’ as one critic says (Flannigan 310–11). Condé notes that ‘‘the uproar about [her] novel Heremakhonon was largely caused by Véronica, the heroine, expressing her own sexuality. For the first time a woman had the right to enjoy sex and to say it’’ (‘‘Order’’ 133). Modernist ideologies, both Western and African, have constructed the narrative of the African woman, according to Condé. In the Occident they have displayed horror at her subjection to man, have felt sorry for her sexual mutilations, and have wanted to be the initiators of her liberation. In a di√erent vein a school of Africans has celebrated the considerable place she occupied in traditional societies, the status she enjoyed; ignoring the myths and the oral literature, they have totally idealized her image and her function. Condé says that the Occident can safely denounce the African woman’s situation since it has largely contributed to her degradation. The French school was reserved for boys. It created an abyss between literate and nonliterate people and therefore helped produce the radical division that exists between the two sexes. Because women were less educated than men, they were considered an impediment to necessary social ascension and could not at first identify with proposed new ideals. African women are placed in a double-bind situation: they are asked by African men to be the keepers of traditional values and to 118

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represent a rampart against the anguishing rise of modernism, while society at large is engaged in the race for progress and consumerism. When women themselves get involved in this race, they are chastised for being too materialistic (Parole 3–4). African women, just like Occidental women, refuse to play the roles assigned to them by patriarchal ideologies.∞≤ ‘‘Ethnicity or womanhood: whose duality?’’ asks Trinh T. Minh-ha rhetorically in Woman, Native, Other (104). She addresses the ‘‘choice many women of color feel obliged to make between ethnicity and womanhood.’’ She argues that the ‘‘idea of two illusory separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes of the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics. Triple jeopardy means here that whenever a woman of color takes up the feminist fight, she immediately qualifies for three possible ‘betrayals’: she can be accused of betraying either man . . . or her community . . . or woman herself ’’ (104). Women are betrayers, ‘‘great betrayers to the Cause and to the Race,’’ says Maryse Condé ironically. Women are elements of disorder, and disorder, she writes, means ‘‘the power to create new objects and to modify the existing ones. In a word, disorder means creativity. . . . 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’’ (‘‘Order’’ 131). Black women are the ‘‘mule of the world,’’ writes Alice Walker. ‘‘Black women writers,’’ she asserts in a 1988 documentary film about her work, ‘‘have a broader vision because they must see around black men, white women and white men’’ (qtd. in Carney 92). They have to walk a tightrope between essentialism (all blacks, men and women, share the same experiences, and so do all women, black and white) and postmodernism as elaborated by white males (there is no privileged or underprivileged point of view); between ‘‘being traditionally universalist’’ (as in ‘‘ ‘Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?’ Ans. ‘Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented’ ’’) and being ‘‘traditionally 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’ ’’ [Walker xi]). 119

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The role of mothers and especially of grandmothers in the transmission of an oral culture, which Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart emphasize in their novels, is ignored for the most part by male Caribbean writers. In Chamoiseau’s work, for instance, the male conteur, the quimboiseur, becomes in Arnold’s terms the ‘‘gendered ancestor of culture and creoleness’’ (32). However, for Simone Schwarz-Bart in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and for Maryse Condé in Moi Tituba, the creation and transmission of créolité are essentially female activities. Indeed Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s women seem to me to be womanists, as they refuse, like Véronica, Tituba, and Télumée, to be ‘‘femmes-jardins,’’ to quote an expression by René Depestre – garden women who exist for the pleasure of men. They are searching, each in her own unique way, for their ‘‘mothers’ gardens,’’ that is, a female tradition and history cultivated by and for women and transmitted from mothers to daughters. They are also in search of ways of being acknowledged as artists and creators, as their mothers and grandmothers ‘‘more often than not, anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see’’ (Walker 240). These characters are ‘‘womanists,’’ with all the complexities, ambiguities, and possible misunderstandings that the notion entails. So, after showing the shortcomings of the theory of créolité and Maryse Condé’s oblique way of highlighting them, should we, at Glissant’s urging, replace the term créolité with creolization? And why not? Glissant, with his usual insight, feels that créolité is in fact, after Negritude, just another answer to francité and that Caribbean ‘‘reality’’ is in the making and should always be. In the next chapter I will show that Chamoiseau and Confiant, in their creative work, for the most part ignore or, rather, bend and exceed the pronouncements of Eloge de la créolité.

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The Creolization of the Je

In Eloge de la créolité the Creole subject is collective and masculine, so unindividuated, undiversified, and dehistoricized that an Africanist critic has labeled the creoleness of the Eloge ‘‘une créolité béate’’ [a smug creoleness]. In my comparative reading of Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphaël Confiant’s autobiographies, autobiographical fiction, and fictional autobiographies, I hope to highlight the idiosyncracies of créolité within the formation of two men of the same generation, two writers, two colleagues intent on preserving, and especially enriching, Creole culture. I would also like to show that they wish to provide the Metropole with new ways of perceiving the place of French language and culture within francophonie and a ‘‘global’’ world. Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance (Childhood), a preschool autobiography, and Chemin d’école (School Days) represent, respectively, paradise lost and a descent into hell. Créolité, in Chamoiseau’s terms, is quite di≈cult to define. Does it belong to the nostalgic realm of the lost Imaginary? Is it the recovery of childhood, which is contemporaneous with the act of writing? Or is it, as embodied by the conteuse Jeanne-Yvette, an act of opposition to the master culture? Is it the practice of a méthode opaque, whereby the oppressed can marvel at creating their own culture, in a precariously safe place? The nous that opens Ravines du devant-jour, Confiant’s childhood autobiography, is not the obvious nous of Eloge de la créolité, nor is the nous of Eau de café. The writer goes to great lengths to reveal the stratagems he had to devise and apply in order to be accepted as Creole by his community. The nous of Ravines (1993) precedes the nous of Eau de café (1991), which was published before Ravines but is diegetically posterior to it. In Ravines to be Creole is to position one’s self as a chabin (an aggressive, untrustworthy male) and to conform to a racial and social essence, while in Eau de café créolité is the process by which the chabin infiltrates popular culture, which is made up of (and by) nègres and mâles-femmes. 121

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I will review the elements of créolité found in the two writers’ creative works that are absent in Eloge de la créolité since one cannot talk so much about créolité (as a progressive and teleological notion) in their creative work as about creolization as Glissant defines it: a process that implies change, fluctuations, the following of the tracées (taken by the maroons and unknown to the slave owners) rather than the roads designed and built by the masters in the name of progress and e≈ciency. These elements of creolization are to be found in the crucial role played by women, whether they are mothers (in Chamoiseau’s case) or lovers (in Confiant’s). They also appear in a very specific Caribbean environment, for instance, on the kitchen roof where the young Chamoiseau draws lessons in humanity by observing and interacting, from above, with the animals that haunt a preurban Fort-deFrance. Chamoiseau and Confiant perform créolité in their fictions and autobiographies in very idiosyncratic ways: in Chamoiseau’s work race is an issue, but not the race of a Creole person (this person is definitely black), while for the chabin Confiant to become Creole is to become a nègre. In this respect Confiant’s créolité seems constructed and artificial compared to Chamoiseau’s ostensibly less selfconscious, more spontaneous performance of créolité. I am using the word performance here because we find ourselves in the realm of écriture, where nothing is natural, everything is impersonation. I also refer to performance as Judith Butler applies it to gender and assume that there is ‘‘no pre-existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured’’ (Butler 149). Gender and créolité are constructions that destabilize the very notions of gender and créolité. Unlike Negritude, which at times is purely theoretical and abstract, créolité is embodied – that is, it recognizes the body as cultural and constructed and assumes that there are numerous and varied créolités. However, as Butler a≈rms at the end of Gender Trouble, ‘‘the task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility, but to reinscribe those possibilities [of créolité here] that already exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible’’ (149). Chamoiseau and Confiant are, first and foremost, writers. They are deeply aware of their literary predecessors, both Caribbean and Metropolitan French. What role do reading and writing play in the 122

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makeup of créolité? And reciprocally, how does an awareness of one’s own créolité shape one’s écriture? And in what language should one write, French or Creole? These questions will be explored in the last part of the chapter. Creolization à la Chamoiseau takes place within interstitial places, as Richard D. E. Burton demonstrates in his study of Chamoiseau’s fiction. Creolization, like Chamoiseau’s writings, is not, like Negritude, an activity of grand marronage but of petit marronage, where the ‘‘runaway absents himself partially and temporarily, and usually at no great distance, from the plantation and continues to live in ambivalent symbiosis with it until he eventually returns’’ (Burton, ‘‘Debrouya’’ 473). Like Burton I believe that Chamoiseau’s brand of creolization is formed not just in and by the space between master and slave, between the plantation and the mornes, but also in and by other liminal spaces, such as the ones that lie between humanity and animality, humanity and femininity, animality and femininity, urbanity and rurality. But whereas Burton sees in Chroniques des sept misères’s weak insiders the ‘‘blow by blow’’ tactics of opposition in contrast to the strategy of resistance, removal, and fierce combat of the maroons, I see in Chamoiseau’s other fictions and/or autobiographies feminine and animal-like strategies that give Caribbean women and animals essential and specific roles in the process of creolization.

Mothers and Conteuse in Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance The feminine world of childhood allows the young boy to experience constant passages between a√ect and concept, between the realm of the Imaginary and that of the Symbolic, as when his mother, who cannot read, verifies every night while she is cooking that her children have done their homework or when she brings back books to her voracious négrillon. The mother knows that her petit dernier is di√erent, and he knows that she knows, without a word ever being pronounced to that e√ect. Far from calling him a makoumé (the worst insult one can apparently hurl at a Caribbean man), as Jacques André claims the Caribbean mother calls a considerate and sensitive son, Man Ninotte involves her son in her daily activities, such as inspecting the house before heavy rains (27–28), confronting landlords (31–32), and taking detours when faced by a carpenter who believes 123

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in béton (32–33).∞ She teaches him, like the other mothers, that not pronouncing the word chaleur during the dry season as le carême will negate the chaleur (36–37), highlighting for him the magic inherent in language. Thanks to her and her disclosures (confidences), he is able to reconstitute a time when women cooked together in rooms separated from the main house: ‘‘This separation of the kitchen from the house, which is very Creole, aimed to protect the house in case of fire’’ (22). Culinary rites in Creole culture are based on practicality and safety and, just as in any other culture, have become second nature. The historian, in this case the creative writer, goes back to the sources in order to demythify and denaturalize certain aspects of his culture, allowing it to adapt, to strategize and change. The négrillon becomes aware of a feminine Caribbean genealogy that has not been acknowledged and sees his mother as an heir to this Creole culture, which she is transmitting and transforming.≤ For instance, she is the first to turn her exterior kitchen into a chicken coop. This will lead the négrillon to speculate about the ‘‘genesis of chicken coops’’ (23). Was the chicken coop devised haphazardly, or was it an e√ect of Man Ninotte’s strategy as a transplanted country woman ‘‘faced with the demands of urban survival’’ (23)?≥ Man Ninotte is associated with the forces of nature and its eternal renewal within an urban setting and is also an active participant in Caribbean popular culture. She acts as her son’s teacher, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, as when he contentedly observes her behavior and marvels at its intricacies. She introduces her son to the mysteries of the communal oven where she goes at dawn to cook the bread (78) and to the miracle of the arrival of water: ‘‘The water’s here! The water’s here!’’ (50). While the surge of water signals for the children that the feast is starting, for the women it means ‘‘watch out, consider your day, and calculate everything that could go wrong’’ (52), notes the autobiographer. Man Ninotte is a haut stratège (a high strategist) and has planned her day as precisely as a general his army: ‘‘She left her machine with a step so assured that the little boy suspected her of planning her moments to come down to the second: the cook-it, the soak-it, the go-out-and-get-it, the go-see at the market’’ (44). To describe Man Ninotte’s extraordinary deliberate activities, Chamoiseau employs a special idiolect, his trademark, which follows some of the rules of Creole, for instance when it joins two 124

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verbs to relate – meaning both ‘‘to link’’ and ‘‘to tell’’ – actions that are impossible to separate, such as descendre-chercher (the go-out-andget-it).∂ At this point in his evolution the négrillon has not fully acknowledged Man Ninotte’s strategic moves. Another woman, JeanneYvette, will allow him to do precisely that. While Chamoiseau’s theoretical reflections on the conteur are undeniably masculinist, in his childhood autobiography he remembers the conteuse Jeanne-Yvette and acknowledges his debt to her: ‘‘Then sometimes Jeanne-Yvette got into the act’’ (69). She makes him aware of the richness of Creole orality, which is Native Caribbean, African, European, Indian, Asian. She introduces him to the pantheon of Caribbean gods and goddesses, such as Manman Dlo, and tells him how to recognize and trick them, not by using the ‘‘noble’’ arms of Occidental ethics and colonialism but by using ruse, patience, perversity, timing: ‘‘She revealed to us the victories of ruse, of vice, of patience, and of the brainchild that hit just at the right moment’’ (71). In fact she taught the children to neither give in to the masters nor resist them but to oppose them: ‘‘Two fingers [the two fingers it takes to write?] often equaled an entire fist. Going straight was not the best means to arrive at a place, and if the paths turned circles in the woods, often you had to turn with them: those who followed the straight roads, which the white mill owners had paved for themselves throughout the country, were lost. To travel them was to serve those people. You had to follow the paths, scribble their order of Maroon madness. With her opaque method, Jeanne-Yvette taught us about life. She gave the little boy a sense of the impenetrable strategy of strength of Ma Ninotte, in fact, and of the other mamas of the city’’ (71; my emphasis).∑ Jean-Yvette not only gives meaning to the mother’s activities, articulating them and rendering the négrillon conscious of their implications, but she also is a ‘‘founder of discursivity,’’ to use Michel Foucault’s expression, as she teaches him the benefits of a méthode opaque.∏ Through the telling of the contes Jeanne-Yvette highlights for the children the advantages of a practice of detour, as it is later outlined by Edouard Glissant. She allows the négrillon to pressentir Man Ninotte’s strategy.π The use of the word strategy by Chamoiseau is also important in light of Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tac125

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tics. According to de Certeau, what distinguishes these two notions are the types of operations that strategies can produce, circumscribe, and impose, whereas tactics can only use these operations, manipulate them, and divert them. ‘‘Tactics are an art of the weak,’’ he writes (Invention 76; my translation). As an example of tactics, de Certeau gives the comings and goings of the housewife who, at opportune moments, seizes the ‘‘occasions’’ o√ered by the ‘‘heterogeneous’’ nature of the supermarket. Chamoiseau leads us to believe that Man Ninotte is not just a tactician, any more than the conteur is, but an opaque strategist whose activities and moves can only be deciphered when put into context and juxtaposed with the lessons of the Creole folktale, where they become repeatable. Interestingly, one of the examples given by Chamoiseau of his mother’s activités de stratège is her highly rehearsed and manipulative behavior with merchants in order to secure the best deal (Antan 121–25). In fact, the writer constantly compares Man Ninotte’s prowess to that of a planner, a strategist in the middle of a battlefield (Antan 105). Man Ninotte’s behavior is not associated with hegemony like de Certeau’s is, but it is nevertheless a carefully rehearsed, reflective, and knowledgeable behavior that is more often associated with strategy than with tactics. spiders, rats, and pigs

It is not surprising that the future writer, whose name contains antagonistic animal species such as the cat and the bird, not to mention the camel (chamois) and the moi caught between the cat and the bird, would be as a child fascinated by the world of animals (Chemin 51).∫ While the négrillon’s first reaction to the world of animals is one of systematic extermination – following the lead of the islands’ ‘‘discoverers’’ or perhaps being moved by self-hatred – a prolonged exposure to animals will teach him how to e√ectuate the passage from a√ect to concept and vice versa. The little boy, left to his own devices in the lethargy of a barely urbanized Fort-de-France afternoon, finds coolness on the kitchens’ roofs, where he also witnesses another world – that of rats in search of crumbs left by humans at their midday meal: ‘‘The little boy believed he was discovering another life form that paralleled that of the house’’ (25). This paralleling (doublure, lining) adds, for the négrillon, another level to his comprehension of Caribbean human life. Initially 126

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intent on tricking and annihilating the perceived Other, the little boy witnesses with horror the decline into senility of his intelligent enemy, the Old Rat (Le Vieux). Instead of rejoicing, he is filled with tears: ‘‘He imagined his aging adversary, a rat isolated by his years: so much intelligence, such cunning, so much genius – all ending in dirty dereliction, with no address other than death and forgetting’’ (29). He cannot remember when the Old Rat disappeared or whether he saw his body swept under the manmans’ brooms, and he fantasizes that he never died, that he ‘‘set up camp between two dreams . . . mummified in an eternal insomnia’’ (29). His obsession with exterminating rats and other ‘‘lesser’’ animals, such as spiders and insects, will come to an end with the demise of the Old Rat: ‘‘There is no precise date, no period when the rats were definitely abandoned. No cuto√ point or moment of disinterest but the progressive loss of astonishment, a silent complicity, without familiarity and without an ounce of sympathy. The rats became one of the world’s possibilities, the oldest among them serving as a banner – and a symbol of variation from the norm. They transformed the little boy’s nature. Beneath the killer lay the makings of someone who today is incapable of doing the slightest harm to the most despicable of the green flies’’ (29). If the encounter with the Other triggers the desire to destroy it, a prolonged exposure to the Other brings about a respectful complicity, an awareness of that Other, and therefore of the Self, as a mere possibility. Elizabeth de Fontenay ends her reflections on Derrida’s ‘‘poemhérisson’’ on the hedgehog rolled in a ball – ‘‘absolute,’’ alone, thrown on the road, about to be run over – as follows: ‘‘The inferior dignity of some humans seems then to reflect on this hedgehog, a representative of all animals and of a lot of men, whose deaths appear particularly ‘historical,’ linked to a moment of the history of Being called the ‘era of technology’ by Heidegger’’ (707; my translation). The négrillon’s ‘‘strange relationship’’ (26) with the rat encourages him to go beyond this ‘‘era of technology’’ contemporaneous with the slave trade, in which the masters exploit or exterminate those whom they consider inferior beings, Africans or rats, in the name of reason and progress. The pig, an impure animal in our Judeo-Christian and Cartesian world, is in the Caribbean the quintessential sacrificial animal. Pigs 127

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are cared for, for a whole year, by the community of women and children. They are dressed in hats, adorned with jewelry, and perfumed; they are loved and respected. The attention and care that the little boy in Antan d’enfance devotes to rats and pigs is not generic, as it is with spiders or insects: it is individual. Rats and pigs di√er from one another; the pig Matador becomes, thanks to the attentive care with which he is surrounded, ‘‘a charming monster who laughed at the world with the eyes of an elder’’ (32). Does the pig know that he is condemned to death? Apparently, as he flees despite the comfortable life he is living: ‘‘Only Matador sensed his fate. He could have told us, had we learned to read his eyes, decode his grunts, understand the listlessness that came from the vague prescience of his fate’’ (34–35; my emphasis). Here there is also a question of decoding that is linked to awareness and love. Thus the children’s ignorance prevents them from noticing or creating a link between the intellect (décodage) and their emotions (their love for the pig). The adult writer’s attitude toward a remembered and transformed Matador can be contrasted with that of Father Labat, who recounts in his journal the master’s Caribbean tale of parrots (152–54). One of the religious fathers had a macaw who became so attached to his master that he would let no one get close to him, including the barber, whom he attacked as he attempted to shave the priest. The priest shut the macaw in a room so that the barber could dress his own leg and shave the priest. Labat pauses in order to inform the reader: ‘‘I do not think that one could see a more a√ectionate animal with its master. It spoke very well and very distinctly; when one heard its voice without seeing it, it was di≈cult to tell if it was the voice of a bird or of a man.’’Ω He then goes on to relate his own experiences with parrots, showing that he may have intellectually understood that parrots can be endowed with noble ‘‘human’’ emotions and abilities but had not really gone from the concept to the a√ect. He had bought three parrots, one from Guadeloupe and two others from la Dominique. The size of the Guadeloupian parrot led him to believe that the parrot was old and would never learn to talk. Furthermore, ‘‘he would just rail, and as he had an extremely loud voice, he would break my ears; because of that I had to have him killed’’ (my emphasis). But he soon regretted what he had done: some of his parishioners, who had come to visit while ‘‘my Negro’’ was plucking the 128

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bird, assured him that the bird was very young and that its incessant squeaking had a name in ‘‘the language of the islands’’: cancanner.∞≠ It would have learned to speak very quickly and much better than the other birds. The good father concludes placidly and in a very ‘‘French’’ way: ‘‘As the act was without remedy, I had the bird steamed: the meat was very good, delicate and succulent.’’ It is obvious here that Labat did not make the jump from concept (he owned an intelligent, gifted, and a√ectionate bird) to a√ect (he had that very bird killed for the flimsiest of reasons). The négrillon-turnedautobiographer, on the other hand, will go from a√ect (his love of Matador) to concept (respect for the living) through his di√ered Derridian decoding and recording of animal behavior. The autobiographer rejects the Cartesian notion of animauxmachines to justify the treatment of animals by men, as he senses (pressentir) an analogy between the enslavement of Africans by white men and the whites’ treatment of animals. Animals, like the descendants of enslaved Africans or Caribbean women, are silent. Chamoiseau show us that it is a question not just of marooning from intellectual Cartesianism but also of marooning from its sensitivity. Elizabeth de Fontenay notes that the secularization of modern societies or, as she calls it, ‘‘the passage from ritual immolations to interior subjectivity’’ gave Occidental-Christian men the regal right to ‘‘manipulate and destroy any nonhuman living creature’’ or ‘‘even any non-Occidental Christian’’ without any accountability, mediation, or meditation’’ (207; my translation). Matador is sacrificed by the writer; he takes him out of the world of the profane and anonymity and consecrates him as the ultimate victim of mankind and as the mediator between Caribbean animality and Caribbean humanity. Unlike Confiant, the chabin, the négrillon does not have to prove himself to his community. His childhood autobiography is foremost an Eloge addressed to despised or feared members of Caribbean society: women and animals, both leading him to the possibility of a di√erent epistemology and sensitivity than that of the master.

