Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean 9781846318412, 9781846317941

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Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 24

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Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editors EDMUND SMYTH Manchester Metropolitan University

CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM University of Oxford

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

DAVID WALKER University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 8 Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory

16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster: The Rhetoric of Image-Text

9 Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History

17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics

10 Celia Britton, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction

18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative

11 Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature 12 Lawrence R. Schehr, French Post-Modern Masculinities: From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity 13 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress 14 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image 15 Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon

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19 David H. Walker, Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature 20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel 21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory 22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France 23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History

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Louise H ardwick

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

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First published 2013 by First published 2013Press by Liverpool University Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street 4 Cambridge LiverpoolStreet Liverpool L69 7ZU L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 Louise Hardwick Copyright © 2013 Louise Hardwick The right of Louise Hardwick to be identified as the author of this book has The of Louise to bewith identified as the author of this has beenright asserted by herHardwick in accordance the Copyright, Designs andbook Patents been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a All rightssystem, reserved. No part of this book mayorbebyreproduced, in a retrieval or transmitted, in any form any means,stored electronic, retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written mechanical, photocopying, recording, permission of or theotherwise, publisher.without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-841-2 cased

ISBN 978-1-84631-841-2 cased Web PDF eISBN 978-1-84631-794-1 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster by Carnegie Book (UK) Production, Lancaster PrintedTypeset and bound by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition

1

1 The Emergence of a Tradition

24

2 Apples and Mimic Men: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une Enfance créole

55

3 The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour and Le Cahier de romances 83 4 Alienation and Estrangement in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer 108 5 Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora: Daniel Maximin’s Tu, c’est l’enfance and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia 132 6 Thwarted Expectations? Stasis and Change in Haiti in Dany Laferrière’s L’Odeur du café and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin 158 7 Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes

181

Afterword 203 Notes

208

Bibliography 230 Index

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau and Dany Laferrière for generously discussing several of the ideas expressed in this analysis with me. At the University of Oxford, I am particularly indebted to Toby Garfitt for his guidance, enthusiasm and friendship, which proved inspirational. I am extremely grateful to Jane Hiddleston, Jonathan Mallinson and Jennifer Yee, who provided advice and camaraderie. During my Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, Martin Crowley and Emma Wilson offered valuable support. At the University of Birmingham, colleagues in French Studies have been a source of friendly encouragement in the final stages of the project, and Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert, Angela Kershaw and Berny Sèbe kindly provided helpful comments on sections of the manuscript. Conrad James in Hispanic Studies and Stewart Brown in the Centre of West African Studies organized events which brought new perspectives to my own work on the Caribbean. Particular thanks go to Jennifer Birkett, who read the work in its entirety; her generous guidance was invaluable. My students have brought the récits d’enfance to life, and I am especially grateful to those who shared their own responses to these texts with me during seminars at Birmingham. At Liverpool University Press, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the proposal and manuscript for their constructive comments, as well as Anthony Cond for his efficiency and encouragement. In the wider Francophone Caribbean community, Jenny Zobel and Emily Zobel Marshall discussed aspects of Joseph Zobel’s literary production with me, and Martine Maximin discussed her stage adaptation of Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer; for their kind encouragement, I am hugely grateful. Fellow members of the community of French and Francophone studies in general, and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

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Acknowledgements

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in particular, have been inspirational. Special thanks must go to Patrick Crowley, Charles Forsdick and Lorna Milne. A three-year doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council enabled me to commence this project, and a further AHRC grant permitted me to visit Martinique and Guadeloupe. Funding from the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham, Homerton College, Cambridge, the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Mairie de Trouville, Trinity College and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, the Université Laval, Quebec, and the European Science Foundation assisted me with travel to present my work at a number of international conferences. Family and friends, in Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford and elsewhere, have been a fantastic source of support, distraction and adventure. This book is dedicated to my parents, Elaine and George Hardwick. Sections of the Introduction build on the insights I explored in the article ‘The Rise of the récit d’enfance in the Francophone Caribbean’ in Postcolonial Poetics, edited by Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston, and a section of Chapter 4 draws on my earlier article ‘“Est-ce cela être aliené?” Alienation in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer’ in Alienation and Alterity, edited by Paul Cooke and Helen Vassallo. I would like to thank the editors for permission to reproduce this material.

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Sinon l’enfance, qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y a plus? Saint-John Perse, Pour fêter une enfance, Eloges (1911) du crachat sur la face et cette histoire parmi laquelle je marche mieux    que durant le jour la nuit en feu la nuit déliée le songe forcé le feu qui de l’eau nous redonne l’horizon outrageux bien sûr un enfant entrouvrira la porte… Aimé Césaire, ‘En vérité…’, Ferraments (1960) that child who puts the shell’s howl to his ear, hears nothing, hears everything that the historian cannot hear, the howls of all the races that crossed the water Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea Is History’, The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980)

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Introduction: Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition

Et j’ai beau avaler sept gorgées d’eau trois à quatre fois par vingt-quatre heures me revient mon enfance dans un hoquet secouant Léon-Gontran Damas, ‘Hoquet’, Pigments (1937)

Representations of childhood are anything but simple. Childhood may be, on the one hand, a democratic trope which derives its appeal from the fact that it is a stage common to all humankind, or it may serve to emphasize the intense alienation and isolation of individual experience. Writing about childhood can function as an initiation into an unknown society, the child’s learning curve correlating with that of the reader. Alternatively, it may be an act of consolidation, as readers – particularly those who are familiar with the context being described – identify recognizable experiences. While childhood often evokes nostalgia and celebration of (a lost) innocence, it is just as frequently used in order to cast a critical eye over significant moments of social conditioning or indoctrination, and their consequences. The literary accounts of childhood examined in this study are strongly aligned with autobiography. Autobiographical forms of writing in Francophone Caribbean literature have, however, long been neglected, occupying an annexed position in both an individual author’s wider output and the critical studies of such works. Autobiography is not a major identifiable genre in Francophone Caribbean literature before the 1990s. Prior to this, the overwhelming majority of authors approached questions of identity formation from the standpoint of collective identity,

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rather than examining the minutiae of individual identity formation. The early twentieth-century cultural movement of négritude shaped intellectual debates in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, and their diasporas. With its focus on uniting black peoples and emphasis on Africa, négritude imposed a fascination with collectivity and elsewhere which is likely to have dissuaded Francophone Caribbean authors from engaging with their immediate surroundings through the solipsistic genre of autobiography. This relative lack of an autobiographical tradition in Francophone Caribbean literature contrasts sharply with contemporary literature of the same period from the former British Caribbean colonies and North America. The origins of Anglophone African American literatures can be traced to a tradition of slave autobiographies by authors such as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano (who settled in the United Kingdom) and Harriet Jacobs. Moreover, from the 1930s, Anglophone Caribbean authors produced now canonical autobiographical texts, many of which made childhood a central concern, including A Long Way from Home (1937) by Jamaican Claude McKay, In the Castle of My Skin (1953) by Barbadian George Lamming and Another Life (1973) by Trinidadian Derek Walcott.1 During the same period, African American authors wrote major autobiographies such as The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956) by Langston Hughes, Black Boy: A Record of Youth and Childhood (1945) by Richard Wright and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first of six volumes of autobiography by Maya Angelou. 2 The status of autobiographical writing in the Francophone Caribbean radically altered in the 1990s, when several of the most prominent contemporary authors published works which placed childhood at their centre. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance (1990) marked this new direction for Antillean literature, and the text opened his trilogy, Une Enfance créole, which was later completed by Chemin-d’école (1994) and A Bout d’enfance (2005). 3 Other authors from Martinique and Guadeloupe swiftly added to the volume of writing on childhood, producing a substantial corpus which includes Ravines du devant-jour (1993) and Le Cahier de romances (2000) by Raphaël Confiant,4 L’Exil selon Julia (1996) by Gisèle Pineau, 5 Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999) by Maryse Condé 6 and Tu, c’est l’enfance (2004) by Daniel Maximin.7 At the same time, a Haitian childhood came under scrutiny in Dany Laferrière’s L’Odeur du café (1991) and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin (1997).8 Further texts by Marie-Célie Agnant, Dany Bébel-Gisler,

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Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition

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Emile Ollivier and Ernest Pépin9 consolidate childhood’s significance in contemporary Francophone Caribbean literature from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Haiti and its diaspora. Childhood rose to prominence in contemporary Francophone Caribbean literature during a period which was marked by charged historical anniversaries and political debates. The year 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, while in 1998 France commemorated the 150th anniversary of the second, and definitive, French abolition of slavery which occurred in 1848, decades after the first abolition of 1794 which had been rapidly annulled by the reinstatement of slavery in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte. The manner in which these dates, and the complex historical legacies they represent, should be ‘celebrated’ generated significant debate in the French media, adding another strand to discussions on le devoir de mémoire in contemporary French culture. Furthermore, on 21 May 2001, when the Assemblée Nationale promulgated ‘la loi Taubira’, France took the unprecedented step of recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. As a result of this law, the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (CPME) was instated on 5 January 2004. Jacques Chirac’s decision to invite the prominent author Maryse Condé to serve as the committee’s inaugural president highlights the active connection between literature, politics and memory, a connection to which Condé drew attention in an article published in L’Humanité. The article, entitled ‘Parce que tu es une négresse’,10 discussed her work as president of the CPME with reference to events from her own life which had been recounted in Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer. The article’s title is a direct quotation from Le Cœur (p. 42) and alludes to a pivotal incident in the text when the young Maryse encounters racism and the slave past for the first time. The incident exposes the negative psychological effects of an enduring Antillean unwillingness to discuss slavery (discussed further in Chapter 4).The author has fought against such silences in her literature and through changes to public policy; under Condé’s presidency, the CPME oversaw the designation of 10 May as the national day for the ­commemoration of slavery in France, first observed under Chirac in 2006. More than three years after ‘la loi Taubira’ had been passed, further public debate arose as to how France should commemorate its colonial past due to the controversial ‘loi du 23 février 2005’. Article 4 of the law stipulated that ‘le rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer’ should be taught in schools and universities. As Maeve McCusker comments,

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Antilleans played a vociferous role in the ensuing polemics and ‘the stipulation […] was rejected with particular vehemence in Martinique and Guadeloupe, islands which in fact are not even mentioned in the text’.11 During the furore, Aimé Césaire, who was mayor of Fort-deFrance at the time, refused to meet with the Minister for the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who subsequently cancelled a state visit to Martinique. As a result of these interventions, Article 4 of the law was modified on 16 February 2006, and the reference to French colonialism having played a positive role was removed.12 The year 2006 was the Année de la francophonie, which once again brought questions of ‘francophonie’ and the colonial past to the fore in French public debate. The year, while doing much to promote non-metropolitan literature, also drew attention to francophonie’s great paradox: although ‘Francophone’ is a term which purports to promote inclusion, it often upholds a distinct barrier between metropolitan France and all other areas where French is spoken. The term is not applied to metropolitan French authors, and rather identifies and ‘unites’ areas which were for the most part former French colonies. Despite the fact that Martinique and Guadeloupe have been French since 1635 and became Départements d’Outre-Mer on 1 January 1947, authors from these islands are persistently categorized as Francophone rather than French, as exemplified by the high number of Martinican and Guadeloupean authors (including Confiant, Maximin, Pineau and Pépin) present at the 2006 Salon du Livre in Paris, which was organized around the theme of ‘Francofffonies’ [sic]. This underscores the ambivalent relationship of Antillean authors from the DOMs to the hexagone, casting a provocative shadow over their status as French citizens – a concern which repeatedly emerges in Francophone Caribbean writing on childhood. Childhood in the Caribbean Childhood metaphors frame the colonial project, promoting images of European colonialism as an ostensibly benevolent enterprise while masking its inherently exploitative nature. If Montaigne considers the conquest of the New World as the discovery of a younger child whose innocence is pitted against the corruption of the European conquistadors,13 French colonial discourse reappropriated the child metaphor in order to deliberately infantilize and subjugate colonized peoples.

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Martinique and Guadeloupe were often referred to as the petit pays, beholden to the mère-patrie. This established a paradigm of power and dependence which was emphasized by the mission civilisatrice, a systematic process of indoctrination which turned Frenchness into an acquirable commodity and a passport to ‘civilization’. The French mission civilisatrice bears similarities with the enkyklios paideia (‘cycles of learning’), the educational curricula of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Both policies were born of a need to include and exert power over newly conquered peoples of different cultural backgrounds; to achieve this, both policies used education as a method for cultural assimilation.14 The concept of ‘parler petit-nègre’ further demonstrates the link between language, education and pejorative connotations. Petit-nègre signifies broken or pidgin French and immediately infantilizes the speakers, signifying a lack of French education and magnifying their supposed inferiority. In the Caribbean context, the term petit-nègre also refers to the lowest socio-economic group of the population (discussed later in this chapter). In addition, the trope of childhood is freighted with its own metaphorical charge in Francophone Caribbean folklore. Under slavery and the plantation system, an unburdened childhood was impossible, and as Patrick Chamoiseau has observed, Creole contes are cautionary tales unlikely to furnish a happy ending, and characterized by ‘une dynamique éducative, un mode d’apprentissage de la vie, ou plus exactement de la survie en pays colonisé: le conte créole dit que la peur est là, que chaque brin du monde est terrifiant, et qu’il faut savoir vivre avec’ [original emphasis].15 In the Francophone Caribbean, childhood has also generated its own semantic field, offering the specific Creole terms iche/yiche and ti-moun(e), meaning child and children (literally ‘small people’). In addition, the diminutive ti- applies to many characters from pan-Caribbean Creole folklore. The most notable example is Ti Jean, a wily, quick-witted hero who is locked in an eternal battle against the slave master. Another similar figure is Compère Lapin, the francophone counterpart to Brer Rabbit. This trickster character, whose origins lie in West African folklore, is the hero of pan-Caribbean legends which span plantation societies from the American Deep South to the Caribbean. The allegorical function of Creole folklore makes these tales essential for the transmission of collective history and memory; in the Caribbean imaginary, a diminutive status does not equate with subservience, but is the very position from which resistance is forged.