Confiant’s Créolité The picture on the cover of the Gallimard edition of Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance shows a little black child, his two hands touching at 129

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his chest, his hair an unruly shock. He is staring right at the camera, looking somewhat scared. In stark contrast to this photograph, the picture that graces the cover of Ravines du devant-jour is of three children: two little black boys are sitting on steps, the older child looking bemused, about to get angry, the youngest with his mouth wide open, appearing either scared and astounded; they are both staring at a third child, the chabin, Raphaël Confiant, standing erect, superbly ignoring the camera and his audience, his mouth open in bold assurance, his wavy hair neatly combed, his skin much lighter than that of the other two boys. The child Confiant is not the négrillon Chamoiseau. He calls himself a chabin. Whereas the term négrillon connotes purity, innocence, tenderness, wholesomeness, chabin suggests aggressiveness, deceitfulness, sexuality. Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s autobiographies, far from illustrating the theory of créolité, betray it, producing their own mobile and volatile theories. There is no créolité; there are only Creole acts. The Creole can be as white as Saint-John Perse (though Charles Maurras refers to him as le nègre du Quai-d’Orsay); as black as the négrillon; or neither black nor white, like the chabin. If Eloge de la créolité seems overtly idealistic, optimistic, and universalizing, the childhood autobiographies of Chamoiseau and Confiant are anchored in a precise geographical and historical context – that of transitions. For example, when sugar-cane production begins to die out, the workers strike. ‘‘What’s a strike? It is when the Negro puts down his cutter on the ground and refuses to cut the cane for the white man,’’ explains Léonice, the Confiant family’s very black servant (Ravines 57).∞∞ Léonice engages in a Creole act by applying the European, ‘‘universal’’ notion of strike to a very local reality and by assigning, as the essential paradigm of what defines a strike, the gesture of a black rural man laying down his tool and refusing to work for the béké. Here race masks class but also makes class distinctions more obvious. Rural and urban working classes meet on the plantation. Blacks in the Caribbean are not yet factory workers, as there are no factories in the Caribbean and as the Caribbean people have not yet massively immigrated to the Metropole, but the concept of proletarian revolution is making its way into the black rural population. Strikes in the sugar-cane fields started as early as 1949, two years after the departmentalization of Martinique. The emergence of 130

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strikes among the black population showed that their outlook on the Metropole had changed. France was no longer, in their eyes, the benevolent mother or father, as portrayed by Richard Burton in La Famille coloniale, but was now, as Glissant writes, the unmediated master. The examples of Indochina and especially Algeria, where many Martinicans did their military service and lost their lives, convinced many Martinicans that the stakes now lay with France, not with the békés. The strikers who were killed, not the maroons, are the last heroes of the culture of the plantation, in Confiant’s view: ‘‘Wakes will be held in haste to honor the death of the courageous strikers who did not hesitate to face the rifles almost barehanded. Names will circulate on the lips of adults, names of anonymous heros who already fascinate you: Hildevert Augustin . . . Aubin Louis-Therese, Francois Beauregard’’ (61). Tractors are replacing horses, and artisans are recycling: in the country the cordonnier (shoemaker) becomes a mailman while remaining a cordonnier like Confiant’s father; in the city the artisans recycle sporting goods (articles de sport) and nurse their nostalgia. Sometimes they become demented like the menuisier-mesureur of Antan d’enfance. We are in the afterglow of the moment when the ‘‘oldest of our colonies’’ have been decreed départements d’OutreMer (dom). There is no more space in which to hide, no more space from which to resist. James Arnold judiciously notes that what differentiates the creolists from a writer like Glissant is that the Caribbean ‘‘scene’’ has moved from the mornes, where the maroon took refuge, to the cities or, at least, to the plains, where creolization is being negotiated (28).

How to Become a Chabin-Beau Nègre Eau de café precedes Ravines as far as its publication is concerned but is diegetically posterior to it: the chabin, an adult now, is back from studying in the Metropole and tries, under the guidance of Thimoléon, the carpenter, to reestablish himself within his native community, Grande-Anse, a threatened village at the very edge of the north coast of the cursed Atlantic Ocean. Thimoléon explains to him that the chabin is feared because he has ‘‘usurped the whiteness of the ex-Masters and he does not know how to 131

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use it’’ (Eau 177; my emphasis).∞≤ If the chabins in the city are respected lawyers, professors, doctors, and so forth, in the country they are despised. What is the point of being a chabin if one is using a pitchfork like the nègres? But the chabins, nevertheless, are feared because they compensate for their ‘‘paradoxical weakness’’ with violent and sudden bursts of temper, like the majors (gang lords) who rule over di√erent neighborhoods in the city and groups of villages in the rural areas. They act as if they were invulnerable, which leads one to believe that ‘‘there must be some sort of protection somewhere’’ (Eau 133). Nevertheless, the chabin is a nègre, as his father assures him, though quite abstractly: ‘‘In any event, as soon as one has a drop of black blood, one is a Negro, my son. Do not ever forget it!’’ (Ravines 247). But being a nègre for the chabin is not a given; he has to earn the title in the eyes of the black community. The chabin, back from the Metropole on the fourteenth of July, meets Thimoléon, who will be his guide, so to speak, in Creole Negritude. The fourteenth of July is a fortuitous day as it allows the chabin to interact with the rare women who venture out to the marketplace that day: punch dispensers, makers of boudins (blood sausages), candy sellers – ‘‘as well as, oh yes! The dice players, ‘he women’ as they call themselves’’ (Eau 90). Thimoléon teaches him tactics or strategies to enlist their support: the chabin is not to talk (as he is prone to do), as he knows nothing about these women who live daily with the ‘‘déveine ancestrale’’ [the ancestral ill luck]. ‘‘All that,’’ Thimoléon says, ‘‘that’s a Creole woman’s life, all very ordinary, infinitely banal, a misfortune that’s bearable because it’s always been like that, so don’t come and mess up this fine orderation of things with words as big as Guinea’s gras savannas or polite niceties which would make you look like some sort of maccomère [homosexual] or anything of that sort’’ (90; translation modified).∞≥ While we encounter the term maccomère here, the women and mothers described by Thimoléon are seen from a very di√erent perspective than that of André and Gracchus. Women have been able to create a world of their own that shelters them from despair (à l’abri de la désespérance). This independence threatens men as they get older and leads them to exclaim, ‘‘Our women are strong, godamm it!’’ – ‘‘as if,’’ continues Thimoléon, ‘‘they needed such an overdue compliment, having only ever heard them grunt in monosyllables, and more often than not, 132

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yell rum drinkers’ insults. But don’t think it’s contentement, it’s nothing like that. In any case, they are proudly oblivious to that word, preferring happiment. No, a black woman’s life is one that takes on and fights against the world’s ugliness, without failing or weakening’’ (91).∞∂ Having bidden this eloge to the Creole woman, Thimoléon tells the returning chabin: ‘‘So do as well as you can so that the women end up saying: ‘That chabin is a cool Negro!’ ’’ (92; translation modified) [‘‘c’est un beau nègre!’’ 127]. In other words, act in order to obtain their ‘‘additional and ubiquitous protection’’ (93), Thimoléon tells the chabin. To be a nègre is not just a question of color; it is the choice of an interior disposition, a way of leading one’s life and behaving in one’s own society. If in Ravines the chabin learns to conform to his essence as an ‘‘isolated being’’ [être à part] of a ‘‘bad, violent, nervous, epileptic race’’ (Ravines 132), in Eau de café the chabin will learn how to become nègre, that is, créole.

Sexuality, Death, Race, and Class in Confiant’s Creolization The elements of sex, race, and social class are inextricably linked in Confiant’s depiction of Caribbean culture. This vision of sexuality valorizes racial and social distinctions among women and also marks contrasts within classes, such as the contrast Confiant draws between couli men and women. For example, Matouma, one of the servants, appears as a stereotypical untouchable couli: ‘‘He is so skinny, he looks like a praying mantis. His long oily hair covers his forehead without hiding his two shiny and enigmatic pupils’’ (Ravines 47). His daughter Laetitia, however, is seen by the child as a ‘‘fragile goddess’’ (95), ‘‘the most beautiful among coulies’’ (48). The alleged hypersexuality that attracts Caribbean men to couli women is perceived by Caribbean women as threatening and even dangerous. The female couli is a castrator: if her hair is pleasant to comb, the hair of her sex is ‘‘sharp as a razor blade.’’ ‘‘Expect prickles!’’ exclaims aunt Emerante (95). In Ravines sex is definitely the domain of the ‘‘lower’’ classes. The child chabin will be initiated by a female servant, like the narrator in Perse’s Eloges who is acknowledged under the guise of a pastiche: ‘‘You remember her long cinnamon-colored quivering legs with their short curly fur glistening with sweat’’ [Tu as souvenir de ses longues jambes frémissantes couleur de canelle sur lesquelles un petit duvet frisé cristallise la sueur, 16].∞∑ 133

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As for the négrillon, sexuality, class, death, gender, and language play an important role in the formation of the créolité of the young chabin, but here these elements intersect in a di√erent way. For instance, the propagator of the beau langage is a school mistress in Ravines, while for Chamoiseau it is the school master. When the school mistress is being ‘‘coquée’’ [fucked, in Creole] by Parrain Salvie, she ‘‘asks for more’’ in Creole. This demonstration lacks subtlety, but it is startling, as she takes her pleasure after a particularly grueling language class. This creates a carnivalesque e√ect: the despised Creole patois shows itself for what it is: a language of desire and derision speaking within a female body. When the children realize that the school mistress speaks Creole, her prestige collapses: she becomes just another ‘‘vulgar Léonise,’’ a servant ready to be possessed, standing up against the casing of a door (Ravines 70). While the use of Creole by a man connotes virility, when a woman speaks Creole, it is the sign of frenetic license and lack of self-respect. The chabin will have to learn from Thimoléon the richness of the Creole language when spoken by women: ‘‘We can indulge in Creole, make it express things that only a woman’s innards can feel, and savour the texture of each good word as some strange and delicious flesh’’ (Eau 91; translation modified). In Confiant’s depiction of an aggressive, almost caricatural Caribbean male sexual perspective, the coucoune (female genitalia, in Creole) is seen as fascinating and terrorizing. Death arrives very quickly in Confiant’s autobiography, under the guise of the oiseau-Cohé, the messenger of death. This is a petrifying figure like our Western Medusa: ‘‘It does not build a nest but lays its eggs in the earth’s bosom, which nourishes it. Its obsidian-like feathers are speckled with blood. Its mouth that never closes is a woman’s sex, a huge coucoune, which can devour you’’ (Ravines 14).∞∏ The bird, which according to Freud signifies the male sex, here represents the paradoxical generative and castrating power of women as seen by men, Freud included: a vagina, the better to engender and the better to engulf, a womb that is also a tomb. While the coucoune is an instrument of death, the bâton (the male organ) deflects it. ‘‘Death is an opportunity for us to party without end,’’ writes Confiant at the beginning of a section of Ravines called ‘‘La Veillée’’ (The wake). Death is warded o√ by the conteur, maître 134

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Honorien, with his devinettes and tales, and also by a woman who thus addresses the chabin’s grandfather’s dead body: ‘‘You dirty pig, you stole my virginity when I was only twelve years old. . . . Now your stick will rot in the earth, ha! ha! Isn’t that so, Loulou? The sugar of your penis will be candy to the worms’’ (Ravines 32–33). In the prolongation of the death of her husband the chabin’s grandmother reminisces about him with one of her friends – ‘‘son amie-ma-cocotte,’’ Ida. She has forgiven him ‘‘everything’’ except ‘‘the child he had with a coulie from Basse-Pointe.’’ As for the rest, children or a√airs he had with other women, including an a√air between Loulou and Ida herself, this makes Man Yise laugh: ‘‘And even you, Ida, you were there. Ha-ha-ha! Fuck! Aren’t you depraved, dear, taking my man while I was sick? Ha-ha-ha!’’ (334). The blame, admiring and mirthful, is squarely placed on Ida: she ‘‘took’’ Man Yise’s man because of the fatal character of the coucoune. This tirade, far from begetting guilt in Ida, is an occasion for a dreamy return to the past that displaces the data as presented by Man Yise: ‘‘ ‘Loulou was a great rooster,’ dear, retorts her pal, dreaming’’ [‘‘Loulou était un sacré coq-calabraille,’’ chère! rétorque sa commère, rêveuse, 58]. The fault does not lie with Ida’s coucoune but with Loulou’s bâton, but has Man Yise ever complained about it? Women’s pain is warded o√, silenced by the women themselves because Caribbean women are mâles-femmes: women in that they implicitly recognize their inferiority and men in that they stoically endure their plight. Another example of the role of gender di√erence in the realization of créolité, as Confiant sees it, can be found at the carnival, where the chabin will find himself confronted with the strangeness of his own culture performing the comedy of sexual di√erence. In one of the scenes of carnival the child sees men mimicking the labor of newly wed women while women mimic men sympathizing with their ‘‘women’’ in labor: ‘‘Hairy men disguised as brides, dressed in white, shaking, combating on the ground, holding on with great di≈culty to their huge pregnancies made up of worn clothes and newspapers. Bridegrooms with equivocal round forms, with fine hair, wearing enormous top hats and moved to tears in an exaggerated way over the spasms of the women giving birth’’ (Ravines 185–86). What is going on here? Is this a spoof of Catholic marriages, where chastity and virginity are required of brides? Or is it an ephemeral mise en scène 135

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with the power to ward o√ the possibility of a world where transsexualism would be generalized and where women, playing at being men, would be feared more than anyone else because they act their parts in an equivocal way? The women here are more frightening than the men, who act the part of brand-new mothers but also point out, with a paranoid a√ectation, the very obvious mystification – ‘‘worn clothes and newspapers’’ – thus deflecting their terror of the creative powers of women. But what are the carnivalesque ‘‘bridegrooms’’ trying to express? And what do these ‘‘exaggerated tears’’ [attendrissements exagérés] at the sight of the men grotesquely mimicking the birthing process mean? Do they designate, by antiphrasis or, rather, by antimimesis, the place of the (absent) Caribbean companion and father? Does attendrissements suggest some sort of feared and mocked femininity within the virile world of the Caribbean man? Faël’s reaction to this incident is ‘‘surprise and horror . . . uncontrollable laughter and nausea at the same time’’ (Ravines 186). We are certainly still in the realm of colonialism, which Robert Young says is not only an alienating system, ‘‘a machine of war and administration,’’ but also a ‘‘desiring machine’’ and therefore in some ways liberating: ‘‘This desiring machine, with its unlimited appetite for territorial expansion, for ‘endless growth and self-reproduction,’ for making connections and disjunctions, continuously forced disparate territories, histories and people to be thrust together like foreign bodies in the night. In that sense it was itself the instrument that produced its own darkest fantasy – the unlimited and ungovernable fertility of ‘unnatural’ unions’’ (Young 98). The child finds himself confronted not only with the importance of carnival for the populace, as they enact the workings of a desultory power that has seemingly changed hands, women playing at being men, men at being women, but also with the representation of boundaries that a masculine (rather than patriarchal) culture is unwilling to transgress: the domain of strict sex roles. Race, even more than sex and gender, is a delicate subject in the Caribbean. The narrator will only become aware of this malediction at the close of childhood when he summons his mother, a ‘‘white chabine,’’ to reveal not where children come from but a matter of race: ‘‘Why am I a Negro [nègre] and yet I am not black?’’ The little boy, 136

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through a Caribbean tactic of detour, reformulates this question, which he presumes to be indecent, shocking, impossible to pose directly: ‘‘Manman, why in books are not people of a same country the same color?’’ (Ravines 245). The question is so deviated from its latent meaning that he fears his mother will not understand it and feels obliged to reformulate it in a more direct, ‘‘spontaneous’’ way: ‘‘The Romans are all pink but with us everyone has his color. . . . Neither Chantou nor Miguel nor Monique have the same skin, isn’t it so?’’ (Ravines 245). His mother starts talking about something else; she is ill at ease: ‘‘You want to know too many things that are none of your business at your age’’ (246). At the beginning there was no Africa, just slavery, malediction, and very quickly the blending of races: ‘‘Well at the beginning of this country, our . . . our ancestors were of the same color. They were black and . . . well, they were slaves . . . their women made children with the white masters to lighten up the race . . . to save the skin, you see’’ (246). Just like Fanon, the chabin’s mother seems to attribute to women ‘‘the lactification complex’’ and does not mention the collective rape of black women that is at the origin of the Caribbean people. Nevertheless, just like Thimoléon in Eau de café (135), the mother designates the white masters as inventing an injurious taxonomy, the better to despoil the products of these ‘‘monstrous unions’’: ‘‘This was the beginning of the mulattoes, the chabins, the câpres’’ (246). The Western reader is disconcerted. One word has so many meanings in Creole; it is so duplicitous. What is a mulâtre? Are not chabins and câpres also mulâtres? This is an important revelation for the chabin, who had forgotten, he says, that Man Yise told him about ‘‘that.’’ The writer Confiant has also forgotten that this elucidation was made by Thimoléon in Eau de café: ‘‘Do you know where the word ‘chabin’ comes from? It refers to a kind of sheep with yellow hair to be found in Normandy. Like the word ‘mulatto’ comes from mule! Your fathers, the whites, thus condemned the sons they had with their black slave women to the realm of pure bestiality. Make sure you never forget that, my friend, but without harbouring the slightest resentment about it. What is done is done once and for all’’ (134–35). Here, black women are relegated to the sphere of pure passivity and despair, but like the mother’s words, Thimoléon’s turn of phrase 137

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is ambiguous. The reader wonders by whom, toward whom, the grudge should be felt: the Creoles toward the whites or the blacks toward the chabins? And the chabins themselves, continues Thimoléon, are not homogeneous: ‘‘Last and not least, you must recall that thanks to the powerful alchemy of colonial rape, there are several types of chabins, depending on how white their complexion is, or how light their eyes: sun chabin, golden chabin, white chabin, brown chabin, dark chabin, mulatto chabin, etc. . . . and each of these types has his own idiosyncracies that everyone knows by heart. You see, it’s as if by some strange atavism the blacks on this island had felt the obscure urge to re-create the tribes they are descended from, but go and tell them that!’’ (135). The purpose of Confiant’s autobiographies is to create a space for the chabin where he can retreat, reflect on his behavior among ‘‘his’’ people, chabins or not. The narrator goes back in time, replays for himself (under the guise of his philosopher guide, Thimoléon) his encounter with his people, as he had missed most of its signification while he was living it: ‘‘And if you’d known how to read the deep and secret movements which animate your own people, you’d have realized that they were granting you, as a highly exceptional favor, their endorsement’’ (134). Writing is therefore a reassessment of a previous state of being in the world and seeing the world. The wiser and cognizant je implicitly contrasts with the arrogant tu, the returnee-from-France, and so actualizes the trials and tribulations, the transformations, this present je endured in order to be able to give meaning to his ‘‘own people.’’ For the returnee, who has been cut o√ from the body of ‘‘his’’ people, writing is in fact a discipline for reading bodies culturally and, paradoxically, for reconnecting with one’s own body and (oral) culture. In this respect Confiant’s work could also fall under the designation of a literature of orality.

Anxiety of Influence? I will now review the ways Chamoiseau and Confiant have dealt with both their predecessors and their contemporary fellow writers and thinkers. 138

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In Ecrire en pays dominé, the story of a developing consciousness and, as advertised on the book’s back cover, ‘‘the intimate saga of an écriture,’’ Chamoiseau, like Fanon in the 1950s, tries to come to terms with the realization that the colonization of the French West Indies has become, for the colonized as for the colonizers, an interior colonization.∞π Fanon attributes the psychological ‘‘abnormalities’’ of the Caribbean to the cultural situation of the islands: ‘‘There is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly – with the help of books, newspapers, education, text-books, posters, cinema, radio – work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world and of the group to which one belongs.’’ ‘‘In the Antilles,’’ continues Fanon, ‘‘that view of the world is white because no black voice exists. The folklore of Martinique is poor’’ (Black Skin 152–53; translation modified). There is no popular counterdiscourse, or even metadiscourse, to counteract the hegemonic views of the white man. It is therefore the role of the intellectual, of Fanon or Césaire, to make the black man aware of his oppression and give him the tools to liberate himself. This is of course a heroic view. It is revealing to compare a passage of Fanon’s Black Skin with a passage of Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance concerning the French Caribbean people’s reaction to cinema. Fanon notes the ‘‘schizophrenia’’ of the Caribbean man watching a movie made in Hollywood: in the French West Indies he will very easily identify with ‘‘Tarzan against the Negroes,’’ as Tarzan is handsome, strong, and good and the Negroes are Simian, ugly, stupid, and ridiculed (152–53 n.15). The négrillon will also acknowledge this identification: ‘‘We were Tarzan and never the half monkeys he defeated’’ (Antan 99; my translation). What is di√erent about Chamoiseau’s outlook is that he recognizes and loves the magic of cinema: ‘‘The moving picture is a dream!’’ (101). Chamoiseau does note the devastating e√ects of Hollywood on the Caribbean psyche, but he does not stop there: the experience of going to the movies is an occasion for Creole culture to exercise its creativity. Fanon claims that ‘‘there he [the Negro] has no more hope of flight’’ (153 n.15), as Creole culture is ‘‘poor’’ and incapable of reacting to the assaults of an aggressive modernity. In 139

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Chamoiseau’s cinema, however, the Caribbean audience does not passively consume Hollywood’s images but plays with them and, in doing so, reveals their intentional arbitrariness. Going to the movies is an opportunity for popular Creole culture to show o√, to create a metacinema that challenges Western imagery and thus both highlights its absurdity and delights in it: ‘‘The protector [le Major], who was already seated, rose from somewhere and called to the other with the slowness of a Western film: Say, Mr. Something-or-other’’ (Antan 100; my translation). Wherever there have been people in the Caribbean, culture has been transmitted, innovated, created collectively, in contrast to the Western scene of creativity, which is one of solitude, doubt, and madness. The dominator (dominateur) has become a ‘‘furtive victor’’ [vainqueur furtif ] and is not even aware of his own domination over the dominated. It is not appropriate anymore to oppose resistance, as the dominator has also become a victim of his own compassionate yet aggressive ideology of modernity. The dominated are indeed aware that the enemy is lodged in their hearts and minds and also haunts, for better or for worse, their writing. The Caribbean writer cannot write innocently anymore. The voyage en moi-même (interior journey) that constitutes Ecrire en pays dominé is a journey of interior colonization. In this intellectual autobiography Chamoiseau describes his early impulse ‘‘to imitate, continue, complete, transform, bring my two cents to the clamor of the authors I had met,’’ the authors of the French classics (37). And he also notes a primary disappointment: ‘‘These books had not woken up in me; they had crushed me’’; ‘‘I was expressing what I was not’’ (44). And then came Césaire, who glorifies Negritude in a sumptuous French, Césaire who ‘‘uses the French language as no white does nowadays,’’ according to Breton in the preface to the Notebook. Yet his écriture was not liberating: ‘‘By deploying its love-hate in the elected enclosure of a dominant language, Negritude proceeded to celebrate it’’ (61); ‘‘My desire to exist was being molded by a language that was digesting me painlessly. The generalities of Negritude allowed it to swallow me. . . . The assertive pride of this language digested without any problem our assertive counteraccent and our counterpride. This way of writing did not maroon’’ (60). 140

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Césaire is indeed, along with Glissant, acknowledged as a spiritual father by the creolists, but not without major reservations and criticism. Like the ‘‘négrillon Césaire’’ (as Chamoiseau designates him in Lettres créoles), the négrillon Chamoiseau (son of Cham, who fought to be worthy of his father) ‘‘enjoys being outside of the world,’’ but the places where we find the two are quite di√erent. The little Chamoiseau is not to be found like the négrillon Césaire ‘‘immobile above the sea’’ (Lettres 115), but ‘‘immobile on the roof of the kitchen counting the clouds’’ (Antan 14; my translation).∞∫ The two négrillons share a similar disposition to immobility and daydreaming, but they dream from di√erent places: Césaire nobly looks beyond the sea, as SaintJohn Perse did, while Chamoiseau’s domain is situated at the periphery of the kitchen, where he can be found spying (épier) on women at work and animals (Antan 14). In Ecrire en pays dominé Chamoiseau recognizes his immense debt to Césaire but also says that ‘‘for him colonization had contaminated everything’’ (59). Like Fanon, Césaire sees nothing in the French Caribbean but colonized, exploited land: ‘‘All around the child Césaire, Martinique is a colonial land. He does not see any of the natural beauty but misery, . . . the absolute denial of the black man’’ (Lettres créoles 117). Fanon only saw in Creole culture folklorism or doudouism, and when Césaire at rare moments celebrates his own daily culture it is in hieratic poses, reminiscent of ‘‘primitivity,’’ which bring this culture closer to African or Biblical ones.∞Ω Confiant devotes a thick study to Aimé Césaire. He has decided to take into account Césaire in his entirety: the poet and the politician. Césaire’s life is based on a misunderstanding, a belief that politics and poetry do not and should not mix. According to Confiant, without Césaire there would have been no Frantz Fanon, no Edouard Glissant, to name the most famous examples, yet Césaire failed. Paradoxically, if Martinique is now part of the European community, it is because Césaire celebrated Africa in his poems and France at the National Assembly. In a time when technology was creeping into Martinique he believed, like an African, in the power of the word, the mono, to change the world. And then we find Césaire, the father of Negritude, presenting the assimilation law (whereby Martinique 141

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went from the status of colony to that of French department) to the French Assembly in 1946. Césaire, in Confiant’s logic, was coopted by the French intelligentsia, and this a√ected his politics with France. Confiant wants to break the taboo of Negritude and Césaire. Paradoxically, he claims to want to be an ‘‘authentic son’’ of Césaire but states that he can only do this by not following in his footsteps. As early as the first sentence of Ravines, the reader is confronted with two people, two languages, two cultures, with an awareness that the discourse of the Creole writer is necessarily and at least double, like his readership: ‘‘We fear above all the painful cry of the Cohé-bird, the one that the Whites-from-France call nightjar’’ (7). In this statement the we is positioned in contrast to an implied they. We seems to refer to the whole Creole population of the island (békés included), and they refers to the Metropolitan French. Indeed, the writer recognizes the validity of béké culture when he follows this first sentence with: ‘‘He peoples with his ghost the prophecy of the nights’’ (35), a quote from Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse, eulogist of Guadeloupe and Creole childhood in Eloges.≤≠ Oiseaux is a poetical and quasi-scientific reverie on Georges Braque’s Oiseaux: ‘‘The Bird, most ardent for life of all our blood kin, lives out a singular destiny on the frontier of day. As a migrant whom the sun’s inflation haunts, he journeys by night because the days are too short for him. In times of grey moon, grey as mistletoe of the Gauls, he peoples with his ghost the prophecy of the nights. And his cry in the night is a cry of dawn itself: a cry of holy war and naked steel’’ (Perse, Eloges 35).≤∞ The ‘‘mistletoe of the Gauls’’ evokes the plant allegedly used in Druidic ceremonies, and the Gauls are, as is commonly known, the ancestors of the French, but in Confiant’s text the line ‘‘he peoples with his ghost the prophecy of the nights’’ leaves the Druidic forest and creates a tropical forest, containing ‘‘zamanas, flamboyants, mahoganies,’’ the habitat of the nocturnal Caribbean bird. Confiant appropriates Saint-John Perse’s expression without naming him as father of the proposition but also without plagiarizing him, for they share a common Creole culture. What is this we that opens Confiant’s childhood autobiography? It is not a homogeneous we that could be opposed to the homogeneous French ils. It is a site of contestation and contention. For instance, one could object to the creolization of Saint-John Perse by Glissant 142

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and the creolists. Saint-John Perse and Confiant belong to the same culture, but they belong to di√erent generations and ethno-classes; they are in di√erent echelons of the social hierarchy. While it seems justified to include Saint-John Perse within Caribbean culture, as Chamoiseau and Confiant do in Lettres créoles, and to appreciate in his work an autonomy, originality, and self-acceptance that many Caribbean writers lack, is it also fair to contrast him with Aimé Césaire as far as ‘‘vision intérieure’’ is concerned? To contrast his treatment of Pointe-à-Pitre in Eloges with Césaire’s portrayal of Fort-de-France in the Notebook? (Lettres créoles 163–64)? The ‘‘colonial town’’ in the Notebook is not simply an ‘‘exteriority’’ with which the writer must contend, and it is not true that Césaire ‘‘removes himself violently from it’’ [s’en extirpe violemment], as the authors of Eloge de la créolité assert. The town of the Notebook is no less a projection of an interior state than is Perse’s Pointe-à-Pitre. The di√erence is that the child of Eloges refuses to go as far as Césaire, the island’s prodigal son, when conflicts threaten to become truly menacing. When the child narrator of Eloges notices the madness and potential violence particular to the Caribbean people – ‘‘A hairless man in yellow cotton cloth gives a shout: I am God! And other voices: he is mad! / and another filled with an urge to kill starts toward the Reservoir with three balls of poison: rose, green, indigo’’ (42) – he decides to ‘‘retirer ses pieds’’ [leave, in Creole, 43].≤≤ Chamoiseau has published a collection of Martinican tales under the title Au Temps de l’antan. Oddly enough, one of Césaire’s poems, ‘‘Beau sang giclé’’ (Ferrements 45), is quoted as an epigraph to these tales. Is this a way for Chamoiseau to bring together two opposite ideologies – that of the perversely individualistic Creole tale and that of Césairian Negritude, in which the poet saves his community from the throes of abjection? Césaire ends his poem thus: ‘‘The bird with feathers long ago more beautiful than the past / demands that his scattered feathers be counted,’’ a denunciation of the devastation brought upon the fauna and flora of the islands by the colonialists (43; my translation).≤≥ Is this a way of paying homage to Césaire’s denied créolité? Just like the folk tale’s ‘‘l’oiseau caché-craché’’ [the bird hidden-spat], who was shot, plucked, and cut up by the greediness and foolishness of humans and who demands to be reconstituted to his last feather, 143

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Césaire keeps demanding to be reconstituted, whole, powerful, Creole. Are not Césaire’s verses about the dismembered bird and the folk tale ‘‘Glan-Glan, l’oiseau craché’’ both demands for redress addressed to the colonialist? Chamoiseau’s ‘‘first’’ discovery of Caribbean writing is his reading of Glissant’s Malemort, which left him ‘‘staggering in the streets of Fort-de-France’’ (Ecrire 81). (I return to this in chapter 6.) He finds it ‘‘a book-hieroglyph, asleep, close, and undecipherable, glowing in a strange manner at the very core of myself in my impending awakening’’ (84). For him Malemort is foremost an écriture, that is, ‘‘the irruption of another form of consciousness into language’’ (Ecrire 84). For Chamoiseau this language is the French language, and this ‘‘other form of consciousness’’ is, I suppose, Creole consciousness: ‘‘The French language finds itself precipitated in the Caribbean archipelago, driven by an imaginary that loosens it from its domineering memory’’ (Ecrire 59). Malemort makes it painfully obvious that the first gesture of this consciousness, like every consciousness probably, is to reject, to negate.≤∂ Unlike Eloge de la créolité, it does not propose any ready-made solutions but precipitates the reader-writer, like Chamoiseau, into the creolization process of an écriture: ‘‘Writing seemed to live a tortured reality and, without any manifestation, instilled in my head unknown voracities upon unsayable famines’’ (Ecrire 93). Writing and reading are not cathartic. Writing is not just a specific pleasurable medium through which the story of history is expressed; it is the matter, the clay itself that makes up the story. In Glissant’s work writing has a particular history – it is history in the making, history of the past, of course, but also a mapping of the future.

The Notion of Insularity One of the notions Chamoiseau explores, alongside his reflections on his predecessors, is that of insularity. If the noun island conjures up paradisiacal or at least utopian thoughts for a Westerner, the adjective insular, in either English or French, does not.≤∑ It connotes, rather, narrowness of mind, ignorance, periphery, and provincialism. After having succumbed to his fascination for France and then Africa, Chamoiseau acknowledges the insularity of his island and his 144

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self: ‘‘Thus I hung onto my country. . . . My native land was an ‘island’: what strength and what traps were lying in this word?’’ (Ecrire 232–33). He will re-create a genesis of the notion of insularity and draw lessons from it. The first ‘‘discoverers’’ did not consider the islands as real land; for them they were ‘‘land-before-the continent’’ [terres-d’avant-le continent, Ecrire 234]. Later on the European colonialists will come to think of the islands as fortresses, as they create a territory to exploit for their own benefit and that of their motherland. Paradoxically, Césaire adopts this view of his island to the extreme. In his Notebook, as well as in other parts of his poetical oeuvre, islands are portrayed negatively: ‘‘Islands scars of the water / Islands evidence of wounds / Islands crumbs / Islands shapeless’’ (123).≤∏ Islanders are prisoners of the sea, zombies, and they can only ‘‘turn around in circles . . . in the calabash of an island’’ (89). In Lettres créoles Confiant and Chamoiseau note that ‘‘the child Césaire’s environment is Martinique, a colonial land. . . . He does not see any of the natural beauty, but misery . . . the absolute denial of the black man’’ (117). It took a béké, Saint-John-Perse, free from any ontological shackles, to modify this deadly perspective. According to Chamoiseau in Ecrire en pays dominé, Perse manifested an insular sensitivity by allowing the sea to become an element of power within the Caribbean world. But he also separated the islands from the sea and used his native Guadeloupe as a place from which to fly into the realm of universalism: ‘‘In this, Perse remains an Occidental’’ (Ecrire 238). With Glissant’s notion of antillanité, the island in the sea takes on an ambiguous status: the sea becomes a liquid abyss for the maroon chased by the master’s hounds. The former is confronted for the first time with the terrifying notion of ‘‘island,’’ from which one cannot escape. For Glissant the island is a ‘‘sujet-non-sujet,’’ an ‘‘infinite vacuum’’ between two infinites, Africa and America. For Glissant the island was originally a prison for Africans, but it can become a microcosm of the other America, of the culture of the plantation, for those who decide to stay. ‘‘There is continuity between the archipelago and the continent,’’ says Glissant in a discourse on geographical coherence, designed to ‘‘compensate’’ for the discontinuity of what he calls the nonhistory of the Caribbean (Discours 150). Glissant seems here to unquestionably consider the French islands as belong145

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ing ideologically to the Caribbean archipelago, whereas these French departments do not relate to the other islands but, ironically, are tied to the continent, that is, France. Chamoiseau feels the need to re-create the di√erent attitudes of his predecessor toward the islands in order to draw lessons from a ‘‘multiscopic’’ reading of their history. He is able to position himself as an Amerindian watching the colonialist boat sail in, but he can also feel the joy of the sailors approaching land. Thus he can interpret the demise of the Amerindians in the Caribbean islands. Although the indigenous peoples did not see the islands in isolation but as part of an archipelago and as a link between di√erent tribes (a lesson modern Caribbean people might ponder), they were not conscious of forming a whole, a nation (a European notion), but saw themselves dispersed in warring tribes: ‘‘We Caribs, blinded by hateful tradition, would sing the Tainos’ downfall and confirm, without knowing it, our future death’’ (Ecrire 215). Thus this misdirected miseen-relation ended in destruction and death. With as much wonder as Césaire when he ‘‘discovers’’ and recreates Africa, Chamoiseau uncovers the Amerindian presence on his island: ‘‘In Martinique a cheekbone, a face, a silhouette at the market, the glow of a necklace made of seeds, are instilled in our memories’’ (Ecrire 116). Unlike the tenants of Negritude, he is making visible the presence of the Amerindians and their influence on the newly arrived Africans. To become Creole is to create links between people a√ected by the mise-sous-relations – Africans and Amerindians: ‘‘I dreamed their encounters. . . . The black Caribs would be many in the islands’’ (Ecrire 143). By putting the first inhabitants of the islands in relation to other people, by ‘‘hyphenating’’ them, he propels them onto the scene of a history of the past but also of the future. Thus the mise-en-relation, in Chamoiseau’s reading, is in fact displaced rather than obfuscated.

Créolité in Creole or in French? The Mise-en-Relation of Languages What place does the Creole language occupy in the awareness of one’s own créolité? Here is certainly, as Glissant observes, a language of mise-en-relation, albeit of a highly ambivalent nature. 146

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Caribbean linguists – Jean Bernabé and Lambert-Felix Prudent, for instance – have recently explored the sociopolitical implications of speaking Creole. According to them, the Creole language establishes Creole identity di√erently than the French language establishes French identity. Creole has no Metropole, no Academy to back it up or defend it against the intrusion of other languages. It recognizes itself as a hybrid and is the prey of di√erent inherent and exterior sociolinguistic forces, and this places it in a very particular place in the Caribbean psyche, as Glissant shows in Le Discours antillais. Lambert-Felix Prudent distinguishes three forces at work in and around the Creole language. The first is a historical force that tended to reduce the Creole language to a patois, an inferior branch of the language tree. He calls it minoration linguistique, a generic term that represents the activities of ‘‘power-holders who want to silence minority groups’’ (7).≤π He sees the second force as belonging to the field of social linguistics and as attempting to fill the void that has separated French from Creole by using hybrid forms that are paradoxically called créolismes. Prudent calls this force décréolisation, as it decreolizes Creole by bringing it closer to French and thereby creolizing French: ‘‘The French syntax is thus a√ected by Creole models vigorously repressed by the school master. The young student will, at the same time, have to be suspicious of Creole (which he will learn to use in ‘informal’ situations of communication) but especially of French, which he will have to pronounce attentively and ‘construct suitably’ (125; my emphasis). This highlights the inherent suspicion of the Creole toward language or, rather, the apprehensiveness and guardedness of the Creole, in particular of Chamoiseau, confronting language and writing. It will lead Chamoiseau to be fundamentally suspicious of his very own writing, as he reveals in Ecrire en pays dominé, and will lead Confiant to write his first creative works in Creole. The third force is called épilinguistique by Prudent and has to do with the beliefs, judgments, and declarations of creolophones about the Creole language, as well as their ambivalence toward it (8). A language conveys not only a whole culture but also the speaker’s attitude toward that culture. A French man or woman speaking French in the Metropole is for the most part unconscious of the French culture and his or her attitude toward it. However, when he or she hears Creole spoken while vacationing in Martinique or Guade147

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loupe, he or she may suddenly become aware that he or she is using a ‘‘civilized’’ and sophisticated language that carries the weight of a precious and prestigious culture. Robert Hall writes in Pidgin and Creole Languages: ‘‘A creole is just as intimately bound up with the egos of its native speakers as is any other language. Yet a creole language is often, as in Haiti and Curuçao, the object of a strong contempt and social prejudice, which is a major factor in rendering its speakers insecure’’ (qtd. in Prudent 108). To speak Creole, whether one is ‘‘educated’’ or not, is therefore to consciously announce that one belongs to an inferior class of people, while to speak French is to assert, consciously or not, one’s cultural, social, and political superiority. To speak Creole is to admit that one has no history, no culture, no art (except music and rhythm, the better to entertain the jaded French), no intelligence, no ambition. It is to be conscious of one’s own nullity. The creolists are attempting to confound this ideology and in the process to show us how much they owe to women in the reevaluation of their own language and culture. As we have seen, the feminine world that forms the négrillon’s environment speaks Creole without any inherent shame. Creole folk tales, like those told by JeanneYvette, are witty, sophisticated, consciously and proudly amoral, the better with which to dethrone the king, the insular béké. For twelve years Confiant vowed not to write in French, and he published five novels in Creole, along with a collection of poetry. But now he publishes only in French, as writing in Creole was not enjoyable: ‘‘Freedom for Creole writers is paradoxically the French language because French is a fully formed language with which one can play. When I write in Creole, I cannot play because I have to build my tool’’ (‘‘Bicyclette’’ n.p.). According to him, Creole does not have any descriptive vocabulary, and displacing Creole from immediate usage to an unfamiliar level of communication is ungrateful work. These are the very arguments used by Césaire when he explains why he did not write in Creole.≤∫ Confiant, by writing in French, is actually dispossessing the ‘‘hexagonal’’ French of the French language. French is not just the property of Metropolitan France. And Caribbean writers such as Chamoiseau and Confiant contribute to the enrichment of the French language. 148

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Writing in Creole does not necessarily make one a Creole writer. As we have seen, for Confiant to become Creole is to become nègre. What does it mean then for a chabin to be a nègre? It is to be a traitor to the nègres des îles. The chabin, unlike his fellow inhabitants of Grande Anse, loves the sea but not music or geometry: ‘‘A Negro who doesn’t like geometry, okay! But a negro that music annoys, fuck, what a pity, ladies and gentlemen! How strange!’’ (Eau 81). The narrator splits his voice in order to link in indignation and stupor two very diverse discourses: the discourse of Creole culture, which recognizes ironically that it has produced an oddity, and the discourse of French culture, which recognizes that one of its most prevalent stereotypes, that rhythm is inherent to blacks, is a myth. The chabin refuses to conform, arousing in Creoles and Metropolitan whites an indignant and stupefied silence, and is thus recognized in his idiosyncracy. In refusing he uses, among other devices, a figure of Western rhetoric, the occupation, which means, in the terms of Pierre Fontanier in his Traité des figures (1827), ‘‘to prevent or reject in advance any objection one might be subjected to.’’ As Tzvetan Todorov remarks with regard to Dostoevsky’s characters, the discourse of the chabin ‘‘implicitly includes’’ his interlocutor’s discourse, ‘‘imaginary or real.’’ The monologue of the chabin is in fact a ‘‘concealed dialogue’’ that determines the ‘‘deep underlying ambiguity’’ of the chabin (see Todorov 35). The child, eager to please his mother, becomes ‘‘a champion in French’’ before betraying her. He will not write books in the European tradition; he will write in Creole. Philomène, the ‘‘fairy-like street walker’’ [péripatéticienne féerique] of Morne-Pichevin, will be his muse: ‘‘Every one of your sentences will proclaim to her: ‘I have been waiting for you for a long time’ ’’ (Ravines 206). Confiant, the chabin, will not become a major but a writer-chabin, first in Creole, then in French, a traitor to both cultures. The ungratefulness shown toward France and its culture, to which Confiant ‘‘owes so much,’’ will be seen as such much later, when the narrator of Ravines recalls his grandmother – a loving grandmother and of good bearing, a devout mulâtresse, belonging to a privileged class, combing her long hair on her doorstep. As it happens, this respectable and respected women, whom her grandson believes to be a Christian, is a terrible ‘‘négresse Congo’’: ‘‘From time to time she looks up to the sky and murmurs what you mistake for a Christian prayer and what, 149