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Postcolonial Autobiography and the récit d’enfance Postcolonial literature, fraught with questions of authenticity and collective representivity, requires its own discourse on modes of reading autobiography. The ‘humanistic, Enlightenment model of selfhood’ associated with autobiography has been ‘much criticized by postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist critics alike’,16 who instead emphasize the genre’s potential to render the Western ‘“I” unstable, shifting, provisional, troubled by and in its identifications’.17 The postcolonial text, irrespective of whether any autobiographical aims are stated by the author, is often approached not solely as a literary work, but also as a source of cultural and ethnographic information: thus in a manner which closely imitates that of reading autobiography. In postcolonial literature, autobiography has been reinvented as a genre in which the forging of selfhood simultaneously seeks to forge a collective identity by triggering collective responses, frequently elicited through poignant presentations of the topoi of ethnicity, history, memory, language, culture and gender. Approaches to autobiographies written in French are still heavily influenced by Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique (1975).18 For Lejeune, the three main problems encountered by the reader of auto­biography are ‘la place et la fonction du texte autobiographique dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre d’un auteur […]; l’ordre du récit auto­biographique […]; la relation du narrateur avec son narrataire et avec son “héros”’ (p. 8; original emphasis). This final point is reiterated as Lejeune lays out the conditions for his autobiographical pact as follows: ‘il faut qu’il y ait identité de l’auteur, du narrateur et du personnage’ [original emphasis], going on to recognize that this threefold ­identification can nonetheless raise ‘de nombreux problèmes’ (p. 15). Autobiographical writing from the Francophone Caribbean does indeed pose a challenge to Lejeune’s attempts to create a taxonomy of first-person life writing. Mary Gallagher considers Caribbean autobiography to be unsuited to Lejeune’s model, arguing that his focus on the ‘particularity of the self’ is at odds with the portrayal of collective experience so central to Antillean literature.19 However, Lejeune does allow for the importance of wider societal concerns, noting that ‘le sujet doit être principalement la vie individuelle, la genèse de la personnalité: mais la chronique et l’histoire sociale ou politique peuvent y avoir aussi une certaine place’ (p. 15). In many postcolonial autobiographies, it is these wider concerns which are repeatedly foregrounded. Texts such as

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Chamoiseau’s trilogy and Confiant’s Ravines demonstrate the desire to speak for and to a community that will respond in a similar way to evocations of the forbidden Creole language, the dreaded mabouya lizards, and specific Caribbean characters or stereotypes such as the eccentric quimboiseur (practitioner of magic), the much-admired conteur (storyteller) and the feared, French-enforcing Maître (schoolmaster). Yet similar themes are also present in Condé’s Le Cœur or Pineau’s L’Exil, texts which do place an unmistakable focus on the isolating impact of a bourgeois, diasporic upbringing on the psychological development of an individual. Sandra Pouchet Paquet highlights this tension between the individual and the collective in Anglophone Caribbean autobiographies through her observation that ‘each autobiographical act constitutes a different spatial and temporal point in Caribbean literary and cultural history’, going on to emphasize the way in which individual concerns map on to broader, collective themes, as texts ‘provide different points of reference from which to chart the influence of interculturative processes on racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies in the multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and polyglot Caribbean’. 20 Nevertheless, exaggerated emphasis on the collective voice and the roman de nous (sometimes translated literally as the ‘novel of the we’ or more idiomatically as the ‘collective novel’), so important in early Antillean writing (chiefly by Césaire and Edouard Glissant), risks imposing a reductive framework on to the texts being examined in this study; in each Francophone Caribbean narrative, a sense of collectivity is tempered by a pronounced desire to examine the idiosyncrasies of the writing self at the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that the writers under consideration here constitute some of the best-known literary voices to emerge from the Francophone Caribbean, their texts on childhood remain largely unexplored in literary criticism to date. Such works are either referred to parenthetically in studies whose main focus lies elsewhere, or are analysed as individual texts rather than being situated within an author’s wider corpus. These texts are also rarely considered in relation to other texts on childhood. Consequently they occupy an unclear, annexed literary status. This is also evident in multiple attempts to classify the texts’ genre, which result in a number of overlapping designations in English and French criticism: childhood narratives, childhood memoirs, auto­biographies, auto­biographical novels, autofictions, souvenirs d’enfance or récits d’enfance, an anxiety of genre which hinders comparative scholarship.

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The term ‘autofiction’ was coined in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky and is often referenced in French academic criticism. Autofiction is a type of literature which is influenced by psychoanalysis and which allows for the inclusion of fictitious material or the stretching of factual events, while acknowledging that the text is inspired by events from the life of its author. In the essay ‘Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse’, Doubrovsky supplies the following definition: l’autofiction, c’est la fiction que j’ai décidé en tant qu’écrivain de me donner de moi-même et par moi-même, en y incorporant, au sens plein du terme, l’expérience de l’analyse, non point seulement dans la thématique mais dans la production du texte […]21

The generous parameters of autofiction allow for the incorporation of manipulated accounts of lived experience into fictional works in a manner which exploits the potential for psychoanalytic interpretations. Several of the works in this study bear similarities with autofiction and such instances are discussed in the appropriate chapters, but the concept of autofiction does not help to theorize the preoccupation with childhood in Francophone Caribbean literature. The semi-autobiographical genre known in French as the récit d’enfance offers the most helpful methodology for approaching the corpus of texts united here. Only after arriving at a more sophisticated understanding of this genre does it become possible to undertake a comparative analysis of its aesthetics, narrative dynamics and thematic concerns. The genre of the récit d’enfance is relatively well established in French literature, and it describes a narrative which provides a semi-autobiographical account of childhood experiences, typically ending in adolescence. The (metropolitan) French literary canon includes a number of twentiethcentury récits d’enfance which raised the profile of the genre, including Sartre’s Les Mots (1964), Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) and Sarraute’s Enfance (1983). 22 In the English-speaking world, one immediate obstacle to approaching the genre is linguistic, because of the lack of an equivalent established translation for the term récit d’enfance. Although there is a natural overlap between the French terms auto­biographie and récit d’enfance, which becomes even more blurred in the market-driven world of contemporary publishing, the specific terms récit d’enfance and souvenir d’enfance are well enough established to be used in French academe and publishers’ publicity material (both in print and online). In English-language material, however, the broader terms ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’ have prevailed. Richard Coe draws attention

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to this linguistic absence in English, pointing out that the German language coined the term Jugenderinnerungen as early as the end of the eighteenth century, followed shortly afterwards by the appearance of the term souvenir d’enfance in French. Reacting to this absence, he proposes the term ‘the Childhood’ as an English-language equivalent. 23 More recently, publishers have begun to demonstrate greater sensitivity to the genre in postcolonial literature, as exemplified by Dreams in a Time of War by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which bears the subtitle ‘A Childhood Memoir’. 24 Following this development, the term ‘childhood memoir’ will be used as the preferred translation of récit d’enfance in this study. For a text to be considered a récit d’enfance, it must explicitly engage with the autobiographical tradition. It confines itself to recounting the author’s childhood memories from earliest infancy through to adolescence and adopts a position of relative transparency, rather than mediating or ventriloquizing memories through a fictional protagonist; thus Lejeune’s autobiographical pact which identifies the author, the narrator and the main character as one and the same must be present in the text. This definition identifies other canonical works of francophone literature featuring a child protagonist such as Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable 25 or Ferdinand Oyono’s Une Vie de boy, 26 which have a child protagonist but are not narrated from an autobiographical vantage point, as falling outside the parameters of the récit d’enfance. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the récit d’enfance genre is that it is by definition temporally limited, often beginning with accounts of birth and ending in adolescence. This temporal limitation usually means that the texts underplay the device of hindsight which is often found in traditional autobiographies, defined by Lejeune as the ‘perspective rétrospective du récit’. 27 Several of the récits d’enfance are largely unencumbered by the adult author/narrator’s voice, which appears only fleetingly in asides or paratextual information such as dedications, forewords and postscripts. It is frequently left to the reader to analyse the significance of the events of childhood on the adult author, although they may be guided by the (often unanswered but astute) questions raised by the child in the narrative. The reader follows the progress of the child narrator along a path of increased knowledge, witnessing their growing maturity, and the récit d’enfance is therefore also a Bildungsroman which charts the formation of an individual. In addition, the récits d’enfance provide particularly nuanced accounts of the child’s discovery of ethnicity and métissage. The arrival

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of Europeans resulted in the birth of children of mixed race throughout the Americas. In the Caribbean, however, racial mixing, or métissage, evolved in a distinct manner as a direct result of plantation slavery. In contemporary Martinique and Guadeloupe, the population includes the mixed-race descendants of several ethnic groups: autochthonous Amerindians, transported Africans (mainly from the west coast of Africa) and European settlers, as well as the descendants of indentured labourers. The latter group is itself heterogeneous, comprising people who were originally from other regions of France’s colonial empire in Indochina, India, Syria and Lebanon, and who were brought to the islands after 1848 to enlarge the post-abolition workforce. As Doris Garraway has argued, in the colonial era métissage, or racial mixing, was not only the site of fear, desire, rape and colonial fantasy, but also had unmistakable ‘biopolitical’ dimensions caused by ‘the conflict between the interracial sexual libertinage of the ruling elite and the threat posed by a proliferating mixed-race population that contested white claims to superiority’. 28 This led to the establishment of the ‘ethnoclass hierarchy’, which continues to influence society to the present day. In her study of this phenomenon, Chantal MaignanClaverie defines the term ‘ethnoclasse’ as a concept which ‘caractérise les sociétés coloniales et postcoloniales où la hiérarchie sociale recoupe une stratification raciale. Il devient opératoire dès que l’idéologie coloriste, corollaire du système économique de la Plantation et du commerce du sucre devient prépondérante.’29 Race and social class become bound together in a complex status system which dates from plantation slavery. The lower rungs of the ethnoclass hierarchy are occupied by poor black people, the petit-nègre class, and coolies, the descendants of Indian indentured labourers who arrived in the Caribbean after abolition. At the top are rich white people, known as békés or blancs-pays, the descendants of the slave-owning class which is also sometimes referred to as the plantocracy. A wide range of further categories such as chabin, mulâtre and câpresse reflect métissage between the different ethnic groups who travelled, or were transported, to the Caribbean. The exploration of the ethnoclass hierarchy, and the child’s dawning awareness of their position within it, is a major recurring theme in all the récits d’enfance. Unsurprisingly, given the récit d’enfance’s lack of clear definition in Anglophone literature, there has been greater theoretical discussion of the genre in French than in English. Jacques Lecarme argues that one recurrent feature is the shared name of the author and protagonist, even

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if only the forename, and that the presence of signed prefaces establishes autobiographical aims. He also calls attention to the genre’s capacity to elicit candour, and to its potential as a vehicle for satire and criticism. Against these advantages, Lecarme acknowledges its undoubted disadvantage: writing about childhood is often held to be a puerile form lacking in aesthetic or moral dignity. 30 The same tendency is observed in a study of Dany Laferrière’s récits d’enfance by Denis Essar, with Essar noting that ‘a certain amount of criticism has tended to be dismissive of this simpler, more bucolic and nostalgic writing’. 31 The texts do indeed hold a different literary status to their authors’ other works. If, following Chris Bongie, the tension between Francophone Caribbean popular culture and literary production requires a more in-depth consideration of where ‘the lowbrow and middlebrow modes of popularity intersect’, 32 the récits d’enfance unabashedly provide one such example, as the texts benefit from and enhance an author’s celebrity. Childhood’s potency as a publishing strategy certainly cannot be disregarded. Récits d’enfance by Chamoiseau and Confiant are published in Gallimard’s ‘Haute enfance’ series (originally edited by René Ceccatty, and subsequently by Colline Faure-Poirée). 33 Chamoiseau and Confiant were two of the earliest writers to publish in the series, which has a distinctly non-metropolitan tenor, recalling Graham Huggan’s reflections on exoticism as a publishing strategy. Huggan identifies the need to consider to what degree postcolonial writing is ‘bound up in a system of translation operating under the sign of the exotic? What role do exotic registers play in the construction of cultural value, more ­specifically those types of value (re)produced by postcolonial products and (re) presented in postcolonial discourse?’34 Condé has commented that récits d’enfance have a ‘côté exotique’, 35 and the exoticism of the unknown combined with the alluringly accessible period of childhood may indeed attract a wide readership, French or otherwise. It is noteworthy that récits d’enfance by Chamoiseau, Condé, Pineau and Laferrière were all rapidly translated into English and several other languages, which should be seen as a marker of the genre’s success. Nonetheless, the ‘Haute enfance’ series has taken measures to counteract any overt exoticism through the volumes’ standardized physical appearance, which is most often a sober cream cover illustrated with a sepia photograph of the author as a child. Efforts to highlight their undeniable popularity and marketability, in addition to their relatively accessible literary style, cannot justify reductive dismissals of récits d’enfance. Rather, the texts represent an undeniable

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achievement, expressing complex ideas and ‘highbrow’ (to use Bongie’s term) concerns with recourse to a number of innovative prose styles and varied, creative structural formats. Thematically, the genre is particularly appropriate to depictions of the postcolonial predicament because the child protagonist is subject to a double alienation which prevents the motif of colonial domination from overwhelming the narrative. The child is a minor within any culture, a universal subordinate acted upon by adults and limited in their own agency, a position reinforced by the etymology of the French word enfant, derived from the Latin infāns, ‘unable to speak’. As the child explores their surroundings and culture, the reader’s curiosity must also be piqued, so child and reader learn together from a subordinate position. The texts exploit childhood’s potential to convey a wealth of information about colonial and postcolonial Francophone Caribbean societies, thus developing what Régis Antoine calls ‘une anthropologie critique’. 36 Denise Escarpit also draws attention to this distinctly initiatory aspect of the récit d’enfance in Francophone postcolonial literature, commenting on the proliferation of Francophone narratives which allow the reader to discover new countries and histories in texts ‘qui témoignent à la fois d’un individu et, à travers lui, d’un environnement social’. 37 Details about social conditions, hierarchies of domination and strategies of resistance certainly emerge, but they tend not to dominate or weigh down the narratives, as childhood’s natural resilience and ­unpredictability punctuate and enliven the texts. Post-1990: créolité and the regard intérieur It is no coincidence that an increased Francophone Caribbean engagement with the récit d’enfance directly followed the emergence of créolité. The success of the literary manifesto Eloge de la créolité (1989) brought its authors, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé, to an international audience of readers and critics. 38 In the intense period of literary creation that ensued, Chamoiseau and Confiant produced texts that heralded the rebirth of Francophone Caribbean autobiography – through the récit d’enfance – in the 1990s. Their texts map out many of the concerns in Eloge, through their depictions of Martinique in the post-war, post-departmentalization era; an era which also witnessed the collapse of plantation society. Chamoiseau has spoken of his 1950s childhood as coinciding with a ‘moment très particulier de bascule’, 39 and accordingly, tropes of resistance, adaptation and survival are discernible

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throughout his trilogy. Similarly, for Confiant, the backdrop to his early childhood was a rural world of rusting, abandoned distilleries. He also identifies a linguistic impetus for writing about childhood: the drive to document the forced passage from the Creole world of childhood to the adult world of French.40 Eloge was roundly criticized for its narrow, prescriptive attempts to define what it means to be Creole, its nostalgic preoccupation with the past and attendant failure to address contemporary problems such as unemployment and drug use. In addition, St Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott drew attention to the paradox arising from championing a minority language via the language of oppression.41 Nonetheless, the sincerity of the authors’ desire to raise the status of Creole language and culture in the face of French hegemony cannot be disputed. The manifesto is influenced by Edouard Glissant’s antillanité, which was developed in the early 1980s with the publication of Le Discours antillais (1981).42 Glissant articulated a growing concern with establishing a Caribbean identity without recourse to external models, thus reacting against négritude and its desire to reconnect with an African heritage. When Eloge insists on the need to counter l’Universel with la diversalité, it is building on Glissant’s essay ‘Le Même et le Divers’, which is reproduced in Le Discours antillais (pp. 326–41). Similarly, when the créoliste writers draw inspiration from Victor Segalen’s celebration of le divers, this derives from Glissant’s extensive discussion of Segalen from Le Discours antillais onwards. The first epigraph to Eloge is attributed to Segalen: ‘c’est par la Différence et dans le Divers que s’exalte l’existence. Le Divers décroît. C’est là le grand danger’ (the créolistes have actually constructed an epigraph from two separate quotations from Segalen’s text Imago mundi).43 There is an implicit tension between Segalen’s conception of diversity, which hopes the other may remain untainted in order to maintain le divers, and the créolistes’ wish for the celebration of métissage. This epigraph alerts the reader to the tone of cultural protectionism championed by the créolistes in order to oppose French hegemony as, in Eloge, they attempt to shift the focus back on to those creations inherent in, and particular to, the islands themselves. This involves writing about cultural aspects which have previously been excluded and deemed unsuitable as ‘literary’ subjects: ‘La littérature créole à laquelle nous travaillons pose comme principe qu’il n’existe rien dans notre monde qui soit petit, pauvre, inutile, vulgaire, inapte à enrichir un projet littéraire’ (p. 39). Continuing in this same vein of untrammelled exploration, Eloge establishes the pivotal role of childhood and sets out two concepts