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much later, you learn to be a Negro-Congo’s terrible exorcism’’ (13). Metropolitan readers beware – as in the court of the king of La Princesse de Clèves, ‘‘what seems obvious is rarely true.’’ To use Suzanne Césaire’s warning: ‘‘If my Caribbean islands are so beautiful it’s because the great hide-and-seek game has been successful; it’s because the weather was so beautiful that day that one could not see’’ (273). The fact that Confiant writes his childhood autobiography in the second person evokes in the reader the uncanny sensation of both strangeness and familiarity. Who is the narrator of Ravines? It is not Confiant the child but Confiant the grownup, who has since claimed his condition of chabin. And the adult tells the child his own story. The travails of the adult are the workings of memory. Creative memory enhances certain elements of the mosaic and displaces them so that the signifier chabin méchant finds itself in proximity to the child crying at night on his pillow (36). It is Eau de café, this Creole pedagogical treatise in action, that gives to the tu of Ravines its density. This tu is in a state of apprenticeship and initiation. The je implied by the tu, the one ‘‘who went away and came back’’ (92), is enriched by his childhood experiences, by his stay in the Metropole, and by his initiation into Creole culture by Thimoléon. The use of the tu allows the writer to be at least double, a child and an adult at the same time. Dreaming and lucid, violent and tender. The child is an actor in a play he does not understand fully, and the adult interprets it for him by reorganizing the material of childhood. It is only indirectly, and slightly condescendingly, that the adult talks to the reader, the Metropolitan reader, perhaps excluding that reader where his or her presence might threaten the delicate balance of the self of créolité. The autobiography is indeed narrated to the child. The narrator is the retrospective child, enriched or impoverished by his experience as an adult. The quintessential Creole is not only the major, the supreme chabin; he is also the writer who must become a traitor to ‘‘reality’’ in order to reshu√le it, to see it in a di√erent way and therefore challenge the lessons taught by the dominators for their own benefit. Confiant, following a sort of dream logic, displaces the betrayal element from the major to the writer. Confiant’s fundamental betrayal is symbolic (in the Lacanian sense) in that he can only become a Creole writer by 150

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paradoxically and playfully using and abusing the French language without either shame or gratitude. Confiant’s créolité, like Bakhtin’s notion of intentional hybridity but unlike the créolité of Eloge de la créolité, is politicized, contesting; it does not integrate two di√erent viewpoints into a new language, a new vision of the world. Rather, it places them in a conflicting relationship. Créolité is the moment when the discourse of authority undoes itself (Young 22–26); it is the moment of consciousness of a double consciousness, as W. E. B. DuBois understands it: the French consciousness and the Creole consciousness, which are also made up of heterogeneous elements. Créolité is a knot of contradictions within its own usage. The négrillon-narrator of Antan d’enfance observes Fort-de-France in transition: the cloth merchants in the French West Indies, the Syrians, are multilingual and multicultural and use these abilities in order to prosper. Their children, notes the narrator, ‘‘are becoming Creole like us,’’ with the same values; they ‘‘swore o√ the racks and shelves to study medicine, letters, or law’’ (Childhood 80). To become Creole now is to conform to modern, ‘‘progressive’’ values such as ambition, greed, the aspirations of the bourgeoisie. To become Creole is also then to espouse an ideology that seems antagonistic to a true Creole culture like the one the narrator was brought up in, with its popular and communal values and mores. The future here is, as everywhere, ‘‘the self-service store . . . where a nameless lady without a history presided’’ (Childhood 92). Chamoiseau’s outlook on the future of the French Caribbean is very close to Lévi-Strauss’s nostalgic anthropology in Tristes Tropiques: ‘‘There is nothing to be done. . . . Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as it grows beets. Man’s daily bill of fare will consist only of this one dish’’ (38; translation modified). The Caribbean islands, products of the slave trade, have only known monoculture. Still this did not stop the creation of a rich and varied culture, of a language, of an oraliture and a literature arguably indebted to more than just one culture. Today’s monoculture of hotels and supermarkets, however, is trying to assimilate, for economic reasons, this cultural diversity into a global market, an ideal of progress and modernity: the goal is to keep the ‘‘paradisiacal’’ aspects of the islands while making them accessible to mass tourism. Chamoiseau is not, 151

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like Solzhenitsyn, preaching a return to an alleged lost innocence and rusticity but is painfully coming to terms with the beauty of a seemingly lost culture that was not given enough time to, in Glissant’s terms, ‘‘sédimenter’’ [deposit and settle]. The picture does seem glum: Caribbean writers are published in Paris and enjoy a certain popularity within the French press and the publishing world, but probably for the wrong reasons. In LéviStrauss’s words: ‘‘The fact is that these primitive people, the briefest contact with whom can sanctify the traveler, these icy summits, deep caverns and impenetrable forests – all of them august settings for noble and profitable revelations – are all, in their di√erent ways, enemies of our society, which pretends to itself that it is investing them with nobility at the very time when it is completing their destruction, whereas it viewed them with terror and disgust when they were genuine adversaries’’ (Tristes Tropiques 41). Is créolité therefore the swan song of Creole culture? Lévi-Strauss continues: ‘‘The less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity’’ (43). Creole culture has always been aware of the impure condition that allowed for its development. It has no single or prestigious past to draw from, but a multitude of strategies that allow it to survive and create, snatched from various cultures at different times. Glissant and the creolists could be seen as the latest heroes of the ‘‘French’’ Caribbean: they are attempting to create a culture out of remains, traces, vestiges that are about to be crushed by the French and North American assimilative bulldozers. Glissant fears that the colonization of Martinique and Guadeloupe may be the first successful one in human history (Malemort 178). Whereas Bernabé, Confiant, and Chamoiseau’s Eloge de la créolité is resolutely futuristic, I would argue that while Chamoiseau’s créolité in Antan d’enfance can be seen as nostalgic, it is in fact a mindful investigation of the process of creolization and a tribute to the mother, whose relationship to the child has been relegated to the realm of the Imaginary by psychoanalysts, as an active agent in the formation of a specific Creole Symbolic found in the writings of Chamoiseau and Confiant: ‘‘You never leave childhood, you hold it tight inside. You 152

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never separate from it, you repress it. It’s not a process of improvement that leads to adulthood, but the slow sedimentation of a crust around a sensitive state that will always be the core of what you are. You never leave childhood, you begin to believe in reality, what is said to be real. Reality is firm, stable, often drawn at right angles – and comfortable. What is real [which the child perceives in close proximity] is a complex, uncomfortable deflagration of possibilities and impossibilities. To grow up is to cease to have the strength to perceive it. Or else to erect a mental shield between this perception and the self. That’s why poets never grow up, or so little’’ (Childhood 49–50). One may object to the disingenuousness of comparing complex, idiosyncratic novels and autobiographies to a small manifesto written collectively. I nevertheless think that the comparison is necessary, as the notion of créolité, as outlined in Eloge de la créolité, has been derided as simplistic and idealistic. It is necessary to stress that Eloge represents an ideological hardening and could be seen as a screen, a mental shield erected by three adult men who, for inauspicious strategic purposes, chose to cover up the real with the cloak of reality. The domain of the Real, in Lacan’s famous triad, is o√-limits except as recaptured and reorganized by the Symbolic, is what Chamoiseau calls a ‘‘firm, stable, often drawn at right angles’’ reality. Chamoiseau, in the name of art, implicitly objects to Lacan’s belief that the Real can only be represented as impoverished and schematic and states that language, far from alienating the subject from the Real, in fact (re-)creates it is as poesis, artistic production.

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chapter ∏

France and Its Caribbean ‘‘Peripheral’’

The negative community: The community of those who don’t have a community – Georges Bataille

So far I have for the most part glossed over France, the Metropole, in discussing seminal Caribbean literary works. But France, unlike England or Spain, for instance, looms large over its ex-colonies, over Caribbean writers and intellectuals. The Metropolitan French and the French Caribbean are, as I hope to show, still interlocked in a relationship made up of mutual enchantment, distrust, and deception. In recent years the French have celebrated the writings of ‘‘our’’ fellow French citizens who live in the French Caribbean. They have celebrated a new breed of French Caribbean writers, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in particular. These writers are more ambiguous than their predecessors, posturing less but intent on making names for themselves in the French literary establishment. Because of this they are obviously less threatening than Edouard Glissant. They are not poets like Aimé Césaire but novelists and therefore multilingual, impure, traitorous. They are very skillfully distributing both candies and slaps to Mother France. They do not ‘‘cannibalize’’ the French language as Césaire did; in the eyes of some critics they enrich it and therefore protect it against the continuous threats of the American language. Some of them, such as Confiant, have tried to write uniquely in Creole and have returned to writing in French (in ‘‘their’’ French, but in French nevertheless), and the exsanguine French lexicon is getting a needed transfusion, a little life, a little color, a little indecency. For the French intelligentsia the creolists do not, as they claim, descend from the conteur (storyteller), docile during the day, maroon at night. They are trying to lift the oppressive lid o√ of French classicism. For the French literati 155

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Confiant and Chamoiseau are doing what they themselves dare not do, place ‘‘a red bonnet on the dictionary,’’ as Victor Hugo provocatively put it. And they have been rewarded: Chamoiseau received, to the acclamations of a unanimous press, the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for Texaco, which deals with the resistance of the petit peuple to the bétonisation (the building of concrete structures) of Martinique.∞ Thirtyfour years earlier Edouard Glissant, now seventy-four, was honored with the respectable but relatively modest Prix Renaudot for his first novel, La Lézarde. The paper Jeune Nation commented thus on the literary prizes for that year: ‘‘Prix Femina: a Belgian writer. Laureate of the Prix Goncourt: a Belgian writer. Laureate of the Prix Renaudot: a Negro’’ (qtd. in Baudot 364).≤ At the time France was still su√ering from the e√ects of the Second World War, its defeat and its miraculous recovery. Even after forty years, despite such critically acclaimed novels as Le Quatrième Siècle and Tout-Monde, Glissant has yet to secure another major French literary prize or to be recognized in France the way that Chamoiseau and Confiant have been. The love a√air of the Creole writer and the French intelligentsia has been tested by a book Confiant wrote on Aimé Césaire, Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle, published in 1993, the year of Césaire’s eightieth birthday. Confiant refuses to separate the poet from the politician, as Césaire himself has cleverly done. Césaire is shown here as a Machiavellian politician with no clear goal for his ‘‘nation,’’ though Césaire reminds us that he was the first to use the term nation when referring to Martinique. According to Confiant, if Martinique is part of the European community, it is because Césaire celebrated Africa in his poems and France at the Assembly. He used carrots with the French and carrots and sticks with the Martinicans. He has been not a parâtre (bad father) but a marâtre (bad mother) to his fellow countrymen. ‘‘Here is a country,’’ writes Confiant, ‘‘where the standard of living is by far superior to any Third World country but where the production of riches is practically nonexistent or, rather, symbolic’’ (25). Césaire, according to Confiant, has acted psychoanalytically rather than politically. He has been the type of ‘‘mother’’ who has acceded to all of her child’s demands but not to his desire, the desire to be loved unconditionally: ‘‘Why have you not said that we are beautiful?’’ asks Confiant (46), ‘‘we’’ meaning the 156

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despised, the forgotten, the hybrids. Martinique is dying of ideological anorexia. Since André Breton deemed Césaire, like himself, universal in his preface to Césaire’s Notebook, Césaire has indeed tried to live up to that ideal but, according to Confiant, at the expense of Martinique, not only in his politics but also in his poetics. For Confiant Césaire’s paradoxes can be summed up by the image of the father of Negritude presenting to the French Assembly the assimilation law in 1946, which transformed Martinique and Guadeloupe into French departments. This indeed throws suspicion on Césaire’s poetical oeuvre before the Notebook. But is this really a paradox, as Confiant seems to believe, or simply an illustration of the ‘‘Frenchification’’ of Césaire, who, like Caliban, can only reproach his master for having taught him his language all too well?≥ Negritude is French up to a certain point. Or rather it can become French. It is assimilable, ready to be submitted to dialectics as Sartre recommends in his ‘‘Orphée noire.’’ According to Confiant, Césaire’s type of revolution led to abjection (15). Yet he recognizes that without him there would be no Fanon, no Glissant, no Chamoiseau, no Confiant. Yes, you can be ‘‘a jamais fils de Césaire,’’ as the creolists proclaimed in Eloge de la créolité, and still kill him in Une traversée paradoxale. In fact, the term traversée should not just be read temporally but also spatially. Césaire has ‘‘traversed’’ the Atlantic, which, for him, is not black. He is a victim of his fascination with Paris and its intellectuals. Annie Le Brun, a Surrealist writer and critic, in a pamphlet entitled Pour Aimé Césaire and the article ‘‘Aimé Césaire, liberté du langage, langage de la liberté,’’ reproaches Confiant and Chamoiseau for having heralded Césaire as an ‘‘ante-créole’’ [pre-Creole] in Eloge and denigrated him as a ‘‘anti-créole’’ in Une traversée (‘‘Aimé Césaire’’ 20). She says that the creolists are stereotypically obeying their Occidental unconscious by murdering the father with very poor arguments. According to her, Confiant reproaches ‘‘papa’’ Césaire for not being ‘‘creolly correct’’ (26). She accuses Confiant and Chamoiseau of ‘‘national creolism’’ (26) and claims that the young Antillean writers and intellectuals are but epigones of the creators of European values such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes (28). She also finds fault with Julia Kristeva and Michel Serres, accusing them of Parisian ‘‘chic’’ and of trying to standardize the world under the guise of promoting 157

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diversity (27). For Le Brun, Césaire, on the contrary, never ceased to denounce Occidental values, taking for models other truly subversive writers and thinkers such as Rimbaud, Breton, Victor Schoelcher, Michel Leiris, and the Count de Lautréamont, all of whom are French (28). In fact, for her Confiant’s real crime is this: by studying Césaire in his totality, both his politics and his poetry, Confiant has ‘‘deliberately degraded’’ the individual who was commended by André Breton in 1947 for writing ‘‘the greatest lyrical monument of our time’’ (18). For the French politics and poetry belong, as they do for Césaire, to two di√erent realms and therefore cannot be compared. Confiant has committed an error in intellectual taste. These younger creolists have gone too far, and their whole oeuvre is now being reevaluated according to their attitude toward Césaire. According to Daniel-Henri Pageaux, in ‘‘Raphaël Confiant: Ou, La traversée paradoxale d’une décennie,’’ Confiant writes under the influence of San Antonio, a popular French writer of spy fiction and inventor of spicy neologisms whom Pageaux deems ‘‘a clown of language’’ (46) – the French language, no less, despite Confiant’s alleged allegiance to Caribbean oraliture. In fact, he reproaches the creolists for not being ‘‘Creole’’ enough and for being indebted to others besides just the conteur créole. He chastises them for borrowing the expression ‘‘maître de la parole’’ from the Guinean writer Camara Laye; for borrowing a composite expression like ‘‘pleurer-rire’’ [cry-laugh] from the Congolese writer Henri Lopes (47) (although the creolophones often turn infinitives into nouns and create composite expressions); and for borrowing from Rabelais his numerical and hyperbolical fantasies, which are, one could object to Pageaux, also an integral part of the Caribbean tale. He accuses the creolists of incoherence in their attempts to create a new literary language that accounts for the Caribbean experience and of playing mediocre and mechanical games with the colonizer’s language. These attacks are symptomatic of the ambivalence of a certain Parisian elite toward their ‘‘brothers of color’’ who do not cease to question the French notion of universalism. What Pageaux denounces in Confiant is not his créolité but his proposal to replace universality with diversality. It disturbs him that, instead of emulating the French classics, Confiant makes use of the carnivalesque characteristics of language (57–58). Pageaux sees Confiant’s novels 158

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as ‘‘a version among others of postmodern fiction’’ without any link to a true traditional Caribbean culture or to orality, thus denying the works any originality (50). These pained reproaches are addressed to the creolists because they attach so much importance to the body or to the materiality of language and do not seem typical of French postmodern fiction, which tends toward silence without ever truly attaining it, as Blanchot has expressed so exquisitely. In fact, according to Pageaux, créolité, just like Negritude in Sartre’s analysis, is but the moment of negation that must be transcended so that a true Caribbean culture can at last be born. These views are indicative of a partial reading of the works and declarations of Chamoiseau and Confiant, whose notion of créolité is, as we have seen, much more inclusive than the French critics imply. They also exhibit a depreciatory perspective on the French intellectual sphere, which is not as provincial as Annie Le Brun and Daniel-Henri Pageaux seem to believe. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michel Serres, and Umberto Eco are, in di√erent ways, as subversive as Rimbaud and Lautréamont. Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov, for example, introduced Mikail Bakhtin to the French intelligentsia, and his notion of dialogism has greatly influenced the way we read Rabelais and Dostoevsky (and the novel in general). Dialogism, however, is also the domain of what is called postcolonial studies, at least in the United States, which no doubt aggravates the anger of the contemporary defenders of French values. We are strangers to ourselves. Chamoiseau and Confiant, due to their ‘‘nonhistory,’’ know this better than anyone; the Caribbean people have known it much longer than the hexagonal French. It is therefore unfair to ‘‘accuse’’ them of postmodernism, as Pageaux does. In fact, postmodernism, among other currents, is indebted to Caribbean writers. But Chamoiseau and Confiant are welcome in the Metropole only under certain conditions: they should not attempt to touch France’s sacred cows, even if they happen to be of Caribbean origin. It is not far-fetched to say that Glissant has never been truly accepted by the French literary establishment. He is not as eager to compromise as his younger fellow writers. He is also more rigid than they are and is often critical of the Metropole. He has for twenty years been following the same path of solitude and misunderstanding. His 159

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theoretical writings are often opaque, surprising, and poetical. His most accessible novels, such as Le Quatrième Siècle, keep returning to the time of the ‘‘habitations’’ and slavery, a time better left forgotten for most people. His novels are di≈cult, as Glissant’s sentences and paragraphs and pages can sometimes be as thick and multilayered as those of Faulkner, on whom he has recently written a book. Painstakingly, painfully, prophetically, poetically, he has tried to probe and reveal the soul of his fellow Martinican – his soul, as he truly thinks and feels collectively, unlike Chamoiseau and Confiant, whose highly individualistic and optimistic characters more often than not seem to come out of a Bildungsroman. It is Glissant’s apparent impersonal rhetoric (here the adjective holds no negative connotations) that allows him to write a collective being. It makes him even more threatening to the Metropolitans because he is less susceptible of being caught in flagrante delicto at being ungrateful or platitudinous. It gives him the freedom to truly challenge the superiority of the French over other Francophone cultures. By plunging into the soul of the French Caribbean and resurfacing, he reenacts, this time in freedom, the movement of black bodies being thrown into the Atlantic. He claims, following the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite, that the ‘‘unity is submarine,’’ not volcanic as Césaire claimed (Discours 134). It is at the bottom of the ocean that the French Caribbeans and the Metropolitan French have to meet in order to understand, acknowledge, and forgive the harm done by Europeans to others. It is obvious that most Metropolitans and even many Caribbean people are not willing or prepared to undertake such an ordeal, except perhaps under the aegis of Club Med. But Glissant says that he writes ‘‘for the readers to come,’’ those who will be with him at the ‘‘bottom of the sea.’’ Glissant is not just advocating a return to the submarine. He is interested in languages, particularly languages as they are portrayed in fiction. How, for example, does one write about an illiterate Martinican character obsessed by King Béhanzin’s exile in Martinique? How does one write about a woman who, after various personal tragedies, goes mad and can only stare at French television programs, as in La Case du commandeur? What interests Glissant is not so much what vocabulary these characters use, French or Creole, but the rhythm that governs their way of speech and being. How does he 160

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express in French the rhythm of his characters? Not by trying to tamper with their rhythm but with the rhythm of the French language, that is, with its unassailable syntax. Malemort is, in this respect, exemplary. As Glissant’s contemporary maroons become more bourgeois, like Beautemps, who has been living on the run for seven years and has gotten fat from not working and from eating too much (Malemort 57), Glissant’s writing becomes more adventurous, marooning the canons of French aesthetics, which request clarity, linearity, progression. One might say that his writing dances, just like the co≈n carriers at the beginning of Malemort. Here, not only is the French lexicon subverted or enriched, as it is in Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s most extreme novels, but the French syntax is subjected to a centripetal force that makes it writhe, propels it not forward in a linear way but backward, sideways, in spirals. The force of this writing, which pushes the characters in seemingly disorderly ways, is in fact shaped by a dance that does not favor the head over the tail. The famed proposition principale (principal clause) that French and Caribbean students learn to identify during endless logical analyses of sentences and paragraphs has disappeared, engulfed or dethroned by propositions subordonnées (subordinate clauses): ‘‘The continual quivering of earth without fault to the vertigo of descent, without specifying the leaf or the fruit, without jostling these instructions about words or these classifications of functions that separate, that are the marks of the lateral mind, that search without finding – the long drunkenness without keeping any names in your head’’ (Malemort 17).∂ Here Glissant is aiming at the heart of Caribbean culture and also of French civilization. The lateral mind is at work in this instance and in very di√erent ways than the central mind; the former searches without finding while the latter finds without searching, as when Columbus ‘‘discovered’’ the Caribbean islands. The lexicon of the above lines is undeniably ‘‘French’’; the syntax, the rhythm of the sentence, is not. The French language, just like the corpse in Malemort, is asking to be carried away by Dlan and the other pall bearers, and it is submitted to a change of pace, a change of carriers, to a transformation of itself: ‘‘Understanding perhaps that in the future one had to change the word and without quivering or a caesura undertake the new language – which? – and with sorrow and sweat and 161

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pain and in drunkenness of descent throw o√ one’s syntax in the grass on either side’’ (17).∑ The French langue is carried through a parole that is neither French nor Creole but an attempt to cut through these two universes in order to express the search of the Caribbean man for his own physical, social, and linguistic environment. Caribbean men adhere to an environment permeated by French values, not by obeying rules dictated from above but rather like a caterpillar, lifting its abdomen to avoid an obstacle or sliding down a seemingly smooth run, by ‘‘unstoppable instinct’’ [par une manière d’instinct chenilleux et imparable, 15], changing rhythms according to the obstacles of the terrain: ‘‘crossing on the side of the hill, walking when the incline is too steep, cadencing when the ground feels good, and in places where there is nothing to complain about, the delight of the raven pace’’ (16).∏ The cortege in Malemort, as a collective body, is improvising as it goes along, with its own rhythm, its own language, and the sureness and creativity of a seasoned performer; dance and language are interchangeable in the body and mind of Dlan: ‘‘And every footstep is a word the word deports you fall but how to talk, all that talk that is needed, Dlan meant to walk the pace to dance the pace’’ (17).π In Malemort Glissant puts into practice the ‘‘poetics of detour’’ (outlined in Discours 32–36, 278) as masterfully as Dlan, the co≈n carrier who dances up, down, and sideways on the mornes, on the normes. Creolization is not linear; it does not progress, though it may spread laterally with eruptions of despair: ‘‘And really where, where to look, where to find the time that is the opportunity the way the lightest necessity (without being called immediately an idiot which is a female idiot with an acute accent) to ask why the mahogany trees and the ravines and the sad shades of the mango trees do not create the slightest draft in one’s heart that could be called love or tenderness or passion or simply a vision of the countryside or let’s say of what surrounds us’’ (60).∫ In Malemort the story is shattered in front of the very eyes of the French-from-France; the ‘‘symphony of democracy’’ (90) is replayed as a farce, just like history is. The story’s plot has marooned, but so powerful is Glissant’s writing that the emblematic vocation to be a maroon, like democracy and Occidental musicology, is also replayed in a farcical mode. Never has a writer, with the exception of Joyce, been so close to losing himself in his own culture, in his own writing. 162

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Everywhere in Malemort the apocalyptic birth of democracy is reenacted in a carnivalesque way so as to reinforce the status quo: ‘‘Mayors surer of their own succession than sons of kings’’ (87); ‘‘Listen, mister Mathieu, nothing changes, nothing changes’’ (94); the infernal counterequation: ‘‘Orestes loves Hermione who loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromache. The Negro hates the béké who loathes the white man from France’’ (85); ‘‘Really,’’ claims a voice, ‘‘we were born in an urn. Our highest o≈ce: to fill it up’’ (88). This carnival goes beyond Bakhtin’s; it is ‘‘colonial hybridity,’’ according to Homi Bhabha – that is, ‘‘a problematic of colonial representation and individuation’’ (175). It certainly is not créolité, as Chamoiseau and Confiant see it, and not even métissage: ‘‘This su√ering this uncertainty of words themselves, of their meaning, but also of their use which pushes the language to its limits of derision but, happily, or to compensate, gives it its particular meaning, unnoticed, incomprehensible for who has not turned like a ball in this hollow piece of wrinkled earth from the heights of the north to the salts of the south’’ (93).Ω Caribbean writing can only be esoteric to the outsider. How does one write in a language that does not fulfill its grave function of meaning something to someone? In Glissant’s Malemort even poetry becomes dialogic while serving its function of expressing the ‘‘individual.’’ It accommodates better than prose the clash of identities found in the interior-exterior dialogue of a Caribbean person, which goes from the o≈cial and distinctive je and vous to a universal tu, simultaneously enunciator and enunciatee: ‘‘You are thinking yes yes next to you there / is what is there near / next to you sitting on one buttock like a mantou you are thinking / There is monsieur Lesprit what are you doing there monsieur’’ (100).∞≠ Malemort makes it obvious that democracy cannot be handed down by the descendants of slave owners to the descendants of slaves. This type of ‘‘democracy’’ is but a continuation of slavery draped in the language of equality. The narrator creates three mythical black men, three maroons who are massacred ‘‘without a word’’ by the plantation police (116–17): ‘‘They fell infinitely, they died infinitely’’ (118). And they get up to find themselves dragged into the co√ee fields: ‘‘We keep falling in the night’’ (119). They are ordered to stop by what is probably the voice of the ‘‘mulatto’’ overseer: ‘‘A plantation is not a 163

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prison any more. . . . There are no more free men of color and African slaves – today you can plant your own root.’’ To this answers a desperate and muted voice, the voice of the black worker: ‘‘It is better to be dead than to find oneself in a sugar-cane plantation’’ (119). When the three escape to the woods, they are surrounded by comical gendarmes who tell them that they are ‘‘going to go back to Africa’’ and then shoot them after their desperate attempts to use their ‘‘coutelas’’ (120). They get up as ‘‘mummies’’ and rush into town: ‘‘They did not want to work anymore if it was to work at the distillery of Messieurs the brothers of the plan [one of de Gaulle’s grand economical plans]. . . . They did not want to anymore. . . . They were shouting neither békés nor mulattos, they did not know that from that moment they had sealed the harmony of order against themselves’’ (122).∞∞ They die. They get up ‘‘grinded by manioc’’; they are ‘‘the union delegates.’’ A strike is called (123). The gendarmes arrive in their jeep to guarantee ‘‘freedom of work.’’ As the narrator gets close to our contemporary period, time becomes more precise: it is Christmas 1959, when riots took place in Martinique after a racist incident and three young Martinicans were killed. Whether they are maroons, slaves on the sugar plantation, workers in a rum factory, or banana or pineapple cutters, the three men fall and get up again. What is the meaning of democracy in the French Caribbean? Antonio Benítez-Rojo, in The Repeating Island, urges us to reread Caribbean texts so that they may reveal to us their own textuality. He describes what he calls the ‘‘meta-archipelago’’ of the Antilles (as it has neither a boundary nor a center), bridging North and South America: ‘‘This geographical accident gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagulls squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification; in short, a field of observation quite in tune with the objectives of Chaos’’ (2). This chaos is not synonymous with disorder but is rather reflective of ‘‘dynamic states of regularities that repeat themselves globally’’ (2). Benítez-Rojo deduces that this pattern leads us into ‘‘a new way of reading the concept of chance and 164

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necessity, of particularity and universality’’ (2–3). The Caribbean ‘‘rhythm’’ can be found outside of the Caribbean: it is the rhythm of the decentered, the peripheral, which contributes to the formation of a di√erent type of ‘‘universality.’’ The Caribbean islands, as BenítezRojo sees them, are the product of a nonstop series of encounters, an occurrence of objective chance, ‘‘a meeting or confluence of marine flowings that connect the Niger with the Mississippi, the China Sea with the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo’’ (16). The ‘‘people of the Sea,’’ as Benítez-Rojo calls the inhabitants of the Caribbean, sublimate violence by expressing it in a ‘‘paradoxical space . . . [where] there is no desire other than that of maintaining oneself within the limits of this zone for the longest possible time, in free orbit, beyond imprisonment or liberty,’’ a space that can only be approached through ‘‘the poetic’’ (17). This particular occupying of space and time is what characterizes the ‘‘rhythm’’ of the Caribbean, which ‘‘can be arrived at through any system of signs, whether it be dance, music, language, text or body language, etc.’’ (18). According to Benítez-Rojo, the Caribbean text’s most perceptible movement is ‘‘a metonymic displacement toward scenic, ritual, and mythological forms’’ (25). In Glissant’s Malemort the French Republican electoral urn has been moved, in Martinican space, from the realm of positivist history to the realm of mythological history. It is an open wound that begs to be fed, a Caribbean Medusa. A first reading of Malemort allows the reader to perceive these displacements. With a second reading of Malemort, we may also perceive some of its rhythms that are not ‘‘white’’ and that do not mimic the Western binary – ‘‘the rhythm of steps marching or running, of territorializing . . . of technical knowledge’’ (Benítez-Rojo 26). Malemort’s rhythms seem ‘‘turbulent and erratic,’’ ‘‘without a past or better, rhythms whose past is in the present,’’ like the rhythms that belong to the ‘‘People of the Sea’’ (Benítez-Rojo 26). The Caribbean text crosses ‘‘at all points the network of binary dynamics extended by the West. The result is a text that speaks of a critical coexistence of rhythms, a polyrhythmic ensemble whose central binary system is decentered when the performer (writer/reader) and the text try to escape ‘in a certain type of way’ ’’ (28). 165

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This is what makes Glissant’s most ‘‘Caribbean’’ texts allegedly inaccessible: they require many readings, a decentering for the Occidental reader, a willingness to lose one’s bearings, and they demand to be enjoyed at the same time. The ‘‘inner’’ rhythm of the Caribbean people can be heard and seen in music, dance, religion, plastic arts, and cuisine. It can only be conveyed in literature, however, through a type of syntax that is di√erent from the linear, ‘‘logical’’ one of French classical texts. Glissant’s writing can be characterized as baroque, polyrhythmic, reaching out rhizomatically and then curling back into interwoven arabesques, only to stretch out again like a caterpillar going down a hill, forward, backward, crosswise. This is not the rhythm of the African, as described by Senghor, in which rhythm mirrors the particular relationship that the African holds with the world, which is not for the African an object of study or conquest (22–38). It is the rhythm of the African plus the particular rhythms that the deported Africans have acquired on the slave boats and on the American ‘‘continent.’’ Glissant’s writings are here to testify that ‘‘intellectual’’ memory may elude the Caribbeans but that their body memory has kept and transformed the rhythms to which they were submitted, the rhythms that make them neither African nor European nor Asian, to paraphrase Confiant and Chamoiseau. In La Case du commandeur the collective narrative voice ends one chapter with ‘‘We are grinding to powder the rock of time’’ [Nous pilons en poudre la roche du temps] and starts the next with ‘‘The powder of rock in which we are drifting’’ [La poussière de roche dans quoi nous dérivons, 144-45]. For the Caribbean people space is time, transformation of nature and matter into time, the better to get trapped in slow deadening sands, unlike the African woman whose pounding transforms grain into sustenance through rhythm. It is impossible for the population of African descent to fathom their history through the means of an ancestral ‘‘African’’ recalling or grasp it in a chronological ‘‘Western’’ way: ‘‘The inhabitants of this country were transported from Africa to what was called the New World in slave boats where they died by the thousands. One does not dare estimate at almost fifty million the number of men, women, and children who were torn away from the Womb and sank to the bottom of the ocean or were stranded like foam on the American coasts. The southwest of

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France and Its Caribbean ‘‘Peripheral’’ present-day Guinea could have been at the origin of our peoples.’’ This calm statement would suppose that all things since the day of the shipment have been moved by the same powerful and peaceful breath where the memory of all would have been strengthened; that years passed and accumulated quietly inside the hill full of secrets where each nation keeps trace of its journey. But the heap of the night weighs on us and covers us. We say that it is madness. (Case 18)

Glissant creates a new way of relating history through a thick historiography, an opaque and idiosyncratic history of the Caribbean Imaginary, but his time has yet to come. The moment of reception of this particular enunciation of history has been set in the future and thus cannot be accepted by the contemporary French cultural establishment. Chamoiseau and Confiant – perhaps because their idiolects ‘‘enrich’’ the French language without ‘‘deporting’’ (déporter) it as Glissant’s does, because their writings seem less abysmal to the French – seem to coincide with this particular time in the French Jacobinist Republic, which is now willing to acknowledge the production of a post-Césairian literature in one of her oldest colonies.

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Conclusion

It appears that universalism, as seen by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein in Race, Nation, Class, continuously renews itself, like the hydra and its severed heads, by assimilating conflicting ideologies. But in this particular moment of its history, universalism, which has been seen by many as an eighteenth-century humanist ideology, seems, like the French language, in need of protection. In the era of immigration of the inhabitants of ex-colonies to the excolonial powers, these same powers feel the need to safeguard their borders, to dam up the flux of immigrants partially in the name of preserving the specific characters of cultures. There is a desire on the part of Western authorities to not go back to the original syncretism, hypothesized by Jean-Loup Amselle in Mestizo Logics. There are different and contradictory forms of nationalism taking place in the West, and in France itself, but they have in common the fact that they are not nationalisms of liberation but of protection. Alain Finkielkraut has written an essay entitled La Défaite de la pensée where he attacks the proponents of a multicultural society (société pluriculturelle) as the new agents of the German Romantic notion of Volksgeist, rooted in the belief in common ancestral roots and elaborated as a counterpoint to the French Enlightenment. Claude LéviStrauss, seemingly at the other end of the spectrum, is taken to task by Etienne Balibar for wanting, in Race et histoire, to maintain ‘‘cultural distances’’ in order to stop the intellectual and even biological death of humanity (22). Finkielkraut notes appropriately that the notion of race has recently been replaced by the notion of culture and the notion of the relativity of cultures. It is allegedly out of respect for the specific characters of di√erent cultures forced to coexist that the New Right believes in cultural apartheid. Paradoxically, neither French universalism nor particularism can digest multiculturalism. Balibar shows that racism is inherent to both universalism and particularism and that, in fact, universalism, 169

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far from eradicating racism, universalizes it: ‘‘The excess it [racism] represents in relation to nationalism, and therefore the supplement it brings to it, tends to universalize it, to correct its lack of specificity’’ (54). Whereas Lévi-Strauss waxes nostalgic about separate cultural development, Finkielkraut believes in a temperate form of assimilation, remarking that a country as steeped in enracinement (the belief in the specific characters of cultures) as France is cannot practice a politics of hospitality. But what is assimilation? Without recalling the history of this very French notion, let us just note that it is one of the o√shoots of universalism and quote Maxim Silverman, who writes: ‘‘Alongside the claim of the ‘open’ nation, constituted through the voluntary association of individuals, is the ‘closed’ nation, constituted by the predetermined nature of the community; alongside the claims for universalism there is a multitude of particularisms; alongside assimilation there is always di√erence’’ (25). Where a less astute observer sees one nation, Silverman sees two: the open one, transparent and generous, and the closed one, fearful and defensive. The open nation swallows up and digests her immigrants indiscriminately, but the closed nation hates the open nation for doing so, for ignoring the wisdom and culture of ancient, dismissed, premodern societies. Thus the French and the German models of the nation coexist side by side, and the Republican notion of assimilation cannot be neatly separated from the flagrant racism of the ideology of separate cultural development. However, immigrants do not remain immigrants: they become social actors and, these days in France, do not seem to be as easily ‘‘assimilable’’ as European immigrants to France are alleged to have been, since they are often, because of their physical di√erences, subjected not only to cultural racism but to biological racism as well. The Figaro-Magazine (28 October 1985) asked the question ‘‘Will we still be French in thirty years?’’ and then ‘‘proved’’ that there would be nearly thirteen million non-European foreigners in France by the year 2015, thus implicitly answering the question in the negative (qtd. in Silverman 16).∞ And what becomes of assimilation in an area of globalization? It does not seem that globalization is or will be French. In fact, the French intelligentsia is ideologically fighting it with all its might, 170

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oddly enough at a time when the French Assembly has just voted for limited autonomy for the island of Corsica. The model of globalization, for better or worse, is and will probably remain for years to come North American. Globalization, the free flow of capital and labor, is far from being free of racism, but it does reshu√le the cards and perturb and redefine the notion of universalism, at least of French universalism. Confiant’s autobiography, Ravines du devant-jour, is dedicated ‘‘to all the little chabins of the world.’’ It could very well be that the French Caribbeans are becoming, ironically, a model for the rest of the world inasmuch as political and economic independence is a notion that is eroding very quickly under the pressures of multinationals. Nevertheless, in the name of ‘‘nation’’ people are killing and being killed all over the planet. Conversely the concept of the nation is also eroding, as would-be nations are getting smaller in size. We are getting away from the notion of a nation as an ‘‘imagined political community,’’ as characterized by Benedict Anderson, and are approaching smaller, more ‘‘real’’ or, rather, more artificial communities, as some people, having su√ered under the yoke of a totalitarian regime such as the Soviet Union or of colonization, are retribalizing and, as Jean-Loup Amselle convincingly argues, are becoming comfortable with the colonial ideology of separation and its resulting fundamentalism. I hope to have shown that antillanité, créolité, and creolization are not ‘‘tribal’’ issues but inclusive ones, but I also hope I have underscored the notion of idiosyncracy in Caribbean fiction. Put most simply, a global ideology allows the individual more freedom than one emanating from a particular community. Instead of emphasizing sameness among members of the community, French Caribbean literature, as it should, thrives on the particularities of that community and thus opens up a space for a readership that transcends that very community. However, the image of a Creole society, at least in the French Caribbean, could be seen as a showcase designed to veil the economic and political dependency of the dom. Just as the creation of Creole societies is artificial, so is the idea of créolité, at least under its theoretical guise, as it downplays ethnic, class, and gender struggles and contentions. Nigel O. Bolland sees the West Indian ‘‘creolization 171

Conclusion

thesis,’’ which emphasizes the active role of Caribbean people (particularly those of African descent) in the imagining of a common culture, as having ‘‘made a major contribution to Caribbean historiography’’ (53).≤ Bolland, significantly, sees Creole society as problematic and, in particular, as a thesis imagined by West Indian intellectuals, as ‘‘a significant moment in the decolonization process of the Caribbean,’’ as the ideology of a ‘‘middle-class intelligentsia that seeks a leading role in an integrated, newly independent society’’ (53). The inhabitants of the French Caribbean have been both the beneficiaries and the victims of the ideals of the French Revolution – beneficiaries in the sense that these ideals did keep the békés at bay. The békés, just like the French aristocracy, ignored any notion of nation or patrie. They formed a transcending class, ready to ally themselves with the enemies of the nation in order to defend and expand their own interests. By pointing to the béké class as the sole class responsible for the oppression of nonwhite Caribbean people, the French revolutionaries and the French government, long after the Revolution, deluded French Caribbeans into thinking that the Metropole had their interests and well-being at heart.≥ Richard D. E. Burton notes: ‘‘Ironically, it is the Revolution and the revolutionary tradition in France, along with the thought-patterns and discourses that tradition produced, that have until now impeded Martinique and the other vieilles colonies from taking the radical step of complete independence from the mère-patrie’’ (‘‘Between the Particular’’ 189). The French Jacobinist and centralist Revolution is also about language (see de Certeau, Julian, and Revel). The ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité can only come into being in French. The patois, such as Breton, Occitan, or Creole, have to be eradicated, as they are an obscurantist survival of feudal regimes that dishonor a ‘‘certain idea of France’’ held by General de Gaulle.∂ French Caribbean writers do write in French. They even admit, as Confiant does, that writing in French is more enjoyable than writing in Creole, as the writer finds him- or herself confronted with a fully formed language, not a language that has to be created. A coe≈cient of playfulness replaces the arduous task of forging a language as it is being written. With magisterial playfulness and lucidity, French Caribbean writers idiosyncretize the French language and globalize it. 172

Conclusion

French does not just belong to the French anymore: it belongs to all Francophones, and the Francographes are very skillfully pushing the French language to its outer limits. The French language is not, for Caribbean writers, an end in itself but the most enjoyable instrument with which to write créolité.∑ As for Edouard Glissant, he is a writer in formation, in constant creolization, unpredictable. Language, of course, is as important for him as it is for Chamoiseau or Confiant, but he goes further than they do, is more ambitious than they are, as he fashions a discourse (which has little to do with Confiant’s gesture of writing uniquely in Creole) that ruptures the French language in its fundamental structure, in its syntax, whose logic the French do not question. This brutal and lyrical upheaval is the sine qua non of the expression of a Creole culture, still unsure of itself. This fracturing of French language and logic shows how the Creole culture forges, in the crevices, a place for itself. Glissant does not ‘‘enrich’’ the French language, as Confiant and Chamoiseau’s writings do; he transports it, a just retribution. Caribbean writers find themselves caught between the ‘‘universality’’ of French literature and the particularities of the ‘‘regional’’ writer. No wonder Edouard Glissant recognizes William Faulkner as one of his inspirational influences. What could be more regionalist than Faulkner’s themes and location? What could be more idiosyncratic than his writing? Diane Roberts notes that ‘‘Faulkner, until he won the Nobel Prize in 1949, was widely regarded in the U.S. as a second-rate regional writer from a second-rate, if compellingly, decadent region’’ (1). Glissant is the first major black writer to have written a book on Faulkner, and he states that ‘‘Faulkner’s oeuvre will be complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans’’ (qtd. in Gill n.p.). Glissant’s oeuvre, unlike Faulkner’s, has been studied and analyzed by black and white critics and academics. Does that make him universal? It does, in a way. On the other hand, Glissant’s complete work, in particular his fiction, has yet to be translated into English (something that may have cost him the Nobel Prize), while almost the totality of Maryse Condé’s oeuvre has been translated, as has a good part of Chamoiseau’s. Condé finds herself on the global epistemological scene of a renewed feminism in the Third World and the 173