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of major importance to an understanding of how the récit d’enfance operates. Firstly, it underscores the significance of the child’s gaze as a literary conceit. In an important section which identifies Antilleans as ‘fondamentalement frappés d’extériorité’ (p. 14), the manifesto argues that the regard intérieur required to counteract this alienation must capture ‘un peu de ce regard d’enfance, questionneur de tout, qui n’a pas encore ses postulats et qui interroge même les évidences’ (p. 24). This is the first time that the child’s gaze is theorized as a fundamental conceit of Francophone Caribbean literature, and this theoretical stance anticipates the post-1990 turn to the récit d’enfance. Secondly, the manifesto’s opening sets out the future patterns of reading it wishes to generate, patterns which are subsequently performed in the text itself. The famous quotation from the opening pages illustrates this point: ‘la littérature antillaise n’existe pas encore. Nous sommes encore dans un état de prélittérature: celui d’une production écrite sans audience chez elle, méconnaissant l’interaction auteurs/lecteurs où s’élabore une littérature’ (p. 14). This statement does not just implore Antillean authors to turn their gaze inwards, but also identifies a particular kind of agency which will shape the interaction between author and reader into a significant, reciprocally beneficial connection. Only by deliberately engaging a local audience, the créolistes argue, can literary production flourish and play a recognized and valued cultural role in society. Moreover, this quotation also highlights the internal textual dynamic of an author as a reader, fully aware of their own literary heritage. For, paradoxically, despite the manifesto’s claim that it is being produced in an era of prélittérature, intertextual literary references are actually a significant component of Eloge. A range of diverse literary influences are evident, including Segalen, Césaire, Glissant, Fanon and Frankétyèn (Frankétienne). When the authors of Eloge acknowledge their difficulty with Glissant, ‘[il] ne nous y aidait pas tellement […] persuadé d’écrire pour des lecteurs futurs’ (p. 23), this is not so much a criticism but rather an allusion to Glissant’s reference to his ‘lecteurs futurs’ at the close of Malemort.44 Thus emerges the paradox of the manifesto: it opens by decrying the non-existence of a literary tradition, but it is itself composed of multiple literary sources, evidence of the authors as readers who are extremely conscious of an existing, if underappreciated, Antillean literary heritage. The desire to develop the ‘interaction auteurs/lecteurs’ set out in Eloge is a cornerstone of the contemporary récits d’enfance. This desire was already manifest in the self-reflexive style of early récits d’enfance including the text which founded the genre, La Rue Cases-Nègres,45

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by Joseph Zobel. In a documentary, Zobel states that when he wrote La Rue Cases-Nègres, he was quite aware of its significance for a Martinican/Antillean audience: Je regrettais de ne pas trouver à l’époque quand j’étais à l’école … des situations, des paysages et des gens, qui ressemblaient à ceux qui m’avaient entouré. Avec l’enseignement qu’on avait à l’école, qui était dans une pédagogie d’assimilation, même ceux qui auraient écrit, qui essayaient d’écrire, ils n’écrivaient jamais de la Martinique, ni créaient, ni racontaient une histoire dont les personnages étaient les gens de la rue, de Fort-de-France, les gens travaillant dans les champs de canne d’un petit village. [my transcript]46

Through the récit d’enfance, authors offer themselves as a text to be read, as illustrated by an important mise en abîme scene in La Rue Cases-Nègres. The hero, José, is given the task of writing about ‘votre plus émouvant souvenir d’enfance’ as homework,47 but the schoolmaster refuses to believe that his poignant account of the death of M. Médouze is his own work, unwilling to contemplate that a lower-class petit-nègre such as José could produce work of such literary quality. At the very moment when verisimilitude has been achieved through writing, it is discredited and dismissed. As Mireille Rosello points out, the task of writing about childhood had been assigned to the children as a disdainful last resort by a critical, unsympathetic teacher.48 Nonetheless, the reader is left in no doubt as to the achievement José’s written account actually represents. The politicized exploration of language and schooling is a recurring theme in Francophone Caribbean récits d’enfance. These children belong to a generation of Antilleans who were among the first to have access to education and thus to have the opportunity of advancing to the aspirational status of the bourgeoisie, through a complicated system of examinations and scholarships. Symbolic of this struggle is the historic Lycée Schœlcher which overlooks the baie des Flamands in Fort-de-France.49 In Le Cahier de romances, Confiant presents the Lycée Schœlcher as a symbol of ‘une victoire historique: celle de la classe mulâtre, qui l’avait fait construire au tout début du siècle pour faire échec à l’enseignement religieux, alors prédominant, qui n’acceptait que les rejetons de la plantocratie blanche créole’. 50 Although the establishment of this institution did indeed represent a victory, the prohibitive cost of sending a child to the Lycée Schœlcher meant that it remained out of reach for many poor families in rural areas. A study published in the 1960s reported that even though only one-quarter of

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Martinique’s school-aged children lived in Fort-de-France, they made up the overwhelming majority (two-thirds) of the island’s secondary school pupils. 51 Such a disparity is borne out in La Rue Cases-Nègres; Zobel is meticulous in describing José’s acute awareness of being the only child from his social background at secondary school. In the récits d’enfance, authors, regardless of their social class or ethnic origin, draw attention to the dislocations, compromises and isolation which accompany academic success. As the narrator matures, they become increasingly aware of the social codes and taboos which they must navigate if they are to have any chance of future success. The Scene of Recognition In Francophone Caribbean récits d’enfance, the construction of the self is bound up with a wider exploration of Antillean reality, past and present, focusing upon three highly significant Caribbean historical periods: the past era of slavery, the twentieth-century era of post-departmentalization in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. The narrative becomes a process of memory retrieval, which often draws attention to its own artifice and shortcomings through acknowledgements of significant memory lapses or the ludic manipulation of the truth. This process of memory retrieval, moreover, brings about an improved understanding of Antillean culture and history, and the ways in which the latter still exerts an influence over the former. The récits d’enfance pose a perennial problem: how can one explain the painful history of slavery to Caribbean children in a way which will enlighten, without transmitting a perpetual burden? The only critic to have drawn attention to this theme is Maeve McCusker. In a study of Confiant, Condé, Pépin and Pineau, she observes that this is often ‘a pivot of the autobiography, a haunting, primal scene figured in a strikingly similar way from one to another’. 52 The precise dynamics of scenes confronting the slave history in récits d’enfance are analysed in detail in this book, with additional reference to related moments in a number of pre- and post-1990 texts. Drawing on literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, and without losing sight of the specificities of the Caribbean contexts being discussed, the scenes are analysed as ‘scenes of recognition’. In the scene of recognition, the child formulates a question which begs an answer that discusses the slave past. Crucially, any such discussion is repeatedly postponed or withheld, as questions

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are met with silence. These silences betray a residual cultural trauma concerning the history of slavery in the Caribbean, a trauma which is perpetuated by the acute difficulty, embarrassment and discomfort which hinders direct intergenerational communication between parent and child. The scenes act out processes of recognition which unlock or unblock the truth about manifold examples of ‘repression’ and ‘repressed memory’ scattered throughout the récits d’enfance. These moments of tension, when the societal impulse towards repression is experienced, noticed and questioned by the child, disrupt the fabric of the child’s world, presenting a threat to any notion of cohesion. Yet the scene of recognition also signifies the child’s increasing maturity and introspection, as he or she begins to question the world around them. The term ‘scene of recognition’ is an established and fundamental concept in literary criticism which can be traced back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest surviving work of literary theory. ‘Recognition (anagnôrisis)’, notes Terence Cave, ‘is unquestionably the least respectable term in Aristotelian poetics.’53 The term refers to a surprise development of plot, precipitating or averting terrible consequences (depending upon whether it is employed in tragedy or comedy). Such scenes are always associated with the revelation of highly significant information which was hitherto concealed from characters (but not necessarily from the audience). In Poetics, Aristotle defines the term as ‘a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading to friendship or to enmity, and involving matters which bear on prosperity or adversity. The finest recognition is that which occurs simultaneously with reversal, as with the one in the Oedipus.’54 In psychoanalysis, Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex draws on the very same tale by Sophocles to which Aristotle alludes in his definition of anagnôrisis. The tale of Oedipus is predicated on metaphorical and literal blindness and seeing, recognition of the self and of others, thereby establishing the central concerns of psychoanalytical debate. The most compelling and influential account of the conflict between repression and recognition is found in Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). 55 Freud posits that loss can trigger the establishment of the lost object as a separate entity in the inner world. For Freud, this mechanism requires a process he terms Ichspaltung, the splitting of the ego, which works as a defence against loss, but which also involves a psychically harmful preservation of what has been lost. Freud’s theories, however, were developed in late nineteenth-century Europe, in a society far removed from that of the Antilles. It would take the intervention of Martinican theorist (and trained psychiatrist) Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques

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blancs56 to begin to propose how Freudian thinking might aid, or fall short, in the structuring of the Antillean unconscious: Les écoles psychanalytiques ont étudié les réactions névrotiques qui prennent naissance dans certains milieux, dans certains secteurs de civilisation. On devrait, pour obéir à une exigence dialectique, se demander dans quelle mesure les conclusions de Freud ou d’Adler peuvent être utilisées dans une tentative d’explication de la vision de l’homme de couleur. (p. 115)

This thought finds its conclusion in the penultimate chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs, entitled ‘Le Nègre et la reconnaissance’, in which Fanon posits recognition as the fundamental unresolved concern in Antillean society. Here, he is undoubtedly exploring the concept of recognition, although ‘gratitude’, the alternative meaning of the French term reconnaissance, is present through traces of irony which call attention to his critical stance: to experience gratitude implies an acceptance which is at odds with Fanon’s antagonistic, challenging rhetoric. Firstly, Fanon demonstrates the dissonance between Adler’s conception of psychology as individual, and the collective situation in the Antilles: Ce n’est pas tel Antillais qui présente la structure du nerveux, mais tous les Antillais. La société antillaise est une société nerveuse, une société “comparaison”. Donc nous sommes renvoyés de l’individu à la structure sociale. S’il y a un vice, il ne réside pas dans “l’âme” de l’individu, mais bien dans celle du milieu. (p. 172)

He identifies inferiority as a malaise on an endemic scale, as Antilleans are compelled to construct themselves through constant comparison with a Europeanized other. Moving towards the conclusion of his text, in which he demands a restructuring of the world, Fanon quotes (without citing or even acknowledging his source) the impassioned cry of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal57 to begin ‘la fin du monde, parbleu’ (p. 175; Cahier, p. 98), before focusing his energies on the source of such malaise: the colonial education system, which induces an identity complex in the Antillean. In order to conceptualize this alienation, Fanon turns to Hegel, discussing the need to be ‘reconnu’, which the Martinican author glosses as follows: L’homme n’est humain que dans la mesure où il veut s’imposer à un autre homme, afin de se faire reconnaître par lui. Tant qu’il n’est pas effectivement reconnu par l’autre, c’est cet autre qui demeure le thème de son action. C’est de cet autre, c’est de la reconnaissance par cet autre, que dépendent sa valeur et sa réalité humaines. (p. 176)

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Fanon pinpoints this pathological desire for recognition to be a result of the unarticulated trauma of the abolition of slavery, tracing the cause of the malaise to the fact that in 1848, abolition was bestowed rather than gained. Abolition is recounted with an acerbic casualness which evokes a satirical fable or fairy tale: Il n’y a pas de lutte ouverte entre le Blanc et le Noir. Un jour le Maître Blanc a reconnu sans lutte le nègre esclave. Mais l’ancien esclave veut se faire reconnaître. Il y a, à la base de la dialectique hégélienne, une réciprocité absolue qu’il    faut mettre en évidence. (p. 176; original emphasis)

For Fanon, full recognition cannot be obtained without direct conflict, the only method of enabling the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. It must nonetheless be acknowledged that his account significantly underplays the history of revolt, marronnage and resistance by Antillean slaves in the long struggle for emancipation. Fanon’s account problematically denies any tradition of meaningful resistance on the part of the colonized, in order to emphasize his belief in the need for a contemporary revolution. The physical struggle for recognition becomes the sole means of accessing the possibility of what Fanon, again drawing on Hegel, terms ‘une conscience de soi indépendante’ (p. 178), the sole means to restore the colonial subject’s agency. The reader has been prepared for the iconoclastic conclusion throughout the text. In building to this crescendo, important examples of Fanon’s engagement with childhood in the form of psychoanalytic theory, anecdotal evidence and literary quotations illustrate his conviction that an Antillean childhood is at the origin of many conflicting psychic processes. After demonstrating that the black Antillean child must undergo a process of alienation which begins in the colonial education system, Fanon emphasizes that for the young Antillean, these tensions are exacerbated on arrival in metropolitan France, when any traces of Antillean identity are obsessively eradicated, particularly Creole language: ‘tout idiome est une façon de penser, disaient Damourette et Pichon. Et le fait, pour le Noir récemment débarqué, d’adopter un langage différent de celui de la collectivité qui l’a vu naître, manifeste un décalage, un clivage’ (p. 19). The linguistic décalage or clivage to which Fanon refers evokes the Freudian concept of Ichspaltung, that repression of certain characteristics, or certain knowledge, as a coping mechanism for a particularly difficult truth: here, a sense of inferiority which is bound up with the history of colonialism and in particular slavery.

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By staging a series of moments of denial which anticipate eventual recognition, the récits d’enfance enact a process through which repressed knowledge must be acknowledged, and even rehabilitated. In the scene of recognition, the child asks a question of their parents which begs an answer elucidating the colonial past and slavery – an answer which is not forthcoming, as the question is initially met with embarrassment, ellipsis and silence. Yet this silence arouses the child’s curiosity, leaving them bewildered. They sense that something is being concealed from them, but dare not ask further questions. They will only learn more by piecing together a series of fleeting and often painful events from their childhood which reveal more about slavery. This incomplete discussion leaves fundamental psychic traces as the child struggles to come to terms with a history which, although not personally experienced, is experienced as a personal historical burden through the ancestral link with slavery. Dany Laferrière’s récits d’enfance emerge as important points of contrast which negate many of the concerns which drive the texts by authors from the DOMs. In his work, linguistic and cultural politics and the slave past are not the main sites of conflict. Instead, recognitional mechanisms sustain a narrative tension throughout both L’Odeur and Le Charme. The interplay of repression and recognition represents a dawning infant realization of the increasing danger of the Duvalier regime and a covert authorial acknowledgement of the damage wrought since the author’s childhood in Haiti. Having widened the scope of the study to include the Haitian diaspora, it becomes evident that recognitional processes are embedded in Laferrière’s récits d’enfance, although they operate in different ways and call attention to Haiti’s distinct political situation. The possibility of a shared Antillean collective memory has been repeatedly disputed. In Le Discours antillais, Glissant laments ‘le raturage de la mémoire collective’. 58 Similarly, the critic Françoise Vergès has observed that ‘la France, seul pays européen à avoir connu deux abolitions (1794 et 1848) et un rétablissement de l’esclavage (1802), préféra oublier ce long épisode de son histoire. Aux colonies, celle-ci fut préservée dans la mémoire orale, mais ce fut mémoire honteuse.’59 Shame and guilt are not apportioned to the former colonial power, metropolitan France, but rather to the Antillean population who bear the legacy of the trauma which Fanon has helped us understand in terms of an abolition blighted by a lack of any mechanism of reconnaissance. The memory of slavery is actively avoided and consciously repressed by

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most parental figures in the récits d’enfance. The scene of recognition is catalysed by the child, and enables access to this difficult truth and the plethora of emotions it unleashes. The Guadeloupean author Dany Bébel-Gisler sets out the dynamics of the scene of recognition in a history book for young children, Grand-mère, ça commence où la Route de l’Esclave? (1998). The text uses a question supposedly posed by the author’s three-year-old granddaughter as its title. This question also contains a reference to the UNESCO initiative ‘La Route de l’Esclave’ launched in 1994, 60 in which Bébel-Gisler participated until her death in 2003 at the age of 68. The quatrième de couverture draws attention to the historical and emotional implications of the scene of recognition: Comment répondre à ces pourquoi d’enfants? Comment conter l’histoire douloureuse, si pleine de fureurs et d’atrocités, de la traite négrière transatlantique? Comment parler à mes petits enfants, au-delà à tous les enfants de la Guadeloupe, de la Caraïbe, de la diaspora noire, de ce crime contre l’humanité que fut l’esclavage mercantile? […] Le devoir de mémoire nous impose à nous parents, éducateurs, enseignants, de lever le voile. De dire et redire à nos enfants ce que fut, ce qu’est notre histoire, si terrible, si douloureuse et complexe soit-elle […] J’espère [que ce livre] suscitera émotions et discussions. Qu’il sera l’occasion pour la famille de se ressouder autour d’un passé dont la connaissance est indispensable pour reconstruire le lien brisé entre mémoire de l’esclavage et identité.