Conclusion

United States that puts writings by women of color at the forefront. She squarely addresses the dilemma of women of color, delineated by Trinh T. Minh-ha as traitors either to their race or to their gender. Her ‘‘universality’’ refers to the dismissed diaspora of women of color, whether in France, the United States, or the Caribbean. Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Glissant dissociate themselves from the preoccupations of the African American quest for roots, for instance, by focusing on the problematics of language and writing in a state of di-glossia and dis-culture. Does that make their work less ‘‘universal’’ than Maryse Condé’s? In pragmatic terms, yes. But literature, as Glissant insists, does not have an immediate e√ect on the social and cultural scene, but rather a mediated one. In fact, Glissant and Condé belong to two di√erent categories of writers. Condé writes for her contemporaries, while Glissant, as Stendhal did, writes for the happy few and for the readers to come. Women Caribbean writers have to fight on two fronts: the universalist front of French values and culture and the front of their male counterparts eager to create a new universalism that excludes women from the scene of Caribbean creativity. Maryse Condé is intent on perturbing the dialogue between Caribbean male writers and the Metropolitan intelligentsia. She seems to be the only contemporary Caribbean woman writer able to stand up to the three male stars of French Caribbean literature. And she does, although they haughtily ignore her work, accusing her of writing in standard French, an accusation she has answered to: ‘‘To each his or her own créolité, that is, relationship to oral material and relationship to tradition, and to each his or her own way of expressing it in written literature’’ (qtd. in Pfa√ 165; my translation). She proposes an original vision of the French Caribbean woman: not subservient to man, an independent thinker, ready to take her life into her own hands but susceptible to being bruised and hurt along the way. Condé’s writing reflects and challenges a certain state of a√airs, while Glissant’s ambition, and, up to a certain point, Chamoiseau’s, is to mold the future, to create a new readership and new writers. Perhaps Glissant is not so much an author as a ‘‘founder of discursivity,’’ as his writing does not belong to him but is constantly escaping, transcending the limitations of his own subjectivity and his ‘‘being-in-the world.’’ As Samuel Beckett remarked, ‘‘What does it matter who is speaking?’’ (qtd. in Foucault, ‘‘What Is’’ 101).∏ 174

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Foucault sees in this ‘‘indi√erence’’ ‘‘one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing.’’ He analyzes the notion of the author in the wake of contemporary French theory of the disappearance and even the death of the individual author and the emergence of écriture. However, Glissant’s ‘‘death’’ as an individual author signals not only the disappearance of the writer as an individual into écriture but also a dissolving of his individuality within his own community, which he is also shaping. Glissant could be considered a founder of French Caribbean discursivity, as he is not just the author of his own work but has also produced ‘‘the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts’’ (Foucault, ‘‘What Is’’ 114). He has marooned French literature and the literature of Aimé Césaire and has made possible texts such as Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s, but he has also made possible ‘‘a certain number of divergences – with respect to his own texts, concepts and hypotheses – that all arise’’ from this marooning (Foucault, ‘‘What Is’’ 114). Furthermore, he is a founder of his own discursivity, as his texts diverge from his previous ones. As I have demonstrated, Glissant, in his earlier work, believed in a narrative of emancipation but has become in his later work a polyphonic and heteroglossic writer who pluralizes the very notion of marronage. Glissant, like Dostoevsky, ‘‘creates not voiceless slaves, as does Zeus, but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him’’ (Bakhtin 32). What will become of the French Caribbean when the ‘‘French’’ do not exist anymore, or at least when a sizable minority of French citizens are not only of non-European origin but of colonized origin? Will these new French citizens question the notion of Jacobinism and show that its ideology of unification and centralization is an operation masking the cultural and ethnic diversity of France, that the homogeneity of French culture is a myth? As definitions of Frenchness are being reevaluated, perhaps in response to French Caribbean writing and questioning, so are definitions of what it means to be a French Caribbean. Edouard Glissant often refers, regarding the French Caribbean, to the notion of chaos, not as disorder but as a new way of reordering the world that will lead to unpredictable relations among cultures (see Introduction). Glissant puts forth an Imaginary of the Relation, a way to transcend universalism and particularism, 175

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which do not form a neat dichotomy: ‘‘What is at stake here is that we have to change the notion itself, the depth itself of the experience of our identity, and to conceive that only the Imaginary of the Wholeworld (that is, the fact that I can live in my space while being in relation with the Whole-world) . . . can help us transcend the fundamental limits that no one wants to transcend’’ (88).It is indeed significant that it is a French Caribbean who conjures up this new Imaginary, an Imaginary that is not exclusionary but that is grounded, that sees the subject not only in terms of belonging to a certain group or nation, even one that is yet to come, but in relation to other groups and nations. This notion of relation is imaginary, just as the notion of ‘‘community’’ or ‘‘nation’’ is, but it is an Imaginary whose time has come. The French Caribbeans, inhabitants of these specks of dust (pousssière d’îles), as the islands were called by de Gaulle, forgotten (but threatened) in the vast Atlantic, are forced to stare at a broader picture than Westerners are. As France is, willy-nilly, becoming Westernized and globalized and is, paradoxically, at the same time being forced to reevaluate the limits of Jacobin centralism, the French Caribbean people and the French are about to find themselves placed within a larger field of possibilities for ingenuity and creativity.

176

Notes

introduction

1. Translations from Durand’s work are mine. 2. Translations from Caraïbales are mine. 3. ‘‘White’’ Caribbean literature refers to the literature produced by Caribbean writers of French descent and also to some of the literature written by mulattoes before the birth of a truly French Caribbean literature with Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. This white literature, more often than not, is a celebration of the islands, their scenery, their climate, their women, and so on. 4. The verb maroon means ‘‘to put ashore and leave on a desolate island or coast by way of punishment.’’ The French definition of marroner is ‘‘esclave qui s’est enfui pour être libre’’ [slave that has escaped to be free]. To maroon seems to have acquired the French meaning; both versions of the verb have also gained the meaning of ‘‘escaping from a system and by the same token subverting it.’’ I believe that marroner was first used with this meaning by Aimé Césaire in 1955 in a poem in the review Présence africaine, where he encouraged René Depestre, the Haitian poet, then a communist, to maroon (marroner) the ‘‘o≈cial’’ French communist poet Louis Aragon’s injunction to write poetry according to the canons of tradition (see Delas 130). For the origins of the noun maroon see Price 1–2. 5. The term antillanité will often be used in this study. It was ‘‘invented’’ by Glissant in the 1960s and refers to the then-revolutionary notion of a Caribbean reality, as parallel to a ‘‘French’’ or an ‘‘African’’ identity in the French Caribbean. 6. For a more thorough discussion of Eloge de la créolité and of the notion of créolité, see chapter 4. 7. Glissant seems recently to have taken a position for mondialité (which conceives of the world as multiple and unique) over mondialisation (which sees in the world a market) in a conference entitled ‘‘Poétique et politique de la mondialité’’ (Paris, 1 June 2002), organized by the review ‘‘Les Périphériques vous parlent.’’ 177

Notes to Pages 11–38 chapter ∞ The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

1. A history of women has yet to be defined, but the discipline is definitely in the making. 2. In the Caribbean the o√spring of a white woman were free, regardless of the father; the children of a slave woman were slaves, regardless of the father. Therefore black women have been held responsible, by some, for the reproduction of slavery. 3. Translations from Debien’s work are mine. 4. Translations from Maran’s work are mine. 5. Jacques André, in his preface to Fritz Gracchus’s Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétes afroaméricaines, n.p. 6. Translations from André’s work are mine. chapter ≤ Performing Caribbean Histories and Déraisons

1. Translations from Le Quatriéme Siécle are mine. 2. According to Manigat, di√erent ideologies make up this school: the ethno-nationalist ideology, which sees in marronage a universal aspiration to freedom; the Marxist ideology; and the noiristic ideology, which cites the action of the African masses over the ‘‘mulattoes.’’ All these currents link the phenomenon of marronage to the Haitian revolution and independence. Manigat also establishes a typology of maroons and of various marronages. Maroons as individuals were motivated by strikes, the lack of food, delinquency, inadaption, depression, the desire for relaxation, and sexuality (429–30). Maroons as groups can be explained by ‘‘the determination to resist, the desire for vengeance,’’ and especially ‘‘the clash of conflicting cultures . . . provoked by the master-slave relationship’’ (431). 3. Translations from Malemort and Mahagony are mine. 4. Glissant has a metaphysical, almost biblical way of accounting for the unique African experience: ‘‘Three times you confronted the unknown; the first time when you fell into the belly of the boat, . . . which rejects you in a nonworld where you scream. This boat is a womb, the abyss-womb. It generates your howling. It also produces your unanimity. . . . This round boat, so deep, is your mother that is expelling you’’ (Mahogany 215). 5. Glissant’s essays have been translated only partially by J. Michael Dash under the title Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. When possi178

Notes to Pages 39–66

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

ble I will quote from his translation; otherwise I will translate quotes directly from Le Discours antillais. This is an injunction that Maréchal Pétain, some ninety-two years later, would not forget. Translations from La Case du commandeur are mine. The book Le Quatrième Siècle contains an allusion to the possibility that the name Glissant is the reverse of Senglis, the name of Béluse’s owner. Translations from Poétique de la relation are mine. The book was also translated by Betsy Wing, under the title Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 1997). Segalen speaks of ‘‘the state of ecstasy of the subject trying to conceive of its object’’ (Essai 37; my translation). Richard Philcox has translated the novel under the title The Last African Kings (Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1997). Translations here from Les Derniers Rois mages are mine. Translations from Garcia’s work are mine. The Caribbean world includes ‘‘all the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles plus the territories on the mainland of Central America and Northern South America which border on the Caribbean Sea, and whose history of plantation/mercantile economy is linked to that of the islands. By convention, the term also includes Bermuda and the Bahamas, islands in the Atlantic whose history links them with the colonial empires of the Caribbean proper’’ (Angrosino 131). Translations from La Littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises are mine. Translations from La Parole des femmes are mine. Translations from Cajou are mine. Quand elle se penchait en avant, je cessais de travailler parce que le long de son cou, prolongeant la ligne des cheveux, un soupçon de duvet blond descendait et se perdait en pâlissant. C’était moins qu’un duvet, – une irisation jaune paille, puis pastel et ‘‘platine,’’ dont j’imaginais sous mes doigts, au lieu de la dureté de mon crayon, le toucher suave. Que m’importaient alors les névés, les glaciers, les moraines? Elle s’était mise tout près de moi et me coulait ses cheveux dans le cou. Le piège jouait; je m’y prenais les doigts; je ne pouvais plus lâcher. . . . Je plongeais dans l’opulence des ors et des roux; ça et là, des mèches pastel rappelaient le blé tendre; leur pâleur me donnait le vertige; mes doigts s’enfonçaient, puis s’immobilisaient, en179

Notes to Pages 73–78 dormis, dans la tiédeur des poils. . . . Prendre sournoisement possession de ses cheveux. . . . Mes doigts enhardis remontaient jusqu’aux secrets dessous où naissaient leur coloration et leur puissance. chapter ≥ The Island Walkers and the Forest Wanderer

1. All translations from the French in this chapter, except those from André Breton’s Manifestos of Surrealism, Max-Pol Fouchet’s book on Wifredo Lam, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, are mine. 2. These (forgotten) Creole poets included the Martinicans Prévost de Traversay and Maynard De Queilhe and the Guadeloupean Louise de Lafaye. Their descriptions of the islands are often inspired by the Metropolitan Romantic poets such as René de Chateaubriand and Alphonse de Lamartine. Nevertheless, because of their intimate knowledge of the geography and societies of the islands, their images are never contrived and are sometimes quite original (see Antoine 199–202). Saint-John Perse (1887–1975), a descendant of French colonialists established in the French West Indies since the eighteenth century, left his native island Guadeloupe when he was twelve and celebrated his Creole childhood in magnificent verses, nostalgic and haughty at the same time, in his first collection of poetry, Eloges (1911). 3. Europaeische Literature un lateinisches Mittelalter (1948). This was quoted by Edouard Glissant during an interview granted to Wolfgang Bader, ‘‘Poétique antillaise, poétique de la relation: Interview avec Edouard Glissant.’’ Komparatistische Hefte 9.10 (1984): 92. 4. The Avenue du Bois was one of the best-known avenues in the then-fashionable Bois de Boulogne in Paris. 5. I am indebted to Daniel Maximin, who in L’Isolé soleil attracts his readers’ attention to this beautiful and lucid little-known text. 6. Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé’s notion of créolité is discussed in chapter 4. 7. Légitime Défense was published in Paris in 1932 by a group of Martinican students including Etienne Léro and René Menil. It was short-lived, having only one issue. 8. DuBois characterizes double consciousness as follows: ‘‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt 180

Notes to Pages 80–94

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

and pity. One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder’’ (496). The French word for demonstration (manifestation) refers to an ‘‘expression of a feeling’’ such as joy or fear, an act of God (manifestation naturelle), or a political demonstration. Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was a forerunner of Surrealism in his review Nord-Sud, which he published between March 1917 and the end of 1918, using it to organize the collaboration of young painters and poets. Roger Vitrac (1899–1952) was mainly a theater writer and director. He joined the Surrealist movement but was excluded in 1926, as his irreverence and insubordination were not appreciated. J. Michael Dash translates Glissant’s ‘‘Poétique de la Relation’’ as ‘‘Cross-Cultural Poetics’’ in his translation of Le Discours antillais, Caribbean Discourse (see in particular 97–157). While I wholeheartedly agree with his translation, in this case I would rather stay closer to the French term. La Lézarde has been translated by J. Michael Dash under the title The Ripening. Le Quatrième Siècle has been translated by Betsy Wing under the title The Fourth Century. Toute cette végétation dégradée que nous avons accompagnée, lestés de nos radios portatives, jusqu’aux rivières taries, aux deltas pourris, au poisson crevé, à l’arbre brûlé, aux jardins partis, dans ce qui bientôt ne serait plus qu’un fouillis de marinas et de jetées gre√ées sur quelques routes de traversée, parcourues de ministres du tourisme et de députés palabrants. Bovarysme is a term coined by the nineteenth-century critic Jules de Gaultier to define the ‘‘power that man has to conceive of himself other than he is.’’ Interview with Wole Soyinka, Jeune Afrique 544 (8 June 1971), qtd. in Miller 217. There are, according to Glissant, two types of literature: epics and lyrics. Epic literature is linked to a poetics of duration and orality. It is the domain of repetition and is practiced by ‘‘Southern’’ writers, essentially Latin American and Caribbean. The lyrical mode is linked to the appearance of the individual and the right to own private property. Such a poetic text does not proceed by accumulation but by ‘‘fulguration’’ and is epitomized by Rimbaud’s poetry 181

Notes to Pages 99–102 (Discours 247–48; seminar, spring 1991, the University of California, Davis). 18. Glissant has borrowed this notion of the Diverse from Victor Segalen, who developed it in Essai sur l’exotisme. For Segalen ‘‘exoticism’’ is the feeling we have of the Diverse (63). The Diverse is the creative principle of all great literature. For him the expression of the Diverse, of the encounter with the Other, has to manifest itself through the creation of a work of art whose form has yet to be invented. Segalen expresses his feeling of the Diverse in Stèles, his collection of poems inspired by Chinese inscribed pillars in the creation of a ‘‘new literary genre’’ (71). 19. The term relation has in French and English the same dual meaning – that is, (1) an existing connection; a significant association between or among things; (2) the act of relating, narrating, or telling; narration. chapter ∂ Créolité and Its Discontents

1. All translations from the French in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Martinique aux multiples races engagées dans un corps à corps incessant, où les armes du sexe sont forgées dans l’acier du mépris! . . . Mais, toutes ces comédies, Raymoninque les aplatissait comme une galette. On ne pouvait le situer à aucun degré de cette échelle du mépris qui se dresse au-dessus de l’île, telle une tour de Babel lentement accumulée par des siècles d’écrasement et de crime. D’un mot, il arrachait un barreau. Il disait par exemple: le Blanc méprise le quarteron, qui méprise le Mulâtre, qui méprise le Câpre, qui méprise le Zambo, qui méprise le Nègre, qui méprise le Z’indien, qui méprise sa Z’indienne, laquelle . . . frappe son chien, ha ha; et moi Ray Raymond Raymoninque je vous regarde tous et je ris en moi-même; et si vous me demandez qui est mon frère de sang, je vous dis que c’est le chien! 3. Quand le faire-noir drapa la terre avec sa sauvagerie habituelle, l’Indien-couli se prosterna face contre sol et ne bougea plus. Dictionneur s’approcha de lui à pas prudents. Il n’osait interrompre sa méditation. Une sorte de timidité a√ectueuse le paralysait, Il voulait lui serrer les mains, l’étreindre, éprouver le contact de sa joue imberbe contre la sienne que parsemait une maigre barbe 182

Notes to Pages 108–115

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

crépue comme une enfilade de grains de poivre. Il avait le sentiment qu’ils étaient désormais devenus des frères, lui, Dictionneur, le nègre et lui, Manoutchy, l’Indien-couli. Non pas des frères de sang mais des frères d’âme, ce qui était le plus important, se rendait-il compte à présent. Manoutchy finit par lever la tête et, l’apercevant, se mit à sourire. Ou . . . Tu . . . commença Dictionneur. — Ne dis rien! tu m’as vu vaincre le kalapani . . . — Le quoi? — Cette maudition qui nous suit à la trace depuis que notre peuple a dû quitter le pays natal, l’Inde. Maintenant . . . maintenant, ce pays-ci, la Martinique, ce pays-là . . . c’est le mien . . . C’est . . . le nôtre . . . — C’est le nôtre, oui! approuva Dictionneur en l’enlaçant. Francité in this usage means the realization by people in the French Caribbean that in order to succeed they have to espouse ‘‘French values.’’ James Arnold suggests that the maroon incarnates for the slave ‘‘the ideal figure of the super-male, necessary but inaccessible,’’ while the conteur has accepted his fate as a ‘‘castrated’’ Uncle Tom (31). Chamoiseau and Confiant, as a telling example, give the Creole word kalzyé (eyelid), which literally means the eye’s foreskin. Women were highly present in the Negritude movement. For example, Suzanne Césaire wrote the majority of articles in Tropiques, the review she launched with her husband in Martinique during the Second World War, when Martinique was occupied by the Vichy forces. The unsung Andrée Nardal had a literary salon where African, Caribbean, and African American writers and artists met, and she cofounded the very influential Revue du monde noir in Paris in the 1930s (on Nardal see Kesteloot, Les Écrivains noirs 63). While translations from Condé’s article are mine, translations from Césaire’s Notebook are Mireille Rosello’s. Condé voiced her objection in Berkeley on 7 April 1992 during a class entitled ‘‘Francophone Literature: Literature, Colonization, and Decolonization.’’ ‘‘Francisation,’’ as defined by Edouard Glissant in Le Discours antillais, is the ‘‘massive and hurried process through which Martinican society is saturated with forms, schemes, and even reflexes literally and artificially imposed by the outside’’ (105 n.16). 183

Notes to Pages 116–125 11. As Christine Di Stefano points out: ‘‘Contemporary Western feminism is firmly, if ambivalently, located in the modernist ethos, which made possible the feminist identification and critique of gender’’ (64). She goes on to note that postmodernism ‘‘embraces a skepticism regarding generalizable and universal claims of any sort, including those of feminism’’ (74). 12. Women act as keepers of tradition not for its own sake, as seems to be commonly implied when we talk about women being the keepers of tradition, but because of their opposition to the rule of colonizers, especially the French, who implemented their deep belief that there is no culture other than the French one. African women, by keeping the so-called traditions, were in fact acting in a revolutionary way by refusing to let their culture be rolled over by the French (see Thiam 166). chapter ∑ The Creolization of the Je

1. These remarks are taken from the French edition of Chamoiseau’s book Antan d’enfance. 2. The term négrillon has been translated in Childhood and School Days as ‘‘little boy.’’ Chamoiseau no doubt borrowed the term from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, where Césaire refers to the starving ‘‘négrillon somnolent’’ whose ‘‘shorn skull’’ is being hammered by the teacher with historical French references. Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Césaire’s translators) more appropriately translate négrillon as ‘‘little nigger’’ (76–77). 3. Translations from Antan d’enfance (Childhood) are Carol Volk’s, unless otherwise indicated. 4. Standard French would be descendre chercher or, rather, descendre pour chercher. 5. The French term for scribble ( gribouiller) literally means ‘‘to scribble,’’ but here it also connotes the idea of scrambling the ‘‘Cartesian’’ order. This word is also significant as we know that the little boy will become a writer. 6. Later Glissant will also extol the virtues of the méthode opaque, but it seems that, for him, the opacity of the Caribbeans is treated as a quasi-phenomenological description, a state of being or acting of a whole society rather than an injunction, at least in Le Discours antillais. Here Chamoiseau denaturalizes the notion of opacity by showing that it is a conscious method of opposition. 184

Notes to Pages 125–134 7. Pressentir means (1) to vaguely foresee and (2) to sound someone out on his or her intentions in a circuitous or indirect way. Thus the verb pressentir, in Chamoiseau’s usage, scrambles several significations of the verb: the vagueness of the future, awareness, and detour. 8. Translations from Chemin d’école (School Days) are Linda Coverdale’s. 9. Translations from Labat’s journal are mine. 10. The verb cancanner applies to the ‘‘talk’’ of parrots and to slanderous and idle chatter. 11. Translations from Ravines du devant-jour are mine. 12. Translations from Eau de café are James Ferguson’s, unless otherwise indicated. 13. ‘‘Tout ça, c’est de la vie de femme créole, rien que de très commun, d’infiniment banal, une déveine très supportable parce que ancestrale, alors ne viens pas déranger tout ce bel ordonnancement avec des mots vastes comme des savanes d’herbe de Guinée, des gestes cérémonieux qui te bailleraient l’allure d’un macommère ou tout comme’’ (125). Note: The word ordonnancement has in French both a financial meaning (an act by which an administrator orders an accountant to pay a public expenditure) and a technical meaning (the operations for implementing and checking a placement order). It is used incorrectly in Thimoléon’s speech in place of order or organization and is translated by James Ferguson with the neologism orderation. 14. ‘‘Elles qui n’ont jamais entendu de leurs bouches que des moignons de syllabes et, plus souvent que rarement, des insultes d’amateur de tafia. Mais ne t’imagines pas que c’est le bonheur, ce n’est pas ça du tout. D’ailleurs, elles ignorent superbement ce mot, lui préférant celui d’heureuseté. Non, c’est la vie de négresse qui tient tête et se débat avec la vilainerie, sans mollir’’ (126–27). Note: The term heureuseté has been created with the adjective heureux and does not exist in French. James Ferguson translates it as happiment. 15. See Perse’s Eloges: ‘‘Et les servantes de ta mère, grandes filles luisantes, remuaient leurs jambes chaudes près de toi qui tremblais’’ (6) [‘‘And your mother’s maids, tall glistening girls, moved their warm legs near you who trembled,’’ 7]. Translations from the Eloges are Louise Varèse’s. 16. Il ne tisse pas de nid et pond dans le giron de la terre dont il se nourrit. Ses plumes d’obsidienne sont tiquetées de sang. Sa 185