Bébel-Gisler highlights the emotive tug of the child as inquisitive innocent and acknowledges the parental discomfort generated by children’s questions. She sets out the model for the scene of recognition, arguing that despite the sensitivity of the subject matter, knowledge and discussion must be promoted over ignorance and avoidance, and that this process should begin at home, in the family. Christiane Taubira also focuses on the need for intergenerational, familial discussions, and provides a model for such debates in L’esclavage raconté à ma fille.61 The text’s structure is based on Régis Dubray’s La République expliquée à ma fille, 62 and is written as a series of dialogues between Taubira and her unnamed daughter. It appeared in 2002, in the wake of ‘la loi Taubira’, although Taubira uses the publication to remind her daughter/reader that ‘ce n’est pas ma loi […] les lois sont des constructions collectives’ (pp. 70–71; original emphasis). Taubira advocates an educational approach to the history of transatlantic slavery

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suggesting that this should include reference to figures who personify resistance, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Louis Delgrès and la mulâtresse Solitude (pp. 88–89). She urges educational policy changes in order to ‘restituer aux enfants, et d’abord aux enseignants, ces siècles d’histoire ensevelis sous une chape de silence’ (p. 124). There is no suggestion of the mother/narrator figure experiencing the slightest discomfort in relating the principal events of the slave trade, and the text is characterized by a passionate, militant style, which leaves no space for the discussion of any potential emotional difficulties bound up with confronting the slave past. Ron Eyerman has observed that ‘collective memory specifies the temporal parameters of past and future, where we came from and where we are going, and also why we are here now’, 63 the very same fundamental questions which are raised by child protagonists in the scene of recognition. Temporal disjuncture is essential to the authors’ exploration of unhealed past traumas, as contemporary society struggles to articulate the collective wounds of the past. Just as Glissant acknowledges his position in Le Discours antillais as a writer striving to create ‘à partir d’une situation bloquée’, 64 so childhood provides Francophone Caribbean authors with a manner of depicting unspoken taboos. The récits d’enfance stage an urgent discussion with this ‘situation bloquée’, through violent and traumatic confrontations with the slave past which mark each narrator’s dawning awareness of history. It is indisputable that they also aim to provoke similar patterns of questioning and increased awareness in the reader. Conclusion This study will follow a broadly chronological sweep. A series of close readings permits a more nuanced understanding of the motifs and narrative dynamics which characterize the genre of the récit d’enfance. Firstly, each text is situated within its author’s wider literary output, enabling the identification of overlap, intertextuality and even inconsistencies which are accessible only through a familiarity with the author’s wider literary production (indeed sometimes only accessible to an academic reader of published interviews): such instances draw attention to the wilful manipulation which characterizes the récit d’enfance. Secondly, this study builds comparative readings across authors, identifying differences and similarities in the handling of key themes such as ethnicity, slavery, parenting, schooling and language.

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Chapter 1, ‘The Emergence of a Tradition’, argues that an engagement with the theme of childhood is evident in early Francophone Caribbean literature and that early récits d’enfance map out concerns as to how race, gender, language and schooling influence identity – concerns which will also prove central to post-1990 narratives. Chapter 2 examines the trilogy of récits d’enfance by Chamoiseau, discussing the author’s gradual progression from créolité to a position more attuned to the Glissantean Tout-monde, and exploring Chamoiseau’s depiction of the stifling effects of French schooling through Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry. Chapter 3 examines the representation of ethnicity in the work of Confiant and the way in which this inflects the scene of recognition. In Chapter 4, Condé’s Le Cœur is read as challenging the créoliste claim to collective cultural representivity by presenting a significantly different account of a Creole childhood, marked by performativity and masks. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Maximin and Pineau construct récits d’enfance which highlight the link to the physical environment: in Maximin this link is immediate and tangible whereas in Pineau it is filtered through a situation of diaspora and exile. L’Exil selon Julia is also considered as an important modification of the récit d’enfance genre owing to its unusual narrative stance. Chapter 6 further explores the notion of diaspora in the work of Laferrière and draws attention to the author’s suspension of time in order to access the immediacy of his happy Haitian childhood, while also demonstrating that the knowledge of his future exile inhabits the margins of the text. As this analysis argues that Laferrière’s récits d’enfance develop the genre in a rather different direction, he is considered after the work of the DOM authors in order that these contrasts may fully emerge. The final chapter is devoted to parental paradigms and gender stereotypes, discussing the different configurations of children, parents and grandparents across the récits d’enfance through the lens of gender. It also moves beyond the immediate corpus of récits d’enfance to trace significant intertextual links with Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots65 and Pineau’s Mes quatre femmes, 66 with reference to the Caribbean practice of ‘rewriting’. The récits d’enfance are unquestionably valuable accounts of Antillean society past and present. The narratives examined here entertain, provoke and initiate readers, as authors exploit the genre of the childhood memoir to intercut nostalgia and memory with astute political and psychological commentaries, stimulating further debate on both contemporary and pre-1990 Francophone Caribbean literature.

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chapter one

The Emergence of a Tradition The Emergence of a Tradition

The post-1990 revival of the récit d’enfance gave rise to new critical discussions of the genre’s significance in contemporary Francophone Caribbean literature. Of equal importance, however, is the fact that these modern texts build on a number of earlier works in which childhood occupies a fundamental role. These earlier texts have known varied fates: a few are relatively well known, several are often alluded to but rarely analysed in detail, whereas others have completely slipped from critical attention. This chapter establishes a clear chronology of the récit d’enfance alongside a discussion of literary engagement with the theme of childhood more broadly. While Maeve McCusker has pointed out autobiography’s ‘relative absence in the Francophone Antilles’1 in comparison with the sheer volume of autobiographical works in Anglophone Caribbean literature, there is nonetheless evidence prior to the 1990s of sustained Francophone Caribbean literary engagement with that part of autobiography which deals with childhood. Fragments of childhood memoirs can be found across a variety of forms, including poetry, the novel, the short story and film. By focusing the analysis on questions of genre, several important earlier texts are brought to critical attention. Recurring themes emerge: schooling, language, history, racism, alienation, social mobility and gender relations, all of which will prove to be of enduring importance in the post-1990 récits d’enfance. Joseph Zobel’s seminal La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950) is the best-known – and the first – récit d’enfance, and establishes the genre as an integral component of modern Antillean literature. Close analysis of engagement with the theme of childhood more generally, however, demonstrates that there is a significant literary history of the Francophone Caribbean child as a complex, politicized literary conceit both before and after 1950. Michèle Lacrosil’s novel Sapotille et le serin d’argile (1960), 2 in particular, includes an important discussion of the intergenerational

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imperative to discuss the slave past – precisely the kind of forthright discussion which will be lacking in the récits d’enfance. By focusing on childhood and genre, this chapter also identifies two other important neglected texts post-dating La Rue Cases-Nègres which are without doubt récits d’enfance and which develop the genre in significant, contrasting ways. Françoise Ega’s Le Temps des madras (1966)3 is a pioneering example of the récit d’enfance genre, and includes the earliest example of a scene of recognition. Another récit d’enfance, Maurice Virassamy’s Le Petit coolie noir (1972),4 explores the painful complexities of ethnicity and métissage from the position of the ‘othered other’, presenting a child protagonist who is part African and part coolie (Indian). Finally, the insights gained regarding the récit d’enfance will be applied to Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), 5 revealing perplexing differences which support recent scholarship that advances the theory that the text was a literary hoax. Haitian literature remains under-represented in this chapter. Haiti furnishes few examples of early autobiography, and the publication Autobiographie des écrivains d’Haïti, an anthology of Haitian autobiographical writing published in 1994, concedes on the quatrième de couverture that there is ‘une carence, dans notre littérature, d’œuvre autobiographique du genre de Black Boy’.6 In the same publication, the editor Christophe Philippe-Charles proposes that the ‘notices autobiographiques’ with which authors such as Etzer Vilaire and Frédéric Marcelin prefaced their works merit future critical attention.7 Childhood: The Development of a Theme The preoccupation with childhood in Francophone Caribbean literature can be traced to a cycle of poems by the Nobel-winning Guadeloupean poet, Saint-John Perse (the pseudonym of Alexis Saint-Léger Léger). Pour fêter une enfance was written in 1907 and incorporated into the poetry collection Eloges (1911).8 Saint-John Perse was a member of the white béké class and a descendant of slave-owners. Yet his ethnicity and social class did not preclude him from becoming a seminal reference figure for post-1990 authors in their récits d’enfance, led by créolistes Chamoiseau and Confiant, who consider him as a Creole author. The meaning of the word Creole has undergone several different developments: it entered the French language in the seventeenth century, derived from the Latin verb creare (to produce, create). Although by the early twentieth century

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it was used chiefly to denote the descendants of the early white French settlers, the créolistes’ enthusiasm to reclaim the term Creole is a method of constructing an identity which is not defined by race. By embracing Saint-John Perse as a fellow Creole, the authors return to the original meaning of Creole to designate a person who was born in the islands. Pour fêter une enfance celebrates an idyllic Antillean childhood from the perspective of the privileged plantocracy, although memories are tempered by nostalgia and loss. This is due to the poet’s own physical separation from Guadeloupe (his family moved to Paris when he was 12) and the death of his father around the time of writing. Saint-John Perse’s decision to revisit his Antillean childhood through poetry would, for the first time, make the Creole child a literary focus. The poet opens the cycle with a celebration of his Caribbean childhood, as he recalls being bathed in ‘l’eau-de-feuilles-vertes’ (p. 28). He implores his adult self not only to remember, but to re-experience the sensations of his childhood: ‘Mon front, te souvient-il des nocturnes sueurs?/ du minuit vain de fièvre et d’un goût de citerne?’ (p. 36). Two distinctive strands emerge from the cycle. The poet’s elite position in the ethnoclass hierarchy is particularly evident in references to the family’s servants: ‘pour longtemps encore j’ai mémoire/ des faces insonores, couleur de papaye et d’ennui, qui s’arrêtaient derrière nos chaises comme des astres morts’ (p. 35). These brief vignettes clearly transmit the social codes of the era: ‘Mais la terre se courbait dans nos jeux comme fait la servante,/ celle qui a droit à une chaise si l’on se tient dans la maison’ (p. 30). There is affection in the description of the aged servant who is allowed to sit down, but this act of generosity is singled out as exceptional. In the cycle, expeditions around the colony take place on horseback and by boat, further underscoring the poet’s privileged position. Even so, the poetry is remarkable for its celebration of the sensory experiences and the minutiae of a Creole childhood, related with fond enthusiasm in the repeated refrain: ‘O! j’ai lieu de louer!’ (pp. 36–37). The cycle exploits the tension between repetition and brevity: while several themes and motifs recur to build texture and a sense of continuity, the sole reference to the death of ‘une très petite sœur’ (p. 30) resonates with unspoken grief. In the post-1990 récits d’enfance, the influence of Saint-John Perse is considerable, and is evident in stylistic preferences for fragmented prose and the vocative mode. Additionally, several of these modern récits d’enfance quote directly from Pour fêter une enfance, in particular the refrain ‘sinon l’enfance, qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y a plus?’ (p. 33), a

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refrain which is found in Confiant, Corbin and Maximin (and is further discussed in Chapters 3 and 5). Saint-John Perse is, however, intertextually absent from the pre-1990 récits d’enfance. It would take the aesthetic, psychological and political advances of négritude to reaffirm pride in black, predominantly African ancestry, before antillanité and créolité could eventually begin to confront, and celebrate, literary affinities with this white author; for the authors of Eloge, this new acceptance ‘correspond assurément à une avancée de la Créolité dans les consciences antillaises’.9 The first black Caribbean voice writing in French to engage with childhood came from French Guiana, articulating a very different experience to that of Saint-John Perse. Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–78) was a founding member of négritude along with Césaire and Senghor, although since his death in 1978 he has been somewhat eclipsed by his co-founders, who both outlived him by several decades. Like Césaire, Damas was a pupil at the prestigious Lycée Schœlcher in Martinique, where one critic suggests that his advanced assimilation into French culture conferred upon him ‘a kind of honorary whiteness’, a social phenomenon which alarmed him and which had not been so pronounced in his native French Guiana due to its distinct historical evolution as a penal colony.10 Damas’s first collection of poetry, Pigments (1937),11 is the earliest study of those structures of dominance – and the ensuing alienation – which would become synonymous with literary depictions of a bourgeois black childhood in the Francophone Caribbean. Well-meaning parental aspirations – the very kind that would propel black children to academic success at the Lycée Schœlcher – are deconstructed by Damas, who exposes their culturally alienating consequences. Two poems highlight this process with startling clarity. In ‘Limbé’ (a Creole word meaning spleen), the narrator demands to be left to play with his ‘poupées noires’ (p. 42), a plea to be allowed to develop unimpeded by European homogenizing efforts. Similarly, the poem ‘Hoquet’ plays on the psychological interruptions caused by a Eurocentric education, conveyed through the truncated structures of the poem which evoke the hiccup of the title. Although the hiccup is a metaphor for the child’s psychological disturbance, it also conveys the indomitable strength of the child’s African heritage, which asserts itself to resist assimilation. Furthermore, the poem ‘Nuit blanche’ includes a scathing reference to ‘mes ancêtres/ les Gaulois’ (p. 57), the same colonial mantra that Fanon would later famously attack in Peau noire, masques blancs.