Notes to Pages 139–148

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

bouche qu’il ne ferme jamais est un sexe de femme, une grande coucoune, qui peut vous dévorer. Translations from Ecrire en pays dominé are mine. Translations from Lettres créoles are mine. See, for example, Césaire’s description of ‘‘ou à l’animalité subitement grave d’une paysanne, urinant debout, les jambes écartées, roides’’ (Cahier 14) [‘‘the sudden animality of a peasant woman, urinating standing, legs parted, sti√,’’ Notebook 15]. ‘‘Il peuple de son spectre la prophétie des nuits’’ (Perse, Eloges 3). ‘‘L’oiseau, de tous nos consanguins le plus ardent à vivre, mène aux confins du jour un singulier destin. Migrateur, et hanté d’inflation solaire, il voyage de nuit, les jours étant trop courts pour son activité. Par temps de lune grise couleur du gui des Gaules, il peuple de son spectre la prophétie des nuits. Et son cri dans la nuit et cri de l’aube elle-même: cri de guerre sainte à l’arme blanche’’ (Perse, Eloges 3). ‘‘Un homme glabre, en cotonnade jaune, pousse un cri: je suis Dieu! Et d’autres: il est fou! / et un autre envahi par le goût de tuer se met en marche vers le Château d’eau avec trois billes de poison: rose, verte, indigo’’ (Perse, Eloges 43). L’oiseau aux plumes jadis plus belles que le passé / exige le compte de ses plumes dispersées. The first action of consciousness, which is a consequence of the Cartesian operation of the cogito, is to negate or refuse, at least according to Sartre, who claims that ‘‘to think is to say no’’ [penser, c’est dire non]. Nevertheless, Caribbean consciousness cannot be compared to Cartesian consciousness, as the reasoning that follows the negation in Sartre’s thought is not ‘‘transported’’ by the workings of a powerfully specific Caribbean Imaginary. One rare negative utopian island in French literature is depicted by Georges Perec in his autobiography W ou le souvenir d’enfance. The island W is a concentration camp. ‘‘Iles cicatrices des eaux / Iles evidences de blessure / Iles miettes / Iles informes’’ (22). Translations from Bernabé’s and Prudent’s works are mine. See Césaire’s interview with Jacqueline Leiner in Tropiques: ‘‘I have spoken of the Martinican cultural backwardness. One aspect of this cultural backwardness is precisely the level of language, of créolité, if you wish, which has remained very low . . . at a rudimentary level, incapable of rising, of expressing abstract ideas. That is 186

Notes to Pages 156–163 why I wonder if such a work as mine would have been conceivable in Creole. And then to write it in Creole, basic questions should have been resolved . . . a grammar, a spelling that has not yet been established’’ (xi; my translation). chapter ∏ France and Its Caribbean ‘‘Peripheral’’

1. See in particular Josyane Savigneau’s article in Le Monde, 4 September 1992; and Milan Kundera’s essay in Philippe Sollers’s L’Infini 24 (summer 1991). 2. All translations from the French in this chapter are mine. 3. See Breton’s laudatory ‘‘Et c’est un Noir qui manie la langue française comme il n’est pas aujourd’hui un Blanc pour la manier’’ (preface to Notebook 80). 4. Le frémissement continu de terre sans faille au vertige de descente, sans préciser la feuille ni le fruit, sans agiter ces instructions de mots ou ces classements de fonctions qui séparent, qui sont la marque de l’esprit latéral, qui fouillent sans trouver, – la longue saoulerie de pas sans tenir aucun nom dans la tête. 5. Comprenant peut-être dans l’avenir qu’il fallait changer le mot et sans tremblement ni césure entreprendre le neuf langage – quel? – et à peine et sueur et douleur et en ivresse de descente balancer sa syntaxe dans les herbes des deux côtés. 6. La traverse à flanc de morne, la marche quand la pente est trop raide, la cadence quand le terrain est bon, et aux endroits où vraiment il n’y a rien à redire, le délice du pas corbeau. 7. Et chaque pas est un mot le mot te déporte tu tombes mais comment parler, tout ce parler qu’il faut Dlan voulait dire marcher le pas danser le pas. 8. Et vraiment où, où chercher où trouver le temps c’est-à-dire l’occasion la manière la plus légère nécessité (sans être aussitôt attitré sot mais alors sot qui est sotte avec accent aigu) de se demander pourquoi les acajous et les ravines et les ombrages tristes des manguiers ne lèvent pas dans le coeur le plus petit courant d’air qui pût être nommé amour ou tendresse ou passion ou simplement vision du paysage ou disons de ce qui est là dans l’entour. 9. Cette sou√rance cette incertitude des mots eux-mêmes, de leur signification, mais aussi de leur usage, qui poussent le langage jusqu’aux limites de la derision mais par bonheur ou compensation lui donnent son sens particulier, inaperçu, incompréhensible 187

Notes to Pages 163–172 pour tout autre que celui qui a tourne en boule dans ce creux de terre froissée des hauts du nord et de sels du sud. 10. Tu penses oui oui à côté il y /a qu’est-ce que c’est qu’il y a près / à côté de toi assis sur une fesse / comme un mantou tu penses / Il y a monsieur Lesprit qu’est-ce / que tu fais là monsieur. 11. Ils ne voulaient plus travailler si c’était travailler à la distillerie de Messieurs les frères du plan . . . ils ne voulaient plus . . . ils criaient ni békés ni mulâtres, ils ne savaient pas que dès cet instant ils avaient réalisé contre eux l’harmonie de l’ordre. conclusion

1. The term non-European is interesting, as it shows that the French at least consider their nation to be European and not specifically ‘‘French.’’ Thus the notion of Frenchness has expanded since the 1950s and 1960s, even within a right-wing type of ideology. It is also interesting to note that Le Figaro refers to the notion of origins while, as Silverman reminds us, the nation of France came from one of the two models of the nation with currency at the end of the eighteenth century: the contractual one (French), by which the Revolution ‘‘established the nation as a voluntary association or contract between free individuals’’ (Silverman 19), and the racial one (German). Is Le Figaro’s model for the nation based on racial, emotional, ‘‘German’’ values? In fact, as Silverman shows, Renan’s famous ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?,’’ which is considered by many as the expression par excellence of the notion of the nation as a contract, is formed of a confusing articulation of ‘‘rational’’ and, under the guise of culture, racial theories. Translations from the French in the conclusion are mine. 2. Bolland quotes the Jamaican anthropologist M. G. Smith, who contended in 1961 that ‘‘the multiracial creole complex’’ is a ‘‘graduated hierarchy of European and African elements,’’ with a ‘‘dominant Creole-European tradition’’ contrasting with the ‘‘African creole culture’’ at the opposite end of the spectrum. Smith concludes his essay: ‘‘The common culture, without which West Indian nationalism cannot develop the dynamics to create a West Indian nation, may, by its very nature and composition, preclude the nationalism that invokes it. This is merely another way of saying that the Creole culture which West Indians share is the basis of their division’’ (50–51). 188

Notes to Pages 172–174 3. According to Confiant in Eau de café, the French Caribbean saw de Gaulle, during the Second World War, as a reincarnation of Toussaint Louverture; he was the one that would save them from the békés. 4. It is interesting to note that Father Grégoire, a fervent advocate of Jews’ emancipation and the abolition of slavery, is also the author of a Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française (de Certeau, Julian, and Revel 11). Liberation and democracy can only happen in French and, keeping in step with the French Revolutionary ideology (freedom and equality at all costs), only at the cost of annihilation! 5. In an interview given to Le Monde Confiant compares the Creole language to a bicycle and the French language to a car. ‘‘Why use my bicycle when I can use my car?’’ he asks (‘‘Bicyclette’’ n.p.). Interestingly, in most advanced industrialized societies, although not in France, the car is considered a deadly and polluting means of transportation. Other means of transportation, especially the bicycle, are touted as being ecologically correct. 6. It is significant that Glissant, unlike Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Condé, has not felt the need to write his autobiography.

189

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Bibliography Segalen, Victor. Essai sur l’exotisme. Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1986. ————. Stèles. 1973. Paris: Poésie/Gallimard, 1989. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme. 1964. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Sheperd, Verene, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, eds. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Scharfman, Ronnie. Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1980. Schwarz-Bart, Simone. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. 1972. Paris: Points/Seuil, 1980. ————. Ti Jean l’horizon. 1979. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1981. Schwarz-Bart, Simone, and André Schwarz-Bart. Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Silverman, Maxim. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France. London: Routledge, 1992. Smith, Robert P., Jr. ‘‘Michèle Lacrosil: Novelist with a Color Complex.’’ The French Review 47 (1974): 783–90. Spear, Thomas. ‘‘Jouissances carnavalesques: Représentations de la sexualité.’’ Penser la créolité. Ed. Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet. Paris: Karthala, 1995. 135–52. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Thiam, Awa. La Parole aux négresses. Paris: Denoël, 1978. Todorov, Tzvetan. Poétique de la prose. Poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Toumson, Roger. La Transgression des couleurs: Littérature et langage des Antilles, vols. 1–2. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1989. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1983. Walton, Jean. ‘‘ ‘Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-folk’: Race, Psychoanalysis, and H. D.’s Borderline.’’ The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 395– 416. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Wynter, Sylvia. ‘‘Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban’s ‘Woman.’ ’’ Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton nj: Africa World Press, 1990. 335–72. 199

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200

Index Africa, 33–72; Caribbean return to, 1– 2, 6–7, 86–88; Condé’s rejection of, 50–59, 112–15, 117–18; creolist alternative to, 2, 102–7, 114–15, 141–42, 171–71, 188 n.2; European prejudice against, 21–23, 78–79, 113–14; Glissant’s engagement with, 34–50, 83, 90, 166–67, 178 n.4. See also Negritude; slavery L’Afrique fantôme (Leiris), 10–11 Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Confiant), 141–43, 156–58 Ain’t I a Woman (hooks), 11, 13–14, 30 Alibar, France, 26 Amegboh, Joseph: Béhanzin: Roi d’Abomey, 52 Amselle, Jean-Loup: Mestizo Logics, 169, 171 Anderson, Benedict, 171 André, Jacques, 7, 123, 132; Caraïbales, 5, 37, 41; L’Inceste focal, 23–30, 110–11 ‘‘André Breton’’ (Suzanne Césaire), 73, 82 Antan d’enfance (Chamoiseau), 121, 123– 26, 128–29, 131, 139–40, 141, 151– 53, 184 n.2 antillanité: gender bias of, 117–18; Glissant’s definition of, 101, 177 n.5; importance of, 7, 90, 92–93, 145– 46; in Suzanne Césaire’s works, 77– 79; unpopularity of, 57 ‘‘Antille’’ (Masson), 75 Antilles. See French Caribbean Antoine, Régis, 73, 74, 180 n.2 Apter, Emily, 66–67 Aragon, Louis, 33, 177 n.4

L’Archéologie du savoir (Foucault), 54, 58 Arnold, James, 24, 110, 112, 120, 131, 183 n.5 Austin, J. L., 103 Au Temps de l’antan (Chamoiseau), 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 104, 111, 151, 159, 163, 175 Balibar, Etienne: Race, Nation, Class, 169–70 Balzac, Honoré de, 94 Barber-Williams, Patricia, 63 Barthes, Roland, 91, 157, 159 Baudelaire, Charles, 66, 75 Beauharnais, Joséphine de, 87 ‘‘Beau sang giclé’’ (Césaire), 143 Bebel-Gisler, Dany, 97 Beckett, Samuel, 50, 174 Beckles, Hilary, 12–13, 15, 18–19, 31 Béhanzin, king of Dahomey, 50–59, 86, 160 Béhanzin: Roi d’Abomey (Amegboh), 52 Belain d’Esnambuc, Pierre, 87 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio: The Repeating Island, 164–65 Benveniste, Emile: ‘‘La Notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression linguistique,’’ 95 Bergson, Henri, 2 Bernabé, Jean, 147. See also Eloge de la créolité ‘‘Between the Particular’’ (Burton), 172 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 68 Bhabha, Homi, 103, 104–5, 111, 163 ‘‘Bicyclette’’ (Confiant), 148, 189 n.5

201

Index Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 5, 20– 24, 30, 32, 63–64, 70, 139–40 Blanchot, Maurice, 50, 159 Blank Darkness (Miller), 10 Bolland, Nigel O.: ‘‘Creolization and Creole Societies,’’ 106, 171–72, 188 n.2 Bolles, A. Lynn, 29–30 Brandt, Willy, 4 Braque, Georges: Oiseaux, 142 Brathwaite, Edward, 38, 106, 160 Breton, André, 7, 73–82, 90; ‘‘Le Dialogue créole,’’ 74, 75, 76, 81–82; Manifesto of Surrealism, 80; Martinique, charmeuse de serpents, 74–76, 81–82; preface to Césaire’s Notebook, 73, 140, 157, 158 Brodber, Erna, 29–30 Burton, Richard D. E.: ‘‘Between the Particular,’’ 172; ‘‘Debrouya,’’ 123; La Famille coloniale, 3, 131 Bush, Barbara, 10, 14–15, 19; Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 18 Butler, Judith, 66; Gender Trouble, 70, 71, 122 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Césaire). See Notebook of a Return to My Native Land Cajou (Lacrosil), 7, 32, 59–71 Camus, Albert, 102, 105 Capécia, Mayotte: Je suis Martiniquaise, 21, 23; La Négresse blanche, 21, 23 Caraïbales (André), 5, 37, 41 Caribbean Discourse (Glissant). See Le Discours antillais Caribbean geography, 73–100, 179 n.14; American character of, 55, 77–78, 83, 92; contemporary approaches to, 82–100, 130–31, 164–65; insular character of, 40, 90, 144–46, 186 n.25; and marronage, 42, 83–84, 87–89, 94–95, 117–18, 145– 46, 177 n.4; oral literature and, 89,

91–100; paradisiacal character of, 5, 73, 84, 114, 150, 177 n.3, 180 n.2; Surrealist vision of, 7, 73–82, 90; view of, from above, 79, 176; view of, from below, 63, 87, 94, 97–98, 160 Caribbean history, 33–59, 82–100; Condé’s interrogation of, 50–57; as geography, 82–91, 97–98, 144–46; Glissant’s ‘‘thick’’ narrative of, 33– 50, 165–67; as nonhistory, 1–2, 33– 34, 38–40, 72, 98, 108–9, 151; reframing of, by Caribbean intellectuals, 6–7, 10, 30–32, 33–34, 57– 59; transitions in, 130–31 Caribbean Imaginary, 1–8; and Caribbean Symbolic, 1, 3–5; in Chamoiseau’s work, 121, 123, 152–53; Glissant’s model of, 144, 167, 175– 76; importance of, 1–5, 10, 20, 54, 186 n.24; in Lacrosil’s Cajou, 59. See also Imaginary Caribbean Caribbean literature: animals in, 85, 126–29, 185 n.10; autobiographical, 56, 62, 64, 121–53, 189 n.6; challenge of, to Metropolitan theory, 1– 5, 33–34, 44–50, 91–100, 169–76; nonrealistic framework of, 48, 94; as performance, 31, 102–3, 122; postcolonial approach to, 5, 63, 104–11, 159; postmodernity of, 44, 50, 115–17, 159; reception of, in France, 8, 155–67; specificity of, 3, 107, 109; white, 6, 73–82, 115, 142– 43, 145, 177 n.3, 180 n.2. See also orality Caribbean women, 9–32; in Chamoiseau’s work, 123–26; in Condé’s work, 7, 55–57, 61–62, 112–20; in Confiant’s work, 133–38; créolité and, 109–11, 112, 121–22, 148; in Lacrosil’s Cajou, 7, 59–72; psychoanalytical discourse on, 6, 9–10, 20– 30; resistance of, 7, 17–19, 116–17,

202

Index 119–20, 132–33, 184 n.12; sexuality of, 10–18, 26–27, 59–71, 118, 133– 36, 185 n.15; in slave societies, 9– 20, 30–31, 178 n.2; Western histories of, 6, 9–20, 11–13, 15–20, 30– 32. See also feminist criticism La Case du commandeur (Glissant): Caribbean history in, 39–40, 45, 54; French language in, 160, 166–67; search for origins in, 41, 43, 52–53, 86 Certeau, Michel de, 55, 92, 125–26, 172, 189 Césaire, Aimé: contemporary revaluation of, 6, 21, 58, 112–15, 117, 140– 46, 155–60, 175; French style of, 148, 155, 186 n.28; and French Surrealism, 73, 90; insular geography of, 88, 90, 118, 145; and marronage, 33, 177 n.4; and Martinique, 112, 141–42, 145, 156–57, 186 n.28. Works: ‘‘Beau sang giclé,’’ 143; Et les Chiens se taisaient, 112. See also Negritude; Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; Tropiques Césaire, Suzanne, 7, 72, 73, 75, 76–82, 108; ‘‘André Breton,’’ 73, 82; ‘‘Le Grand Camouflage,’’ 77–82, 150; ‘‘Malaise d’une civilisation,’’ 77. See also Tropiques Chamoiseau, Patrick, 121–53; on antillanité, 92; compared with Confiant, 129–30, 134; compared with Fanon, 139–40; compared with Glissant, 160, 161, 163, 173, 189 n.6; Condé’s challenge to, 7, 115–20; créolité of, 7– 8, 101–11, 121–29, 151–52, 183 n.6; debt of, to Césaire, 141, 143–46, 157, 184 n.2; debt of, to Glissant, 125, 144–46, 184 n.6; debt of, to SaintJohn Perse, 6, 115, 142–43, 145; Imaginary and Symbolic realms of, 5, 123, 152–53; importance of, 8, 174; orality of, 47, 77, 91, 97–98,

120, 123–26; reputation of, in France, 155–59, 167; suspicions of, about French language, 93, 97–98, 140, 144, 147, 185 n.7; Suzanne Césaire’s challenge to, 78. Works: Antan d’enfance, 121, 123–26, 128–29, 131, 139–40, 141, 151–53, 184 n.2; Au Temps de l’antan, 143; Chemin d’école, 121, 126–28, 184 n.2; Chroniques des sept misères, 123; Ecrire en pays dominé, 5, 139–40, 141, 144–46, 147; Texaco, 156. See also Eloge de la créolité; Lettres créoles Chateaubriand, René de, 180 n.2 Chemin d’école (Chamoiseau), 121, 126– 28, 184 n.2 Chroniques des sept misères (Chamoiseau), 123 Claudel, Paul, 102 Cli√ord, James: The Predicament of Culture, 82, 87 Columbus, Christopher, 40, 41–42, 73, 85, 161 Condé, Maryse: as autobiographer, 56, 189 n.6; on Césairian Negritude, 21, 55, 112–15; femihumanism of, 19, 55–57, 61–62, 111, 115–20; importance of, 8, 31–32, 33, 173–74; intimist créolité of, 101, 111, 112–20; on Lacrosil’s Cajou, 61–62; on myth of Africa, 6–7, 50–59. Works: Les Derniers Rois mages, 50–59; En Attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon), 114, 118; I Tituba, 19, 116–17, 120; ‘‘Négritude césairienne, négritude senghorienne,’’ 21, 112–14; ‘‘Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,’’ 114, 118; La Parole des femmes, 61–62, 116, 118–19; Ségou, 55, 117 Confiant, Raphaël: on Césaire, 6, 141– 43, 145, 156–58; compared with Glissant, 160, 161, 173, 174, 175, 189 n.6; Creole works of, 146–53,

203

Index Confiant, Raphaël (cont.) 183 n.6; créolité of, 7–8, 120, 121–23, 129–38, 148–51; French works of, 148, 150–51, 172, 189 n.5; Glissant’s critique of, 105–7, 163; reputation of, in France, 155–59, 167. Works: Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle, 141–43, 156–58; ‘‘Bicyclette,’’ 148, 189 n.5; Eau de café, 121, 131–33, 134, 137–38, 149, 150, 189 n.3; ‘‘Petit Lexique du pays Creole,’’ 103–4; Ravines du devant-jour, 103, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133–37, 142, 149–50, 171; La Vierge du grand retour, 101–2, 103. See also Eloge de la créolité; Lettres créoles Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingo (Hilliard d’Auberteuil), 17 Corzani, Jack, 57, 60–61 Creole language: compared with standard French, 93–94, 124–25, 184 n.4 n.5; and créolité, 146–53, 158–59; and gender, 24–25, 110–11, 134; limitations of, 172–73, 186 n.28; strengths of, 99. See also orality créolité, 101–20; compared with antillanité, 77–79, 90; compared with francité, 7, 92, 108, 120, 183 n.4; compared with Negritude, 7–8, 108, 114–15, 122, 146; creative expression of, 121–53; gender di√erence in, 7, 109–11, 112–20, 122, 123–26, 133– 36, 174; and hybridity, 103–5, 109– 10, 151, 163; importance of, 171–72; limitations of, 102–11, 157–59; struggle of, with universalist assumptions, 106–9, 111, 145, 158–59, 171–74, 174. See also Creole language; Eloge de la créolité creolization: 121–53; compared with créolité, 7–8, 105–7, 120, 122–23, 144, 152–53; interstitial quality of, 44, 123, 161–62, 173. See also créolité