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Pigments caused a sensation. It boldly reclaimed the word nègre (in a parallel development to the American Anglophone ‘New Negro’ movement, which began in the late 1920s). In his introduction to the first edition, Robert Desnos places Damas’s poetry in ‘a political or sociohumanitarian, rather than an artistic or literary, context’,12 and indeed Damas broached major social themes which would prove to be leitmotifs of twentieth-century Antillean literature. Nonetheless, such an appraisal should not obscure the aesthetic importance of Damas’s extraordinary play with structure, language and form, which presents an undeniably significant example of négritude’s modernist influences. Yet Damas receives little attention from modern critics, and most often it is Fanon’s decision to quote Damas’s poem ‘Hoquet’ in Peau noire, masques blancs which introduces him to contemporary readers. Damas’s foundational role in creating a poetic vision of Caribbean négritude has been eclipsed by Aimé Césaire, whose dense, allusive extended poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal still dominates the Caribbean literary landscape. The ‘cahier’ of the title itself suggests youth, situating the author as a young man, who offers his work as a humble notebook, in the form of jottings which one might scribble in an old school exercise book. The poem underwent significant rewritings: it first appeared in the Parisian journal Volontés in 1939, followed by the publication of two different Paris and New York editions in 1947 and a 1956 Présence Africaine edition.13 Following Damas’s reappropriation of the term nègre, Césaire’s Cahier also problematizes and then reclaims the term, which is famously transformed into négritude. Cahier demonstrates an insightful and politicized engagement with childhood. The child figure has autobiographical resonances, but is also – and more importantly – symbolic of a generation of Antilleans born into post-slavery society, but still enduring the material hardships and psychological disjuncture of life under colonialism. The poet creates the poignant tableau of the négrillon who attends the colonial institutions of school and church in a state of silent and passive torpor: Car c’est dans les marais de la faim que s’est enlisée sa voix d’inanition (un-mot-un-seul-mot et je-vous-en-tiens-quitte-de-la-reine-Blanche-deCastille, un-seul-mot-un-seul-mot, voyez-vous-ce-petit-sauvage-qui-ne-sait-pasun-seul-des-dix-commandements-de-Dieu). Car sa voix s’oublie dans les marais de la faim. Et il n’y a rien, rien à tirer de ce petit vaurien, Qu’une faim qui ne sait plus grimper aux agrès de sa voix. (p. 76)

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The child’s voice is consumed by his own hunger. In the face of such desperate poverty, his lack of knowledge of a Eurocentric syllabus is deftly rendered insignificant by the poet, who simultaneously exposes the callous lack of comprehension exhibited by authority figures who are all too quick to equate the child’s famished silence with a lack of ability. The very choice of the term ‘négrillon’ to describe this child has painful historical resonances: in slave ledgers, slaves were grouped as nègres, négresses or négrillons (children before puberty),14 and Césaire’s nuanced portrait of le négrillon is part of the rehabilitation of black identity for which négritude argued. Childhood reappears in the poem through the description of the family house in the wretchedly named la rue Paille. At home, the poet’s gaze is fixed on his mother ‘dont les jambes pour notre faim inlassable pédalent’ (p. 82). As his mother desperately pedals late into the night, his ears resound with the rhythm of the Singer sewing machine. The deadening placement of ‘inlassable’ means that image and metre combine to underscore once again the all-consuming theme of hunger. The mother’s sewing machine is transformed into an emblem of the constant, female battle against poverty (an image which becomes all too common in the récits d’enfance). In Lettres créoles, Chamoiseau and Confiant observe that the child figure in Cahier gains increased political agency as he matures into adolescence.15 The child’s final appearance suggests the physical and cultural voyage the poet has undertaken: the humble image of ‘moi sur une route, enfant, mâchant une racine de canne à sucre’ (p. 96) is in sharp contrast with Césaire’s status at the time of writing the poem, as a recent graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure who has returned to his native island to appraise it in all its poverty and proclaim a hope in a better future. Significantly, a 2008 film adaptation of the poem uses the recurring figure of the child Césaire as a leitmotif; the boy wears glasses which clearly identify him as a representation of the poet’s younger self.16 The effect of inserting this pensive and enigmatic character is to add a more accessible level to this challenging poem, which operates through the child’s evident curiosity about and compassion for the scenes being depicted. Two years after Cahier was first published, Martinican author Clément Richer’s satirical novella Ti-Coyo et son requin (1941)17 completely dissociates childhood from the realm of autobiography but passes important comment on the child as an agent of social mobility. Although Richer was the author of seven novels between 1939 and 1952, winning the Prix Courteline in 1942 for Ti-Coyo, he is virtually

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unknown today. Ti-Coyo offers a window on social transformations in Martinique before and after the devastating eruption of Mount Pelée on 8 May 1902. The very name Ti-Coyo is reminiscent of the resourceful Antillean folk hero Ti-Jean, and in addition, the quick-witted, wily Ti-Coyo has much in common with the Brer Rabbit/Compère Lapin tradition. The child epitomizes the racial diversity of the Antilles: Le bébé était un curieux échantillon des croisements antillais. Son père, Cocoyo, était né des amours d’un Blanc (quelque marin de passage) et d’une négresse anonyme. Quant à sa mère, Dora, elle était issue du légal accouplement d’un Hindou et d’une Chinoise – descendants de ces coolies hindous et chinois importés afin de suppléer à la défaillance des nègres en révolte.18

Yet although the narrator hints that the hero’s extraordinary charisma owes something to his mixed-race status, Ti-Coyo is born to social pariahs, a hunchback father and a cross-eyed mother, whose physical deformities are counterbalanced by their love and wisdom. This unusual background goes some way to explaining Ti-Coyo’s desire to succeed in the face of a society which has rejected his family as outcasts. Moreover, he is the attractive result of a complex process of métissage, meaning he occupies an unclear position in the rigid ethnoclass hierarchy, and rather than being racially pigeonholed, enjoys a more fluid racial identity. The inclusion of a real event, the 1902 eruption of the volcano Mount Pelée, further destabilizes the ethnoclass hierarchy and produces a narrative twist in which Ti-Coyo marries a béké’s daughter and inherits her father’s plantation after he is killed by the volcanic eruption. The narrative opens with a cautionary tale about alienation: Cocoyo, who places no importance on formal schooling, tells the story of a young Martinican man who went to France to train as a doctor. However, on his return, he found it impossible to reintegrate into Martinican life. Martinicans were too poor to buy his medicines, and he eventually hanged himself. Cocoyo is adamant that his son should not share the same fate. Instead, the uneducated Ti-Coyo will rely on his wits for self-advancement. With the help of his trained pet shark, Manidou, the boy secures his family’s future. To do this, Ti-Coyo turns a demeaning game to his own profit. When wealthy American tourists sailed into the bay of Saint-Pierre onboard cruise ships, they would toss coins into the sea for entertainment, watching while local black Martinicans retrieved them. Ti-Coyo trains Manidou to kill other divers, leaving the way clear for him to collect his fortune one coin at a time. Stylistically, the tale

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is rich in satire, which takes the sting out of Ti-Coyo’s immorality and opportunism (as does the fact that the divers he kills have shunned his own family). Despite this lightness of touch, it is clear that the intrepid child is being figured as an agent of rapid social mobility within one generation. Ti-Coyo shuns the more usual route of education, however, and relies on his wits and charm for his social advancement, aided by a natural disaster which proved fatal for thousands but beneficial for the individual in question. Richer’s novella advocates opportunism rather than education, thus circumnavigating the problems of cultural alienation which are so crucial in other contemporary texts about childhood and setting the satirical tale apart from the autobiographical mode. Another more serious text on childhood by the Guadeloupean author Guy Tirolien, ‘Prière d’un petit enfant nègre’, first published in 1943 and reproduced five years later in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française,19 has become particularly well known due to its reproduction in anthologies. The poem was later included in Tirolien’s collection Balles d’or (1961). 20 ‘Prière d’un petit enfant nègre’ is reminiscent of Damas’s poem ‘Hoquet’ through its rejection of school and its presentation of academic success as a process of alienation which exists only to churn out template copies of ‘un monsieur de la ville, / un monsieur comme il faut’. In the name of education, these bourgeois men have lost (or even ‘un-learned’) the ability to ‘danser le soir au clair de lune’ or to ‘conter les contes aux veillées.’ The poem develops a harrowing parallel: if education is an infernal othering machine, its alternative is also presented through the symbol of the ‘Usine’ [original capitals] which ‘Comme un bateau ancré / Vomit dans la campagne son équipage nègre…’. These terms emphasize the life of backbreaking labour which awaits uneducated pupils, in a metaphor which deliberately evokes the slave ship and which suggests in no uncertain terms the lack of evolution in Antillean society since 1848. The apparently naive child’s voice is laced with irony, as nature both enchants through its ‘ravines fraîches’ and ‘cocotiers penchés’ but also entraps in ‘l’océan des cannes’. This irony reaches a climax in the barbed phrase: ‘Les nègres, vous le savez, n’ont que trop travaillé’. This line follows the patterns of everyday speech with its direct interpellation to the reader/ audience, and derives much of its aural potency from the internal rhyme of ‘savez’ and ‘travaillé’. In a move which resembles Césaire’s discussion of ‘le négrillon’ in his Cahier, the poet is refiguring behaviours which European critics might ascribe to innate inability, in order to demonstrate that they in fact stem from utter disaffection with the bourgeois French

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school system. The poem has been included in numerous anthologies and school text books in Europe and in Francophone Africa, as Maryse Condé recounts in La vie sans fards (2012). 21 It would take the intervention of Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) to make the psychological alienation which begins in a Caribbean childhood the focus of a sustained study. Drawing on psychoanalysis, personal anecdotes and literary examples, his analysis prefigures many of the concerns of the récits d’enfance, demonstrating the urgent political and psychological dimensions of childhood in the Francophone Caribbean. The opening chapter, ‘Le Noir et le langage’, discusses linguistic estrangement, which Fanon illustrates with a searing extract from Damas’s poem ‘Hoquet’: cet enfant sera la honte de notre nom cet enfant sera notre nom de Dieu taisez-vous vous ai-je dit qu’il vous fallait parler français le français de France le français du Français le français français. (p. 16)

In Damas’s poem, the tension between French (the language of education and the mission civilisatrice) and Creole (the langue maternelle) is set in stark contrast. The French language carries the metonymic burden of French culture and ‘civilization’, and the child’s own voice has no place in the poem. Bourgeois aspirational values have rendered him the site of extreme linguistic anxiety, and he is alternately compelled to be silent, or to speak, but only, of course, in French. The poet’s use of anaphora mimics the manner in which French is drummed into the child, while the repetition of ‘français’ threatens to smother all other cultural influences. The same repetition, however, unmistakably conveys Damas’s rejection of stifling French supremacy. Fanon’s reaction to the poem sympathizes with the poet, while acknowledging that language is a particular site of anxiety: ‘Oui, il faut que je me surveille dans mon élocution, car c’est un peu à travers elle qu’on me jugera … On dira de moi, avec beaucoup de mépris: il ne sait même pas parler le français’ (p. 16). Peau noire, masques blancs is at its most potent when it addresses linguistic interplay. Fanon’s own writing displays an astonishingly innovative usage of the French language, switching between theoretical academic discourse and anecdotal conversations to produce a text in which ‘the scientific fact comes to be aggressed by the experience of the street’. 22 Steadfastly wary of petit-nègre (pidgin French), he remains

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unequivocal in his belief that speaking correct French is an important tool with which black Martinicans can undermine patronizing approaches: ‘Un Noir qui vous dit: “Monsieur, je suis nullement votre brave…” Du nouveau dans le monde’ (p. 26). Fanon tends to assert that, despite the cultural alienation imposed by French colonialism in all its forms, Creole also has no place in modern Martinique. He regards Creole as a historical fragment which will be eradicated by future educational advances, and casts aspersions on the literary value of poets writing in Creole such as Gilbert Gratiant (pp. 21–22). Nonetheless, one of the more colloquial, and potent, examples in Peau noire, masques blancs demonstrates that as long as Creole remains a mother tongue in the Antilles, attempts to deny and suppress the language by the évolué class (who have benefited from access to education and sojourns in metropolitan France) unambiguously mark the onset of a white mask, and are indicative of psychological denial (reminiscent of Freudian Ichspaltung) and an implicit hypocrisy: A ce propos, le folklore nous fournit une illustration. Après quelques mois passés en France, un paysan retourne près des siens. Apercevant un instrument aratoire, il interroge son père, vieux campagnard à-quion-ne-la-fait-pas: ‘Comment s’appelle cet engin?’ Pour toute réponse, son père le lui lâche sur les pieds, et l’amnésie disparaît. Singulière thérapeutique. (p. 18)

Fanon becomes somewhat entangled in language, recognizing that French represents a ‘masque blanc’ if it pretentiously overwrites a speaker’s native Creole. Yet at the same time, he exhorts Antilleans to speak French rather than Creole, in order to overcome the prejudices of those who seek to belittle black people and who will interpret any French mistakes as a marker of an inherent inferiority. As Fanon’s thesis develops, he points to the effects of social conditioning in books and films which perpetuate the colonial black/white power imbalance, and result in the black child internalizing Western discourse and negative stereotypes of black racial identity: Et le Loup, le Diable, le Mauvais Génie, le Mal, le Sauvage sont toujours représentés par un nègre ou un Indien, et comme il y a toujours identification avec le vainqueur, le petit nègre se fait explorateur, aventurier, missionnaire ‘qui risque d’être mangé par les méchants nègres’ aussi facilement que par le petit Blanc. (p. 119)23

The corollary of this is the internalization of the belief that everything associated with white, Western society is civilized and desirable. To

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demonstrate this point, Fanon famously invokes the mantra of the French education system under the mission civilisatrice (the same mantra to which Damas had first drawn attention in 1937). Racial estrangement is rooted in infancy, when black schoolchildren learn history via a mantra which Fanon transcribes as ‘nos pères, les Gaulois’ (p. 120). The more frequent form of the phrase is ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’, but Fanon’s version proposes a greater familial proximity to Gallic culture. The result of this educational policy is that ‘peu à peu, on voit se former et cristalliser chez le jeune Antillais une attitude, une habitude de penser et de voir, qui sont essentiellement blanches’ (p. 120). Fanon’s work is an urgent and polemical dialogue with racial alienation. Although keenly aware that psychoanalytic concepts present a valuable method of excavating childhood, he is constantly arguing for the specificity of circumstances in the Antilles: ‘Je crois qu’il faut redevenir enfant pour comprendre certaines réalités psychiques. C’est en quoi Jung est un novateur: il veut aller à la jeunesse du monde. Mais il se trompe singulièrement: il ne va qu’à la jeunesse de l’Europe’ (p. 153). Peau noire, masques blancs leaves the reader in no doubt as to the imperative to analyse childhood in the Francophone Caribbean, and it is little surprise that it should emerge as an explicit literary reference for the authors of the post-1990 revival of the récit d’enfance. Edouard Glissant’s first novel, La Lézarde (1958), 24 for which the author received the Prix Goncourt, is an early Antillean novel which also makes striking use of the motif of childhood. Much of the novel’s narrative complexity is generated by the enigmatic first-person narrator, who is a bystander to a political election and relates the political activities of two young men, Mathieu and Thaël. In the course of the novel, the narrator grows into a man: ‘J’ai entendu ces mots, pourtant je n’étais encore qu’un enfant, et ils résonnèrent en moi’ (p. 17), and eventually, the text suggests, turns from narrator to author: ‘Mathieu se tourna vers moi […] – Fais une histoire, dit Mathieu. Tu es le plus jeune, tu te rappelleras’ (p. 237). The device of the narrator-as-observer performs an expository role, introducing the Francophone Caribbean to metropolitan audiences and engaging the interest of a reading public for whom, at the time, Martinican literature was unknown, even in Martinique (as Confiant describes when discussing La Lézarde in Le Cahier de romances). 25 Elinor S. Miller points out an autobiographical connection, as Glissant was involved as a young man of 17 in Césaire’s election victory of 1945. 26 The novel stages a struggle between opposing political ideologies in which abstract debate does not eclipse the urgent

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plight of the Martinicans (the name of the country is not given in the novel, but Lamentin is thinly veiled as Lambrianne). This message is illustrated with dignity in the plight of an unnamed father: Ses enfants doivent travailler (c’est une banalité) dans les petites bandes. Le plus jeune, quatre ans, conduit les bœufs devant la charrue. Il ne peut pas les envoyer à l’école obligatoire. Mais laissons … Ce qui importe, après la dure lutte quotidienne, c’est la lumière nouvelle qui se répand sur les mains du monde. (p. 56)

The new light is a reference to Mathieu and Thaël, whose activities have been noticed by the unnamed man. In a lyrical meander typical of the novel, it becomes apparent that this is the same man mentioned by Mathieu in his first conversation with Thaël: ‘J’ai vu un enfant de quatre ans: il dirigeait un attelage de bœufs, au travers d’un champ stérile. Bœufs squelettiques, sillons sans rigueur, laboureur sans joie. Un enfant près des bœufs, et son père cloué à la charrue! […] J’ai entendu la Lézarde: elle criait […] Sûr, la Lézarde criait à la vie. Pourtant là! un enfant de quatre ans …’ (p. 29)

The motif of children in abject poverty, denied access to education despite it being legally ‘obligatoire’ and thus denied any chance of a better future, underscores the perilous condition of future Martinican generations. What is at stake here is not merely abstract political ideology, as the novel uses the motif of childhood to demonstrate a tangible, visceral need for a new political order. The First récits d’enfance In 1950 Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres appeared, founding the Francophone Caribbean tradition of récits d’enfance. The text had won the ‘Prix des lecteurs’, a competition organized by the Parisian literary magazine La Gazette des lettres. 27 A panel of 1,000 membres du prix des lecteurs received specially printed copies of the shortlisted books and voted for their favourite (this first competition ‘preview edition’ of La Rue Cases-Nègres was jointly published by La Gazette des lettres and Editions Jean Froissart). As the winning text, what is known as the original edition of La Rue Cases-Nègres was subsequently published with Editions Jean Froissart. It is wholly significant that this literary landmark was first published thanks to the votes of the reading public, a success which underscores the popular appeal of the récit d’enfance.

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Many editions of the novel take a still from Euzhan Palcy’s successful 1983 film adaptation Rue cases-nègres as the front cover image, a further reminder of the text’s enduring significance in popular culture. 28 At a video conference in 2002, Aimé Césaire emphasized Zobel’s significance for Antillean literature: ‘Joseph Zobel, c’est LE romancier martiniquais.’29 Zobel’s first novel, Diab’-là, 30 had urged black Martinicans to fight for autonomy over their land rather than accept an economically exploitative society predicated on colonial power hierarchies. This message was deemed sufficiently radical for the text’s publication to be banned by the Vichy censor during the Second World War; the novel was not published until 1946, after the war had ended. La Rue Cases-Nègres develops themes which had already emerged as significant in Zobel’s 1946 volume of short stories, Laghia de la mort. 31 Two stories in the collection, ‘Le syllabaire’ and ‘Mapiam’, focus on poignant child figures and the themes of poverty and education. ‘Le syllabaire’ depicts the sacrifices of a mother who is determined to educate her child so he will not be destined to work in the canefields, while ‘Mapiam’ illustrates a school pupil’s daily embarrassment at his extreme poverty. He wraps his feet in bandages, and would prefer his peers to think he has mapiam, a Creole term meaning sores, than go barefoot and admit to being too poor to buy shoes. La Rue Cases-Nègres heralds the maturation of themes addressed in Diab’-là and Laghia de la mort. Just three years after the loi de la départementalisation had come into effect on 1 January 1947, the genre of the récit d’enfance allowed the author a greater degree of freedom to expose social injustices from behind the protective mantle of childhood. Zobel’s novel eschewed the dominant forms of the time (poetry and the essay) to depict Martinican plantation life from an intensely individual viewpoint. Published at an exciting transitional point for former French Caribbean colonies, the novel raises uncomfortable questions about the lack of development in the Antilles since abolition in 1848, and as Martin Munro comments, ‘the opening descriptions of the plantation depict a world in which little has apparently changed since the time of slavery’. 32 Although it is acknowledged as a landmark of Antillean literature, Zobel’s récit d’enfance all too often generates sweeping, reductive critical responses, which read the text as a monument to the power of sacrifice and academic success to enable a determined individual to triumph over poverty. Such readings grossly underplay the novel’s sophisticated critical stance towards the education system and the colonial socio-economic

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structures it upholds. The narrator, José, suffers horribly in order to achieve an education. He is born into the petit-nègre class, the poorest group in society. His humble plantation origins set him apart from his classmates, and he is physically propelled further and further away from his birthplace, Petit-Morne, to Petit-Bourg and Petit-Fond. This progression does not necessarily indicate an improvement in his socioeconomic status, as Mary Gallagher observes, because ‘the prefix “petit” characterizes each one of these locations as lowly or inferior, its fateful recurrence denying hopes of social advancement and working against any notion of deep metamorphosis’. 33 José’s overwhelming isolation upon arrival at the Lycée Schœlcher in Fort-de-France culminates in a painful outpouring: Personne ne me ressemble. Personne n’a d’ailleurs jamais fait attention à moi. […] Certainement, s’il y en avait un qui fût né à une rue Cases-Nègres, un dont les parents maniaient la bêche ou le coutelas, je l’eusse reconnu et approché. Mais je suis le seul de mon espèce. (p. 221)

Zobel’s récit d’enfance is not merely the tale of an ‘élève appliqué’ who, according to Roger Toumson, ‘travaille d’arrache-pied, dans le pieux dessin d’occuper, au terme de ses études, une situation professionnelle qui lui permettra d’arracher M’man Tine ainsi que sa mère de la misère’. 34 This generalization neglects to consider José’s disillusionment with the Eurocentric syllabus and his increasing feelings of isolation at school, which result in him playing truant and even failing part of the baccalaureate (p. 285). Perhaps the greatest achievement of La Rue Cases-Nègres is the way in which the text offers a subtle economic critique of social class in the Antilles, summed up by Randolph Hezekiah as Zobel’s preoccupation with the ‘mechanics of liberation’. 35 Hezekiah rightly draws attention to the emphasis on economic emancipation in Zobel’s récit d’enfance and in Diab’-là, texts which exhort black Martinicans to take control of their own economic destiny rather than continuing to live in circumstances which had evolved very little since 1848 and which maintained the power of the white plantocratic béké ethnoclass. However, it quickly becomes equally apparent that the black bourgeoisie hold an a­ ntagonistic, racist attitude towards those black compatriots who belong to the petit-nègre class. For all his apparent childhood naivety, the narrator, José, describes numerous examples of economic exploitation, which depict a far more complex situation than a simple black–white dichotomy.

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On the plantation, payday is a mournful affair, each worker receiving a pittance (p. 62), and these pitiful wages are spent in the shop run by the overseer’s wife – significantly, the overseer is described as a mulatto, a status which confers a certain superiority in the ethnoclass hierarchy and is often associated with wealth (pp. 19–20). After the children cause a fire on the plantation, M’man Tine draws attention to another exploitative decision. The fire serves as a pretext for the overseer to ban children from being left unsupervised while their parents labour on the plantation, leaving the poor plantation workers little choice but to send their children to work in the cane fields. M’man Tine is convinced that this same mulatto overseer has seized the opportunity to ‘voir grossir les petites-bandes’ (p. 79), swelling the numbers in the gangs of children who undertake light manual work on the plantations. The old lady makes no attempt to conceal her contempt for her neighbours who have sent their children to join the ranks of the petites-bandes, as these children are thus deprived of an education and are condemned to a future of punishing manual labour from which there will be no escape: Et de parler, ronchonner, bougonner! Je l’entendis mépriser les parents de mes camarades qui avaient envoyé leurs enfants dans les petites-bandes, les traitant de nègres sans orgueil et qui ne savaient pas s’attacher les reins solidement. – Hein! comment cela pourrait-il finir si les pères y foutent les fils là-dedans, dans le même malheur? Eh bé! si j’y ai pas mis ta mère, c’est pas toi que j’y mettrai. (p. 79)

In addition, housing is monopolized by the békés, who are revealed as the owners of Cour Fusil in Petit-Bourg (pp. 137–38) and Petit-Fond in Fort-de-France. Petit-Fond was built by békés to house their own workers, so, just as on the plantations, wage money moves in cycles, paid out to the petits-nègres for their manual labour, but returning to the pockets of the mulatto and béké classes through rent payments (p. 252). As José’s social ascent gains momentum and he passes the Certificat d’études, and then – more importantly – the Concours des Bourses, his awareness of the economic and political struggles ahead of him becomes more acute. The partial (quarter) scholarship he has received from the colonial authorities to attend the Lycée is not nearly enough to cover the fees, which leads his mother Délia to denounce the dichotomy in black society between poor plantation workers and the bourgeoisie: – Ils sont trop méchants! C’est parce que nous sommes des petits nègres, pauvres et seuls, qu’ils t’ont pas donné une bourse entière. Ils savent bien

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que je suis une malheureuse femme et que je ne pourrais pas te payer le lycée. Ils savent très bien que te donner un quart de bourse d’études, c’est rien te donner du tout. Mais ils savent pas quelle femme de combat je suis. Eh bé! j’abandonnerai pas ce quart de bourse. Tu iras dans leur lycée! (p. 216; original emphasis)

This speech marks Délia’s first appearance in the novel, and in her anger and resourcefulness she resembles her own mother, M’man Tine. Skin colour here is less important than material wealth and the advantages it confers. Délia’s speech, with its oppositional patterns of ‘them’ and ‘us’, exposes the efforts of the black bourgeoisie to uphold the ethnoclass hierarchy and denounces the barriers against which the petit-nègre class must fight. The partial scholarship is in itself miraculous, as scholarships are usually ‘une affaire de piston’ (p. 215), another indictment of the unjust and biased administration of the colonial education system. Social barriers are also evident in the treatment José receives from Mme Léonce and Mam’zelle Mélie, who both patronize and demean him, and use the term petit-nègre. The narrator parenthetically objects to Mam’zelle Mélie’s use of this term as particularly vexatious because ‘[Mam’zelle Mélie, dis-je, est, telle que je la vois, noire comme moi, sinon comme un merle]’ (pp. 175–76). This unusual use of square brackets only appears once in the text, and draws further attention to this comment on race. As the text develops, José is aware that Martinican society is not just plagued by binary, black/white antagonism, as he encounters the discriminatory ethnoclass hierarchy at work. The text’s deceptively gentle and naive narrative style, and its focus on the themes of education, friendship and filial gratitude, do not diminish Zobel’s acerbic critique of economic exploitation and its perpetrators, both white and black. The text is the first prose narrative to undertake a semi-­autobiographical account of childhood. The quatrième de couverture of the Editions Jean Froissart original book is sensitive to the text’s generic hybridity and its potential to enlighten metropolitan readers about conditions in France’s newest département, describing La Rue Cases-Nègres as ‘à la fois documentaire et roman’. The first edition also contains dedications to Zobel’s mother and grandmother, which clearly set up parallels with the narrative and indicate an autobiographical element: A MA MERE, Domestique chez les Blancs. A MA GRAND-MERE, Travailleuse de plantation, et qui ne sait pas lire. 36

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These dedications were removed in subsequent editions, increasing the distance between author and protagonist. Suzanne Crosta suggests that the scandal provoked in the 1950s by Fanon’s attack on Capécia, which resulted from the close association of author with protagonist, might have motivated the increased paratextual distance between author and protagonist in later editions of La Rue Cases-Nègres. 37 The original dedications provide information which casts light on the genre in which Zobel had chosen to write, confirming that this text is more accurately described as a récit d’enfance than an autobiography. As the dedications suggest, the author is drawing on his own life, and in the text, the child hero José is clearly a creolized version of Joseph. The protagonist’s surname is only revealed at the beginning of Part Two of the novel, on his first day at school (p. 106), when we discover that he is called José Hassam. The reader is left in no doubt that there is a certain distance separating Joseph Zobel from his narrator and hero. Zobel’s daughter, Jenny, offers a potential explanation for this choice of name, suggesting that the African/Arabic-sounding ‘Hassam’ may indicate an ‘allegiance towards Africa as the land of his ancestors and a wish to associate himself with his African origins by selecting a surname which was not a slave master’s name’. 38 The author’s father, Eugène Zobel, was a chauffeur, which corresponds with the brief details recounted in the text, although no surname is given (p. 44). He did not marry Zobel’s mother, and although he recognized his son, he offered no financial support. Furthermore, La Rue Cases-Nègres makes no reference to José having any siblings, whereas Joseph Zobel spent part of his childhood being raised with his half-brother. Other subtle changes reinforce this distance: Joseph Zobel’s mother, Acélia Rocher, also known as Man Célia, and grandmother, Marie, become Délia and M’man Tine in the narrative. 39 The original dedication also reveals that the text’s tragic ending, in which José’s success coincides with M’man Tine’s death, is pure fiction. The dedication refers to the author’s grandmother in the present tense and, indeed, Zobel’s grandmother did live to witness his academic success, a fact which demonstrates that the narrative should not be read as a straightforward autobiography. La Rue Cases-Nègres establishes a narrative mode which other récits d’enfance will follow, in which personal recollections are intercut with fictitious episodes. The text contains no moments of retrospection at which the adult author/ narrator reflects on the significance of particular childhood events on his future life; this work is left to the reader, guided as the text develops by an increasing number of rhetorical questions posed by the narrator.

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The cover of the original edition paradoxically underscores both the text’s exotic otherness and the universality of its central theme: the struggle against poverty. The dust jacket capitalizes on the exotic potential; the cover illustration depicts a young José who, despite his skin tone, has Western features, and this image is set against the backdrop of la rue cases-nègres. In addition, the spine is illustrated with an attractive, amply bosomed black woman, a stereotypical doudou (a word used since colonial times to refer to a desirable Creole woman), carrying a basket on her head. In contrast, the quatrième de couverture foregrounds the novel’s naturalism, targeting metropolitan readers by underscoring the fact that the social struggle it depicts will have resonances for all those living in ‘les rues Cases-Nègres de la Martinique, du Sénégal, de Madagascar; et même pour les rues Cases-Nègres, habitées par les blancs, de la banlieue parisienne, des mines du Nord ou des usines du Creusot’. Although La Rue Cases-Nègres does not include a scene of recognition, José’s childhood brings him into contact with characters who foster the inquisitive, independent thinking which characterizes such scenes. M’man Tine’s strong, astute and reflective voice sensitizes José to the economic injustices in Martinican society, and her male counterpart in the narrative is M. Médouze. From M. Médouze’s first appearance, he evokes the African griot, a captivating oral storyteller, who repeatedly wishes to return to la Guinée (West Africa), but whose stories are decidedly Creole. The old man’s riddles convey lessons about subjugation and domination in the Caribbean, as José learns ‘comment une carafe en terre cuite qu’on tient par le goulot devient un domestique qui ne sert de l’eau à son maître que lorsque ce dernier l’étrangle’ (pp. 53–54). M. Médouze provides the only direct discussion of slavery when he relates his own father’s lived experience of transatlantic transportation from Africa and the 1848 abolition. M. Médouze’s account of his father’s life leaves José and the reader in no doubt that, once the euphoria of liberation had passed, the freed slaves had no choice but to return to the plantations (p. 57). Both M’man Tine and M. Médouze develop José’s own critical acumen and whenever José rushes to see M. Médouze, he knows their discussions will fuel his curiosity about the world: Notre conversation consistait en un long interrogatoire que je lui présentais, et auquel il répondait scrupuleusement. […] J’avais aussi à cœur de savoir où les békés prenaient tout l’argent qu’on disait qu’ils possédaient. M. Médouze m’expliquait alors que c’était le diable qui le leur apportait. Or, je savais déjà par intuition que le diable, la misère et la mort étaient

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The child begins to comprehend that the békés are involved in upholding the conditions of hardship which he has observed all around him on the plantations, and through M. Médouze he comes to equate the békés with a devilish, almost Faustian pact, in which their incredible financial profit is obtained at the expense of black workers’ lives. In the final part of La Rue Cases-Nègres, this critical attitude is sharpened through José’s avid reading of the Harlem Renaissance classic Banjo by Jamaican-born Claude McKay.40 Published in 1929, the novel had influenced the négritude poets due to its denunciation of the black bourgeoisie for their cultural assimilation into European society. The text advises a return to an African heritage, promoted through the figure of the eponymous hero, who celebrates his black identity. In the same section, José also undertakes an angry deconstruction of cinematic representations of black men (pp. 287–89). These comments suggest the kind of discourse the author is hoping to provoke through his own text, and indicate an increasingly urgent desire on the part of the narrator to communicate his life story to a wider audience. In conversation with his friend Carmen, José comes to a disturbing conclusion about the ­inevitability of the racial hatred which drives the békés’ behaviour: – […] Un béké, tu sais, a toujours envie de fouetter le nègre qui le sert. – Atavisme, pensai-je. Les gestes aussi doivent s’imprimer dans le sang et se transmettre. (p. 256)