‘‘Creolization and Creole Societies’’ (Bolland), 106, 171–72, 188 n.2 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 76, 89 Dahomey, Jacky: ‘‘Habiter la créolité ou le heurt de l’universel,’’ 104, 107– 9, 183 n.4 Dahomey, kingdom of, 50–59 Dash, J. Michael, 181 n.12 Debbash, Yvan, 36 Debien, Gabriel, 13, 16–17, 18, 36 ‘‘Debrouya’’ (Burton), 123 La Défaite de la pensée (Finkielkraut), 169, 170 Delacroix, Eugène, 46 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 87 Delgrès, Louis, 40, 87, 117 Demain Jab-Herma (Lacrosil), 59 Depestre, René, 33, 120, 177 n.4 Les Derniers Rois mages (Condé), 50–59 Derrida, Jacques, 91, 127 ‘‘Le Dialogue créole’’ (Breton and Masson), 74, 75, 76, 81–82 Le Discours antillais (Glissant): Caribbean history in, 38–40, 117; Caribbean identity in, 58, 105, 107, 147, 160, 183 n.10, 184 n.6; Caribbean landscape in, 46, 83–84, 85–87, 89; editions of, 178 n.5, 181 n.12; gendered discourse in, 110; orality in, 48, 93–94, 95–96, 98–100, 181 n.17; ‘‘postmodern’’ marronage in, 44, 47 Di Stefano, Christine, 184 n.11 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 149, 159, 175 DuBois, W. E. B., 78, 151, 180 n.8 Durand, Gilbert: Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, 2–3 Du Tertre, Father, 17; Histoire générale des Antilles, 74 Eau de café (Confiant), 121, 131–33, 134, 137–38, 149, 150, 189 n.3 Eco, Umberto, 157, 159 Ecrire en pays dominé (Chamoiseau), 5, 139–40, 141, 144–46, 147

204

Index Eloge de la créolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant), 101–20; argument of, 97–98, 102–3; authors of, 101; on Césaire, 143, 157; challenge of, to French literary forms, 92, 93; Condé’s criticisms of, 7, 112–20; creative limitations of, 7–8, 121–22, 130, 144, 152–53; intellectual limitations of, 78, 104–11, 151 Eloges (Perse), 133, 142–43 En Attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon) (Condé), 114, 118 Essai sur l’exotisme (Segalen), 49, 98, 179 n.10, 182 n.18 Et les Chiens se taisaient (Césaire), 112 ‘‘Expanding the Notion of Créolité’’ (1993 colloquium), 112 La Famille coloniale (Burton), 3, 131 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 107, 137, 157; Black Skin, White Masks, 5, 20–24, 30, 32, 63–64, 70, 139–40 Faulkner, William, 50, 83, 89, 160, 173 feminist criticism: Caribbean, 7, 19, 55–57, 61–62, 111, 112–20, 173–74; on feminine fetishism, 66–72; and postmodernism, 115–16, 184 n.11; on slave societies, 12–20 Ferguson, James, 185 n.13 n.14 Figaro, 188 n.1 Figaro-Magazine, 170 Finkielkraut, Alain: La Défaite de la pensée, 169, 170; The Imaginary Jew, 4 Fisher, Michael, 56, 58 Flannigan, Arthur, 118 Flaubert, Gustave, 104, 181 n.15 Fontanier, Pierre: Traité des figures, 149 Fontenay, Elizabeth de, 129 Foucault, Michel, 14, 34, 91, 125; L’Archéologie du savoir, 54, 58; ‘‘What Is,’’ 174–75 Fouchard, Jean: Marrons du syllabaire, 36, 47 France, 155–67; assimilationist policy

of, 21–23, 40, 57, 107–9, 141–42, 157, 169–71; changing cultural identity of, 169–71, 188 n.1; reception of Caribbean writers in, 8, 152, 155– 60, 167. See also French Caribbean; French language francité, 7, 86–87, 92, 108, 120, 183 n.4, 183 n.4 n.10 French Caribbean: cultural identity of, 1–5, 101–20, 151–52, 171–76, 188 n.2; democracy in, 109, 162–64, 189 n.4; encounter of, with modernity, 108–9, 139–40; family relationships in, 3–4, 6–7, 14–15, 20–31; indigenous people of, 34, 43, 83, 146; political identity of, 57, 109, 172, 189 n.3 n.4; political ideology of, 37, 40, 92, 172; psychoanalytical discourse on, 5–7, 9–10, 20–30, 32, 59–70. See also Caribbean geography; Caribbean history; Caribbean literature; Creole language French language: Césaire’s use of, 140; challenge to, by contemporary writers, 47, 92–93, 99, 144, 146–53, 189 n.5; enriching of, by contemporary writers, 121, 155, 160–62, 167, 172–73; high status of, in Caribbean, 147–48. See also Creole language French Review, 60 French Revolution, 37, 40, 92, 172 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 6, 9, 20, 23, 28, 134; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 68; Jensen’s Gradiva, 59 Frobenius, Leo, 77 Garcia, Luc, 51, 52 García Márquez, Gabriel, 50 Garvey, Marcus, 107 Gauguin, Paul, 107 Gaulle, General de, 164, 172, 176 Gaultier, Jules de, 181 n.15 Gautier, Arlette, 11–12, 16, 19

205

Index gender. See Caribbean women Gender Trouble (Butler), 70, 71, 122 Gisler, Antoine, 35, 47 Glissant, Edouard, 33–50, 82–100; and antillanité, 7, 14, 82–91, 101, 145–46, 177 n.5; compared with Condé, 57–59; and Creole language, 146–47; and creolization, 7–8, 105– 11, 120, 122, 131; on the Diverse, 5, 99–100, 106, 177 n.7, 182 n.18; Faulkner’s influence on, 50, 83, 89, 160, 173; fractured French of, 160– 62, 173; gendered discourse of, 110, 117–18; importance of, 8, 173–76, 189 n.6; influence of, on Chamoiseau, 77, 144; on marronage as history, 6–7, 31–32, 33–50; on marronage as landscape, 88–89; on marronage as writing, 6, 58–59, 161, 162, 175; on naming, 41–44, 179 n.8; on orality, 47–49, 77, 87–88, 90–100, 181 n.17; reputation of, in France, 155, 156, 159–60, 167; ‘‘rhizome’’ theory of, 49, 52, 63, 87; on rhythm, 94–96, 160–62, 165–66, 181 n.17; on ‘‘submarine’’ consciousness, 38, 160, 178 n.4. Works: L’Intention poétique, 89; Introduction à une poétique du divers, 106, 111; La Lézarde, 46, 50, 83, 84–85, 94, 95, 97, 156; Mahogany, 34, 37–38, 42– 49, 84, 87, 88–89, 107, 178 n.4; ‘‘Poétique de la Relation,’’ 44, 49, 52, 89–90, 181 n.12; Tout-Monde, 156. See also La Case du commandeur; Le Discours antillais; Malemort; Le Quatrième Siècle globalization, 8, 151–52, 170–71, 177 n.7 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de, 103 Gorog-Karady, Veronika, 98 Gracchus, Fritz, 23, 27–28, 30, 132; Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétés afroaméricaines, 24, 27

‘‘Le Grand Camouflage’’ (Suzanne Césaire), 77–82, 150 Greenblatt, Stephen: Marvelous Possessions, 41–42, 73 Grégoire, Henri: Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois, 189 n.4 Grosz, Elizabeth: ‘‘Lesbian Fetishism,’’ 66, 67, 68–70 Guadeloupe: in Condé’s work, 117; French domination of, 3, 29, 38, 57, 109, 152, 157; in Glissant’s work, 57, 100, 152; in Lacrosil’s work, 59–60; white writers from, 145, 180 n.2 Guattari, Felix, 49, 87 Gun, dieu de la ferraille (Lam), 81 ‘‘Habiter la créolité ou le heurt de l’universel’’ (Dahomey), 104, 107–9, 183 n.4 Haiti, 36, 79, 96, 117, 148, 178 n.2 Hall, Robert: Pidgin and Creole Languages, 148 Hanold, Norbert, 59, 71 Hearn, Lafcadio, 107 Heath, Stephen, 113 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 91, 108; Glissant’s challenge to, 34, 37, 41, 45, 47, 49, 83 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Michel-René: Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingo, 17 Histoire générale des Antilles (Du Tertre), 74 Un Homme comme les autres (Maran), 21– 23 homosexuality: female, 65–71; male, 20, 25–28, 132 hooks, bell: Ain’t I a Woman, 11, 13–14, 30 Hugo, Victor, 156 Husserl, Edmund, 96 Husson, Louis Thomas, 38–39 hybridity: in Condé’s writing, 63; in

206

Index Confiant’s writing, 151; of Creole language, 147; and créolité, 103–5, 109–11, 163; in Glissant’s writing, 50. See also race Imaginary Caribbean: black Father in, 20–26, 28–29, 44–45, 68–69, 118, 136; black Mother in, 24–30, 69–70, 132–33, 136–37, 152, 156, 178 n.4; versus Caribbean Imaginary, 6, 8; white Father in, 3, 20, 131, 137. See also Caribbean geography The Imaginary Jew (Finkielkraut), 4 L’Inceste focal (André), 23–30, 110–11 L’Intention poétique (Glissant), 89 Introduction à une poétique du divers (Glissant), 106, 111 L’Isolé Soleil (Maximin), 117 I Tituba (Condé), 19, 116–17, 120 Jamaica, 29–30, 36, 55, 106, 117 Jensen’s Gradiva (Freud), 59 Je suis Martiniquaise (Capécia), 21, 23 Jeune Nation, 156 Julian, Dominique, 172 Kesteloot, Lilyan, 97, 113 Klein, Melanie, 66 Kristeva, Julia, 92, 157, 159 Labat, Jean-Baptiste: Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique, 12, 35–36, 74, 85, 128–29 Lacan, Jacques: on Imaginary and Symbolic, 1, 2, 3–4, 150, 153; limitations of, 6, 7, 9, 20, 23 Lacrosil, Michèle, 33; Cajou, 7, 32, 59– 71; Demain Jab-Herma, 59 Lafaye, Louise de, 180 n. 2 La Fayette, Madame de: La Princesse de Clèves, 150 Lam, Wifredo, 76, 79, 81; Gun, dieu de la ferraille, 81 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 180 n.2

Lautréamont, Count de, 158, 159 Laye, Camara, 158 Le Brun, Annie, 157–58, 159 Lecointe-Marcillac, 17 Légitime Défense, 78, 180 n.7 Le Go√, Jacques, 57 Leiner, Jacqueline, 186 n.28 Leiris, Michel, 158; L’Afrique fantôme, 10–11 Lembeye-Boy, Pierette, 26 Léro, Etienne, 180 n.7 ‘‘Lesbian Fetishism’’ (Grosz), 66, 67, 68–70 Lettres créoles (Chamoiseau and Confiant), 47, 77, 97, 110, 115, 141, 143, 145, 183 n.6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91; Race et histoire, 169–70; Tristes Tropiques, 75, 87, 151, 152 La Lézarde (Glissant), 46, 50, 83, 84–85, 94, 95, 97, 156 Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétés afroaméricaines (Gracchus), 24, 27 Lionnet, Françoise, 55; Postcolonial Representations, 111 Lopes, Henri, 158 Lyotard, Jean-François, 50 Mahogany (Glissant), 34, 37–38, 42– 49, 84, 87, 88–89, 107, 178 n.4 Mair, Lucille, 19 ‘‘Malaise d’une civilisation’’ (Suzanne Césaire), 77 Malemort (Glissant): Caribbean landscape in, 83–86, 90, 97; challenge to French culture in, 47, 152, 160–65; Chamoiseau’s reading of, 144; Liberté Longoué in, 37, 41–42 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 90 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton), 80 Manigat, Leslie, 36, 178 n.2 Maran, René: Un Homme comme les autres, 21–23 Mariott, David, 63

207

Index Maroon Societies (Price), 35, 177 n.4 marronage: in Chamoiseau’s work, 129; competing theories of, 36–37, 178 n.2; in Condé’s work, 55–56, 116– 18; in Confiant’s work, 131; definition of, 35–36, 177 n.4; gender bias of, 18, 183 n.5; geography of, 42, 83– 84, 87–89, 94–95, 117–18, 145–46, 177 n.4; in Glissant’s work, 6, 33– 50, 55, 58–59, 175; grand and petit, 2, 36, 123; writing as, 94, 140, 161, 162 Marrons du syllabaire (Fouchard), 36, 47 Martinique: Aimé Césaire’s view of, 112, 141–42, 145, 156–57, 186 n.28; Breton’s stay in, 73–82; Chamoiseau on, 146, 156; Confiant on, 101–2, 152, 164; French domination of, 3, 29, 38, 57, 109, 130–31, 152, 172; Glissant’s view of, 40, 82–91, 96, 100, 107; King Béhanzin’s stay in, 51, 52–55; Suzanne Césaire’s view of, 76–82, 183 n.7 Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Breton), 74–76, 81–82 Marvelous Possessions (Greenblatt), 41– 42, 73 Masson, André, 7; ‘‘Antille,’’ 75; ‘‘Le Dialogue créole,’’ 74, 75, 76, 81–82 Maurras, Charles, 130 Maximin, Daniel: L’Isolé Soleil, 117 Maynard de Queilhe, Louis de, 180 n.2 Menil, René, 180 n.7 Meschonnic, Henri, 95, 96 Mestizo Logics (Amselle), 169, 171 Miller, Christopher L.: Blank Darkness, 10 Minh-ha, Trinh T.: Woman, Native, Other, 119, 174 Moitt, Bernard, 11, 12 Morrissey, Marietta: Slave Women in the New World, 12, 13, 15–16, 17–18, 20 La Négresse blanche (Capécia), 21, 23 Negritude: attraction of, for Cham-

oiseau, 140, 141, 143–44, 146; compared with antillanité, 57, 77–79, 90–91, 92–93, 117–18, 177 n.5; compared with créolité, 7–8, 108, 114–15, 122, 146; Condé’s critique of, 21, 50–59, 112–20; Confiant’s critique of, 131–33, 141–43; Sartre’s assessment of, 157, 159; in Suzanne Césaire’s work, 77–78, 183 n.7; virile myth of, 55, 112 ‘‘Négritude césairienne, négritude senghorienne’’ (Condé), 21, 112–14 ‘‘Négritude in the Feminine Mode’’ (Zimra), 21 Nicolaïsen, Wilhelm, 97 Nonon, E., 85 Nord-Sud (Reverdy), 181 n.10 Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Césaire): Breton’s admiration for, 73, 75, 140; Caribbean landscape in, 90, 145; Chamoiseau’s critique of, 140, 184 n.2; compared with Perse’s Eloges, 143; Condé’s critique of, 21, 112–13; importance of, 177 n.3 ‘‘La Notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression linguistique’’ (Benveniste), 95 Nouveau Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique (Labat), 12, 35–36, 74, 85, 128–29 Oiseaux (Braque), 142 Oiseaux (Perse), 142 orality: plantation system and, 84, 87– 88; restoration of, 41, 46, 47–49, 77, 89–100, 138, 158–59, 181 n.17; women’s role in, 110, 118, 120, 121, 123–26 ‘‘Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer’’ (Condé), 114, 118 ‘‘Orphée noir’’ (Sartre), 114, 157 Pageaux, Daniel-Henri: ‘‘Raphaël Confiant: Ou, La traversée paradoxale d’une décennie,’’ 158–59

208

Index La Parole des femmes (Condé), 61–62, 116, 118–19 Pascal, Blaise, 102 Pelage, Marie-Flore, 62 Perec, Georges: W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 186 n.25 Pétain, Maréchal, 179 n.6 ‘‘Petit Lexique du pays Creole’’ (Confiant), 103–4 Peytraud, Lucien, 17 Pfa√, Françoise, 115, 116, 117, 174 Pidgin and Creole Languages (Hall), 148 Place, Jean-Michel, 76 Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (Schwarz-Bart and Schwarz-Bart), 101 Plato, 91 Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (Simone Schwarz-Bart), 56, 62, 120 ‘‘Poétique de la Relation’’ (Glissant), 44, 49, 52, 89–90, 181 n.12 ‘‘Poétique et politique de la mondialité’’ (2002 conference), 177 n.7 Postcolonial Representations (Lionnet), 111 The Predicament of Culture (Cli√ord), 82, 87 Présence africaine, 177 n.4 Price, Richard: Maroon Societies, 35, 177 n.4 La Princesse de Clèves (La Fayette), 150 Pritchard, Annie, 184 n.2 Proust, Marcel, 86 Prudent, Lambert-Felix, 147–48 Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (Tate), 63, 71 The Psychoanalysis of Race (Walton), 63

‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ (Renan), 188 n.1

Le Quatrième Siècle (Glissant): Caribbean landscape in, 83, 84, 85, 88, 94–95; critical reception of, 156, 160; marronage in, 34–50, 55, 117–18; naming in, 41–42, 179 n.8

Rabelais, François, 158, 159 race: in Caribbean fiction, 59–72, 101– 2, 122, 130, 133–34, 136–38; and créolité, 101–7, 151; as ‘‘culture,’’ 169– 71; and gender, 111–16, 119; and métissage, 1, 21–25, 57, 59–71, 79, 111; psychoanalysis of, 20–30, 59– 72. See also hybridity; slavery Race et histoire (Lévi-Strauss), 169–70 Race, Nation, Class (Balibar and Wallerstein), 169–70 ‘‘Raphaël Confiant: Ou, La traversée paradoxale d’une décennie’’ (Pageaux), 158–59 Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois (Grégoire), 189 n.4 Ravines du devant-jour (Confiant), 103, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133–37, 142, 149– 50, 171 Reagan, Ronald, 4 Renan, Ernest: ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ 188 n.1 The Repeating Island (Benítez-Rojo), 164–65 Revel, Jacques, 172 Reverdy, Pierre, 80; Nord-Sud, 181 n.10 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea, 63 Ricoeur, Paul: Temps et récit, 2 ‘‘Righting the Calabash’’ (Zimra), 30 Rimbaud, Arthur, 158, 159, 181 n.17 Riviere, Joan: ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’’ 69 Roberts, Diane, 173 Rosello, Mireille, 117, 184 n.2 Rousseau, Henri, 7, 74, 79, 84 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37, 91, 114 Saint-John Perse, 6, 74, 115, 130, 141– 44, 145, 180 n.2; Eloges, 133, 142–43; Oiseaux, 142

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Index San Domingo, 11, 17, 36, 88 Sarraute, Nathalie, 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 33, 34, 111, 159, 186 n.24; ‘‘Orphée noir,’’ 114, 157 Schoelcher, Victor, 87, 158 Schor, Naomi, 66, 67 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 111; Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, 56, 62, 120; Ti Jean l’horizon, 118 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, and André Schwarz-Bart: Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, 101 Segalen, Victor: Essai sur l’exotisme, 49, 98, 179 n.10, 182 n.18 Ségou (Condé), 55, 117 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 113, 114, 166 Serres, Michel, 157, 159 Shakespeare, William: The Tempest, 113–14 Silverman, Maxim, 170, 188 n.1 slavery, 9–32; and Creole language, 93; and democracy, 163–64, 189 n.4; female resistance to, 17–19, 116–17; female submission to, 13, 178 n.2; and gender, 9–13, 19–20; history writing on, 6, 9–20, 30–32, 33, 89, 92, 166–67; psychoanalytical writing on, 9–10, 20–21, 23–24, 28, 30, 62, 69; and sexuality, 12–18, 110; Western denial of, 4, 78. See also marronage; race: and métissage Slave Women in Caribbean Society (Bush), 18 Slave Women in the New World (Morrissey), 12, 13, 15–16, 17–18, 20 Smith, M. G., 188 n.2 Smith, Robert P., Jr., 60 Sollers, Philippe, 91 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 152 Soyinka, Wole, 92 Spear, Thomas, 104, 110 Spivak, Gayatri, 110 Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (Durand), 2–3

Surinam, 36 Surrealism, 73–82, 90, 181 n.10 n.11 Tate, Claudia, 5; Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 63, 71 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 113–14 Temps et récit (Ricoeur), 2 Texaco (Chamoiseau), 156 Ti Jean l’horizon (Schwarz-Bart), 118 Todorov, Tzvetan, 149, 159 Touré, Sékou, 114 Toussaint-Louverture, 40, 87, 189 n.3 Tout-Monde (Glissant), 156 Traité des figures (Fontanier), 149 Traversay, Prévost de, 180 n.2 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 75, 87, 151, 152 Tropiques (ed. Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire), 76–77, 82, 85, 183 n.7, 186 n.28 universalism, 169–76; Condé’s struggle with, 56–57; creolists’ struggle with, 106–9, 111, 145, 158–59, 174; Glissant’s challenge to, 40, 47, 91– 92, 97, 99–102, 173–76 Vespucci, Amerigo, 73 Vico, Giambattista, 41 La Vierge du grand retour (Confiant), 101– 2, 103 Vitrac, Roger, 80, 181 n.11 Walker, Alice, 7, 115–16, 119, 120 Wallerstein, Immanuel: Race, Nation, Class, 169–70 Walton, Jean: The Psychoanalysis of Race, 63 ‘‘What Is’’ (Foucault), 174–75 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 63 Wing, Betsy, 179 n.9, 181 n.13 ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’’ (Riviere), 69 Woman, Native, Other (Minh-ha), 119, 174

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Index W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Perec), 186 n.25 Young, Robert, 103, 104, 109–10, 136, 151

Zimra, Clarisse: ‘‘Négritude in the Feminine Mode,’’ 21; ‘‘Righting the Calabash,’’ 30 Zola, Emile, 94 Zumthor, Paul, 92, 96

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