José’s alarming conclusion suggests that racial bias is inherited and inherent in the white béké population, and offers a rather bleak prognosis for the future. In a sequel, La fête à Paris,41 which appeared just three years later in 1953, José, who is now a student in Paris, finds there is a notable difference in racial attitudes in Europe compared to the racism of the békés in Martinique: en Europe, nombreux sont les Blancs qui feraient mea culpa, devant nous, et qui nous demanderaient pardon pour les crimes de leurs ancêtres, envers nous. Vous ne croyez pas? Tandis que là-bas, le maintient [sic] de leur toute-puissance et de leur infaillibilité ne les rend que plus féroces … (p. 138)

The narrator suggests that race relations in the Antilles are quite different

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to those in multicultural metropolitan France, and if he is inclined to be optimistic about his experiences in Paris, José still believes that the békés’ pronounced desire to maintain their economic stranglehold only heightens their obsessive oppression of black people in the Antilles. In the sequel, the narrative vantage point shifts to the third person, indicative of an increased distance between author and protagonist and a move away from autobiography. This creates a more subdued narrative, and the novel’s title is heavily ironic. José arrives in a post-war France which is still reeling from the Occupation, and his observations that conditions are extremely hard immediately call into question the supposed superiority of the mère-patrie. The cultural diversity of post-war Paris is foregrounded as José makes friends from other French colonies and begins a relationship with a white French woman, Marthe. La fête à Paris also provides a sad coda to La Rue Cases-Nègres. Despite his status as a ‘bachelier’ (p. 46), it emerges that José has been unsuccessful in applying for administrative posts in Martinique. The underlying suggestion is that his petit-nègre origins and low position in the ethnoclass hierarchy are still holding him back, despite his educational successes. It is this failure which pushes him to emigrate to Paris to pursue a university education, encouraged by his mother, who is determined that once this final educational hurdle is overcome ‘personne ne pourrait dire qu’il n’y a pas de place pour toi …’ (p. 47). In La fête à Paris, José is again denied a colonial bursary to support his university studies, this time because he unwisely reveals to the administration his dreams of studying architecture in Paris, a career aspiration that is deemed an unsuitable choice for a young man from the petit-nègre level of the ethnoclass hierarchy (p. 48). Zobel’s texts about José Hassam do not unreservedly praise increased access to colonial education and its resultant social mobility. Instead, they are the reflective and mature chronicles of a series of important, if fairly modest educational successes. The narratives are uncompromising in their insistence that these successes are accompanied by constant struggles and numerous disappointments. Zobel’s focus on the most humble aspects of Creole culture has led Raphaël Confiant to place the older author’s corpus as a forerunner of créolité,42 celebrating his innovation in providing early literature which addresses the islands and their indigenous everyday culture. In contrast to the theoretical rhetoric generated by the créolistes, however, Zobel’s prose retains a certain simplicity in relating complex circumstances. It is this poignant clarity,

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and its capacity to evoke compassion and empathy, which Maryse Condé praises in her own récit d’enfance when she states: ‘La lecture de Joseph Zobel, plus que des discours théoriques, m’a ouvert les yeux’.43 Zobel is deservedly a touchstone for the literary revival of the genre in the 1990s. The next significant textual engagement with childhood is not a récit d’enfance, but a novel which in many respects approaches the genre. In Sapotille et le serin d’argile (1960), by the Guadeloupean writer Michèle Lacrosil, the eponymous Sapotille’s childhood memories structure the narrative. Eschewing the narrative prose style which characterizes the récit d’enfance, the text is written as a series of diary entries during a transatlantic crossing from Guadeloupe to Europe, switching between the daily events onboard the steamer and Sapotille’s childhood recollections. The entries concerned with childhood ‘track the disintegration of a subject who internalizes more and more the self-image given to her by the institution [of school]’.44 Indeed, Sapotille first becomes aware that her darker skin sets her apart at school. In a cruel irony, her name suggests the lightness of the sapotilla fruit, a disparity which a lover points out: ‘La chair de la sapotille, c’est café au lait, non?’ (p. 234). Her racial difference later acts as an obstacle to her romantic relationships, and eventually she decides to leave Guadeloupe in a bid to escape the rigid colour-class barriers of the Antilles. The entry headed ‘Dimanche, 21 novembre’, placed at the centre of the narrative, is a climactic exploration of Sapotille’s racial heritage. The child comes into contact with the slave history in an episode which underscores the importance of intergenerational transmission of the Caribbean slave past – the very concern which will become increasingly urgent in later récits d’enfance. Sapotille’s grandmother makes her only appearance in the narrative in order to fulfil this communicative role: Tes aïeux, Sapotille … […] C’étaient des esclaves. Il est temps que tu saches! C’est à moi de te dire, comme fit pour moi ma grand-mère Elodie. A ton tour, tu renseigneras, quand tu seras vieille, ton petit-fils. N’oublie pas. Ecoute. (p. 113)

This scene is a model for the scene of recognition. It is not the mother (who remains a distant figure in the narrative) but the grandmother who is bold enough to discuss the slave past. Yet in an important difference to the scene of recognition as it is presented in the récits d’enfance, this scene is not catalysed by the child Sapotille. It lacks the agency of scenes of recognition that are triggered by the child protagonist, just as Sapotille lacks the moral fortitude of the child narrators in the récits

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d’enfance; throughout the narrative, Sapotille endures, submits to and later, most distressingly, perpetrates racial discrimination, rather than questioning it. Her grandmother’s account nonetheless urges Sapotille to look beyond physical subjugation and seek intellectual emancipation. Her painful personal history of slavery relates the story of Tijean, Sapotille’s valiant great-great-great-grandfather, who worked tirelessly for thirtythree years to acquire the 825 francs he needed to free himself, and then raised a further 725 francs to free his wife. The grandmother’s account alludes to Le Code noir, a set of legal guidelines promulgated in 1685 which defined how slaves were to be treated. To emphasize the totality in which the slaves found themselves trapped, she reiterates its stipulation that all children born to slaves were themselves slaves (p. 117). She asks whether Sapotille has heard of Victor Schœlcher, and explains that the slaves he freed were still fearful of a repetition of the 1802 reinstatement (p. 121). Her tale also includes interjections which indirectly convey Sapotille’s distressed reaction: ‘Ne pleure pas, Sapotille. Notre cas n’est pas un cas unique’ (p. 119), emphasizing collectivity in order to encourage her granddaughter not to feel victimized. This fundamental childhood memory is recalled by an adult Sapotille, who is aged 26 at the narrative’s opening; it emerges that the discovery of the slave past has had an important influence on the course of her future life. Echoing the treatment her slave ancestors had to endure, Sapotille has been repeatedly physically constrained, spending hours in the cachot, a small cell, as punishment at school, then locked in a small bathroom overnight by a violent husband, and finally subject to the claustrophobia of the liner. However, the discovery of an ancestor who was subject to ‘les fers, le cachot, le fouet’ (p. 120) forges a link between oppression in Guadeloupe both during and after slavery, and in a positive development Sapotille becomes inspired by her slave ancestry to resist oppression. The text ends with ambivalence, as the physically and psychologically exhausted narrator places her faith in a new beginning in her chosen country of exile, metropolitan France. The earliest example of a récit d’enfance by a woman writer is Françoise Ega’s Le Temps des madras, which appeared in 1966. Ega was born in Martinique in 1920 and moved to Marseille in the mid-1950s, where she lived until her death in 1976. In her récit d’enfance, Ega’s narrator follows a similar trajectory to José in La Rue Cases-Nègres; the child spends her early infancy in the small town of Morne Rouge in rural Martinique, before moving to the urban centre of Fort-de-France.

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Although the text has received little scholarly attention, Le Temps des madras deserves to be recognized as a literary counterpart to Zobel’s text by an important woman writer. Ega discusses aspects of Martinican life which remain unexplored by Zobel, describing the consequences of volcanic activity in the north of the island, and providing an account of poverty and education as experienced by a young girl. Indeed, it is the girl’s intelligent observations and maturity which catalyse the first scene of recognition in a Francophone Caribbean récit d’enfance. Like the dust jacket of La Rue Cases-Nègres, the text’s preface, by the Martinican Dr Emile Monnerot, displays a heightened sensitivity to the question of genre: Le livre de Françoise Ega n’est pas un roman, un conte, ni un reportage. C’est un récit à la première personne, un témoignage quelque peu autobiographique de sa réalité martiniquaise. Ce récit, véritable observation naturaliste contient cependant ces trois modalités d’expression: Au roman, il emprunte sa trame dramatique au sens étymologique, c’est-àdire des personnages décrits dans leur mouvement intérieur et extérieur; eux-mêmes placés dans des situations et des interactions en mouvement. Au conte, il doit son ambiance supranaturelle et son atmosphère d’attente voisine du ‘suspense’. Il tient du reportage par son esprit documentaire et sa recherche de la réalité. (p. 9)

Monnerot underscores the dual function of Ega’s text to both entertain and inform the reader. Le Temps des madras is divided into 18 chapters and exactly fits the model of the récit d’enfance, taking us from the narrator’s earliest recollections through to the end of childhood and the cusp of adolescence. Despite the fact that Ega’s narrator is never directly named, the sustained use of the first-person makes the autobiographical aims clear, and from the text’s opening, the narrator homes in on children’s perspicacity: ‘Le tort est d’imaginer les enfants incapables de sentiments tumultueux et de dire, à propos de tout et de rien, qu’ils ne comprennent pas’ (p. 13). The title immediately suggests a focus on gender and women in particular: the madras is a woman’s head-tie made from the brightly patterned madras fabric of south-eastern India. It was brought to the Antilles by the indentured labourers recruited from France’s colonial comptoirs in India after abolition in 1848. The madras has come to be symbolic of this era, associated with the nouvelle citoyenne, or freed slave. It is also a colourful, creative display of femininity and sexuality; the number of knots used to tie the madras around the head advertises a woman’s marital status. The early death of the narrator’s

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father means that Le Temps des madras is dominated by a number of resilient female  characters: her mother, her aunt Acé and the healer Elisa. Although the narrator is in awe of her elder brother, whose scholarly achievements are her mother’s pride and joy, her own gender is no bar to academic achievement, and her mother also supports her so she can go on to obtain the prized Certificat d’études. Ega’s account is similar to Zobel’s in her focus on education, but she exhibits a more acute awareness of the imposition of French language and culture than José Hassam. Her first glimpse of a pomme-France fails to impress the narrator (p. 27), and she is similarly unimpressed by the Eurocentric school syllabus. A school geography textbook provokes her scorn, and she naively ridicules it because ‘on n’y trouvait même pas une photographie du Mont Pelé! [sic]’ (p. 86). In Ega’s text, childhood is dominated by a harmonious relationship with the natural environment. In contrast to Zobel, nature is not equated with the canefields and is therefore not linked to exploitation and servitude. The narrator’s early affinity with nature is fostered through her mother’s love of gardening as a means to support her family. This is reinforced by her mother’s friend, the local healer and voyante, Elisa, who provides natural herbal remedies for the poor. Later in the text, however, nature deals the family a terrible blow, as they are forced to evacuate Morne Rouge when Mount Pelée becomes active between 1929 and 1932. Ega’s account supplements Zobel’s récit d’enfance by providing important details about life in the shadow of Mount Pelée, recounting the personal and historical legacy of the greatest tragedy in modern Martinican history. When the narrator is a young child, her father tells her about his own escape from Saint-Pierre during the devastating eruption of 1902, in which his father perished. Later in the text, when volcanic activity has forced the family to live as refugees in Fort-de-France, her youngest brother (named after her deceased father) tragically dies from malnutrition. José Hassam learns about the slave past through M. Médouze, and Sapotille is enlightened by her grandmother, but Le Temps des madras is the first récit d’enfance to include a fully fledged scene of recognition. Crucially, it places the child as the inquisitive instigator who seeks out knowledge. Puzzled by her aunt Acé’s violent hatred of békés, the narrator’s questions lead Acé to recount a historical act of malice in which gender played a particularly disturbing role. Acé’s grandmother, a slave, was forced to sleep next to her béké mistress’s bedroom door. During the slave’s pregnancy, she was still forbidden to leave her post,

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and one night she relieved herself on the bedroom floor. Her mistress’s reaction was one of terrible cruelty: ‘La béké, folle de colère la fit mettre aux fers, carcan au cou. Maman Titine naquit cette nuit-là et sa mère mourut des suites de ses couches’ (p. 50). Acé’s hatred is thus explained: she cannot forgive the békés for her grandmother’s death. This account throws the young narrator into turmoil: ‘Cette brutale révélation me bouleversa. Comment, moi, j’étais petite-fille d’esclave? Tout d’abord, qu’est-ce que c’était que les esclaves? Cette question me tourmentait et jamais mes parents n’avaient fait allusion à cet état’ (p. 50). She soon seizes the opportunity to question her aunt further, but Acé’s evasive response is typical of the scene of recognition: ‘Ne me parle pas de ça. Puisque tu veux savoir, viens voir le père Azou’ (p. 51). Père Azou is a ‘nègre de Guinée’ who tends Acé’s land, and is comparable to Zobel’s M. Médouze. He explains to the young narrator that his people were transported from West Africa to the Caribbean because they were prized workers and could withstand the appalling conditions of slavery. Nonetheless, he provides a remarkably balanced account of the past which rejects racial stereotyping: Et pourtant, depuis que le monde est monde, et partout, il y a des bons et des mauvais. Il y a eu de bons blancs, des saints, il y en a eu de mauvais aussi, il le fallait! Il y a eu de bons esclaves, ils sont au paradis et il y a eu des mauvais qui surent quimboiser les békés. Ils sont en enfer avec tous les mauvais! (p. 54; original emphasis)

In the face of Acé’s annoyance at his measured words, Azou quotes the positive examples of Victor Schœlcher and Père Labat (although this is not discussed in the text, the ‘pirate priest’ Labat was actually involved in slavery, which rather undermines Azou’s point). Azou’s explanations confuse the narrator rather than enlightening her, and she comments ‘Je n’étais pas plus avancée qu’avant; dans ma tête, tout s’était amalgamé’ (p. 55). She pursues her investigations, this time looking to her mother for guidance: Je lui demandai qui elle était. Elle me regarda ahurie. – Est-ce que tu es de Guinée? – Oh! fit-elle suffoquée, je vois que vous avez vu le père Azou et Acé vous a encore dit des sottises. Eh bien! moi, ma grand-mère était Caraïbe: les Caraïbes étaient les maîtres de l’île, ils sont tous morts; on les a tués […] (p. 55)

The child is provided with a parental explanation which, while seeking to reassure, skims over any detailed account of the slave past and

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highlights Amerindian rather than African ancestry. Her mother stresses the advantages arising from colonialism, such as literacy and the benevolence of missionaries, prompting Acé to goad her by remarking that they spread the skill of reading, but not of writing, thus condemning the black Antilleans to passivity and subjugation. The mother’s response suggests a more philosophical approach: ‘il ne faut pas regarder en arrière pour ne voir que les cailloux laissés sur le chemin, mais en avant; et il y a tant d’espoir pour nos descendants qu’il ne faut pas les empoisonner avec des choses que toi tu n’as jamais connues’ (p. 56).45 Ega’s récit d’enfance provides the earliest scene of recognition, in a dialogue which paradoxically portrays an adult calmly advocating a politics of forgetting as a method with which to protect future generations from painful historical memories. Yet the very inclusion of this troubling scene would seem to counter any notion of forgetting, suggesting that such dialogue, no matter how painful, is urgently required in Antillean society precisely in order that Antilleans may look to the future from a position of knowledge and empowerment. In Le Petit Coolie noir (1972), the récit d’enfance becomes the vehicle for an acerbic discussion of métissage. Martinican author Maurice Virassamy uses the genre to voice his unusual position as a métis whose family has both Indian and African ancestry. Virassamy is the first author to explicitly look back at his childhood from an adult perspective, permitting more space for analysis of his psychological development. The text’s ‘avant-propos’ is set in Paris, and begins with a troubling scene between the adult narrator and Anna, his jealous lover. During an argument, Anna slaps the narrator, at which, ‘comme entraîné par un vent de folie’ (p. 13), he violently strikes back at her, repeatedly. Yet her retort to his violence, ‘sale nègre!’ (p. 14), takes him by surprise as it targets not his brutality, but his race. This catalyses the intense meditations on mixed-race identity of which Virassamy’s récit d’enfance is composed, as the narrator is inspired to ‘pénétrer dans les méandres les plus intimes de mon être psychique, à partir du premier jour dont j’ai gardé le souvenir’ (p. 18). The preface depicts the narrator in a far from flattering light; nonetheless, the reader is urged to believe that this narrator is the author himself, and the autobiographical link between author and narrator is indicated in the fact that the narrator is referred to as ‘Maumau’ (p. 32) by his father. In his early infancy, like Ega, Virassamy grows up in the shadow of Mount Pelée, and like Zobel’s José Hassam, he moves to Fort-deFrance to attend the Lycée Schœlcher, remembering ‘les bâtiments

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jaunes du Lycée, aux toits de ciment plats, étagés en gradins’ (p. 148). His text is also the only récit d’enfance to be set during the occupation of Martinique in the Second World War; thus the narrator recalls his childhood confusion at the term ‘dissidence’, confessing: ‘J’ignorais alors le sens de ce mot. Ils disaient qu’ils allaient rejoindre le général de Gaulle, quelque part en Europe, mais tout cela me paraissait bien mystérieux’ (p. 23). Virassamy’s discussion of racism differs from the other texts under discussion as it focuses on the situation of the coolies, the descendants of Indian indentured labourers. The term also exists in the Anglophone Caribbean, and in both cases it carries pejorative nuances. Coolies are the descendants of some 25,000 Indian immigrants who arrived in Martinique after abolition in 1848 as indentured labourers, a scheme which Schœlcher denounced as a ‘seconde traite’.46 In Le Petit Coolie noir, the narrator finds himself at the bottom of the ethnoclass hierarchy, and is subject to unremitting racism from his black compatriots. He experiences an urgent need to voice another kind of racial discrimination present in the Antilles – that experienced by people of Indian ancestry at the hands of the black population. Chapter 3 undertakes a full analysis of this text, identifying points at which Virassamy’s récit d’enfance intersects with Raphaël Confiant’s childhood memoirs, which also testify to the racism directed at a minority identity within the wider black population. By the end of the 1970s the Francophone Caribbean récit d’enfance is beginning to emerge as a genre with its own distinctive narrative arc and characteristics. The setting is predominantly rural, emphasizing the humble dignity of everyday life and its fragile vulnerability. The narrator undergoes a journey from childhood to adolescence which involves confronting the paradoxes of French Caribbean identity, giving rise to extended meditation on alienation. This alienation is encountered linguistically, through the French–Creole diglossia, and historically through the realization of the slave heritage, which gives rise to interrogative passages on the slave history, and generates the first scene of recognition in Ega’s Le Temps des madras. Questions relating to métissage, gender and education are also explored in detail. The genre displays a heightened sense of self-awareness of the authors’ status as literary pioneers, evident in both the narratives and their paratexts. The tone is always mediated by the knowledge that these are pioneering accounts of Caribbean life written by authors who feel a responsibility towards Antilleans both as the subjects and potential

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readers of their works. Zobel and Ega produce texts which are models of modest dignity, while Virassamy’s adult narrator adopts a more vitriolic, but nonetheless analytical stance, aware that he is articulating the position of a minority community being persecuted by a majority community, which has itself been subject to centuries of domination. There is little intertextuality; when it is present, it reaches beyond the Francophone Caribbean. Zobel’s choice of including references to works from the United States, particularly to McKay’s Banjo, suggests an awareness of diaspora and a paucity of existing and accessible Francophone Antillean literary models – a gap his own text aimed to bridge. These early récits d’enfance are self-consciously founding a tradition of writing about the Francophone Antilles through native eyes, and in doing so, offer literary paradigms for future generations of writers. Testing the récit d’enfance Model: the Capécia Hoax Against these early examples of engagement with the theme of childhood and récits d’enfance, Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise, which was published in 1948, emerges as particularly problematic. Part One of this purportedly autobiographical novel is structured around childhood memories. On first inspection, this section of the text would seem to share thematic similarities with the récit d’enfance, implying that it could be considered as a foundational text of the genre, even predating Zobel; it would also become the first récit d’enfance written by a black woman. The young Mayotte enjoys a rural childhood and roams through the Martinican countryside with her peers in passages which celebrate nature and include detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, bearing some similarities with the récits d’enfance. On closer analysis, however, the tone and narrative content mark the text out as considerably different to other literary works on childhood of the time. Mayotte the child lacks the self-reflexivity of the other child protagonists regarding both Caribbean history and her own trailblazing position as a writer. Whereas José, Françoise and, to a lesser extent, Maurice are aware that they are creating original literary paradigms which hold up a mirror to Antillean society, and adopt a dignified narrative tone, Mayotte’s narrative intends to titillate. In contrast to the other narrators, for whom sexuality is of limited concern, her adventures from early childhood are driven by an interest in the opposite sex, and she assumes the character of a capricious chabine (an ethnoclass

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category which typically denotes lightness of skin and is often associated with sexual attractiveness in women). By the end of the first chapter, events have taken a sexualized turn, moving from Mayotte’s first crush to the story of Loulouze, a beautiful teenage laundress whose physical attributes are described in detail. Loulouze is seduced and abandoned by a lover who, it is suggested, is rich and probably white, anticipating Mayotte’s own fate in the novel. Loulouze’s highly stereotyped story is told through ellipsis, and Mayotte does not understand the significance of what she has seen: from the outset, the reader is invited to read the text as a knowing voyeur, leaving Mayotte as a mouthpiece for a story which she does not fully comprehend, or which she coquettishly professes not to understand. Recent scholarship by Christiane Makward and A. James Arnold has pointed to several inconsistencies in the Mayotte Capécia ‘myth’. Although Je suis Martiniquaise won the Prix France-Antilles in 1949 and ‘Mayotte Capécia’ made appearances in Paris, Makward has established that the young woman in question, whose real name was Lucette Céranus Combette, was not the sole author of the text, and that several men had a heavy influence on the manuscript.47 For Arnold, ‘Je suis Martiniquaise n’est nullement l’autobiographie de “Mayotte Capécia” comme Fanon le croyait, et les objections qu’il a formulées s’adressaient, à son insu, aux Européens qui avaient imaginé et mené à bien cette supercherie.’48 Fanon famously interpreted Capécia’s work as the autobiography of a black Antillean woman obsessed by lactification and condemned her portrayal of interracial relations as the epitome of Antillean racial estrangement. It is Arnold’s contention that the author(s) of Je suis Martiniquaise supplemented the rough outline of Combette’s childhood with additional details about life in the French Antilles plagiarized from French translations of texts by the Irish travel writer Lafcadio Hearn, of which he identifies several examples. Moreover, he reminds us that in a review which appeared in the journal Présence Africaine shortly after the text’s original publication, Jenny Alpha observed that Capécia’s description of the chabine did not ring true, and that the text’s descriptive tenor created ‘une certaine atmosphère Baedeker’.49 Reading Capécia alongside the pre-1990 récits d’enfance would seem to support claims that Je suis Martiniquaise is a literary hoax. Whereas the other récits d’enfance are shot through with the awareness that they are pioneering accounts of an indigenous Antillean literary tradition, Capécia’s text does not display the slightest interest in an

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Antillean audience. This is nowhere more apparent than in the narrator’s explanation of why she wrote the text: Je venais d’arriver à Paris. J’y étais venue pour me marier, mais cela, c’est une histoire dont je ne veux pas parler … Il faisait froid, il neigeait et cette blancheur douce qui tombait lentement du ciel et que je voyais pour la première fois m’enchantait, tout en me donnant de la nostalgie. C’est alors que j’ai noté quelques souvenirs de mon pays, de mon enfance. (p. 21)

Distance and physical separation might indeed provide the motive for writing about childhood. Or, following Fanon, is her alienation such that she can only write when she is in a position to be read by an external French audience, in France itself? The tantalizing, undeveloped narrative strand about the narrator’s marriage is a telling inclusion, in keeping with the erotic charge which runs through the text. The novel’s depiction of an incestuous attraction between father and daughter further distances it from the récits d’enfance, and hints at the intrusion of European influences. The only critic to have drawn attention to this is Condé, who comments in La Parole des femmes that in Antillean literature, ‘les conflits de type freudien entre les pères et les filles n’apparaissent guère. Le seul roman où soit esquissé une situation intéressante à cet égard est Je suis Martiniquaise de Mayotte Capécia.’50 The relationship between Mayotte and her womanizing father carries strong incestuous undertones, particularly when he takes a mistress who is close to her own age. It is only after losing her virginity (in a passionate clichéd encounter on a Caribbean beach) that Mayotte announces she is no longer jealous of her father’s mistress: ‘je ne jalousais plus Rènelise, elle pouvait bien maintenant faire tout ce qu’elle voudrait avec mon Père’ (p. 107). This grafting of a European Oedipus complex on to a Caribbean narrative strengthens the hypothesis that the text is a fiction which draws on European and Caribbean influences, and is not the work of one Martinican woman. A final striking difference between Je suis Martiniquaise and the récits d’enfance is the presentation of the slave history, or rather the lack thereof. Mayotte is blissfully untroubled by the slave legacy, which is never really addressed; instead, it is the discovery that she had a white grandmother which interests her. Even this element of the text is sexually charged: her white ancestry is presented as a partial explanation for her early attraction to white men, as a racialized sexual passe-partout, which makes her desirable to both black and white men. The only

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mention of slavery itself infuses a direct reference to emancipation with the suggestion of sexual availability: j’avais bien autre chose en tête. Moi, dont les ancêtres avaient été des esclaves, j’avais décidé d’être indépendante; et, aujourd’hui encore, bien que je n’aie pas toujours pu en jouir comme je l’aurais voulu, je pense qu’il n’y a rien de mieux au monde que l’indépendance. (p. 9)

Slavery is casually invoked, to explain the narrator’s desire for independence – an independence which is immediately undermined, as it has not been achieved (and which is equated with sexuality, as the pun on ‘jouir’ suggests). There is no troubling confrontation with the slave past, no move from innocence to maturity through independent questioning, no scene of recognition. Rather than the protagonist emerging as an intelligent, dignified spokesperson for their country who will evoke empathy, Mayotte remains a coquettish fantasy aimed at, and in all likelihood created by, European males. Conclusion The genre of the récit d’enfance prior to 1990 is an established tradition in its own right, with its own aesthetic framework. It is a self-consciously reflexive mode of expression, freighted with expectation and a heightened sense of duty towards Antillean readers. Examination of literary engagement with childhood in early texts by Saint-John Perse, Damas, Césaire, Richer, Fanon, Lacrosil and Glissant has identified significant moments at which the motif of childhood is developed as a politicized literary conceit. Close readings of the earliest examples of récits d’enfance from the Francophone Caribbean by Zobel, Ega and Virassamy all exhibit a narrative arc from innocence to knowingness regarding the slave history, a desire to accurately depict the specificities of Antillean life, and a bold awareness of bringing the subaltern to the fore by creating new literary paradigms. These would prove both inspirational and challenging for future generations of authors, as the following chapters demonstrate.

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chapter two

Apples and Mimic Men Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une Enfance créole Apples and Mimic Men

Négrillon ho! il faut tant de mémoires pour fonder une mémoire, et tant de fiction pour en affermir une ...1

In 1990 Patrick Chamoiseau published Antan d’enfance, catalysing the contemporary Antillean turn towards récits d’enfance. A sequel, Chemind’école (1994), quickly followed, and the pair of texts were subsequently republished and repackaged as Une enfance créole, a strategy which drew attention to the intentional narrative continuities between them. Some eleven years later Une Enfance créole was established as a trilogy with the publication of A Bout d’enfance (2005). All three titles appear in Gallimard’s ‘Haute enfance’ series. Exploring his personal development from the earliest stage of infancy through the perils of schooling under the French education system to the throes of adolescence, Chamoiseau traverses both individual and collective subject matter in literature which, although heavily influenced by the autobiographical tradition, is rich in self-aware contradiction and artifice. The notion of créolité as laid out in Eloge de la créolité is particularly evident in Une Enfance créole, and there are significant intersections, overlaps and developments between the views set out in Eloge and the ways in which Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs emphasize the capacity for Antillean – and specifically Creole – culture to successfully oppose European hegemony. The conspicuous absence of a scene of recognition in the trilogy would appear to indicate that the author’s energies are channelled into the denunciation of ‘les fastes [du] français universel’. 2 Through their unrelenting emphasis on Antillean agency in the face of cultural domination, Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance play out a number of postcolonial scenarios of resistance. Homi K. Bhabha has argued

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for the agency of colonized peoples in The Location of Culture, and his theory of mimicry opens up critical insights into how structures of domination and resistance inform Chamoiseau’s texts. Bhabha develops mimicry by drawing on discourse on colonial education from India and the Caribbean, evidence of the transnational valency of mimicry. His analysis is inspired by Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ about the British need to educate a class of Indian civil servants, and Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men. 3 Without wishing to collapse the differences between British and French colonial rule, or to play down the attention Chamoiseau pays to the Antillean specificities of the situations he presents, this chapter observes a number of points of contact between Bhabha’s notion of mimicry and Chamoiseau’s trilogy. The chapter also considers the status of the trilogy as a foundational text of the post-1990 récit d’enfance. Chamoiseau forges polyphonic, stratified narratives, and the trilogy is shot through with digressive, interrogative passages, characteristic détours and fragmented recollections which McCusker suggests operate as ‘fissures for the raw material of memory to infuse and reactivate the prose passages’.4 Although the Antillean reader is invited to identify with the author’s depiction of childhood, Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs do not claim to be exemplary, neither do they promise verisimilitude. A return to his early years also provides the impetus for lyrical reflection on his subsequent literary vocation. The Dynamics of Une Enfance créole Since the late 1980s, the rapid trajectory of Patrick Chamoiseau (b. 12 March 1953) has profoundly influenced the development of Francophone Caribbean literature, transforming the former social worker into a figure of global renown. Currently best known for his novels, Chamoiseau’s rapidly growing corpus of work also includes theatre, bande dessinée, short stories, manifestos and screenplays, as well as texts for several volumes of photography. Tracées de mélancolies (1999), 5 a collaboration with Martinican photographer Jean-Luc de Laguarigue, places childhood at the centre of its artistic project, using the scenario of a child exploring Martinique with his grandfather on a long walk to establish ‘une sorte de carte virtuelle des traditions martiniquaises’.6 Chamoiseau has also published award-winning children’s fiction, influenced by Antillean folktales. A leitmotif of his work to date is the

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battle to identify and preserve Creole traditions, as the author argues that should these stifled and disappearing customs vanish, this will leave an irrevocable psychic tear in society. His first novel, Chronique des sept misères (1986),7 depicts the destruction of traditional markets in Fort-deFrance, and in Chronique ‘a widespread melancholic reverence towards a lost (recent) past acts as a screen memory for a much more traumatic and ­unrecoverable origin’:8 as once-traditional Creole spaces disappear, the loss of the Creole folklore and customs forged on slave plantations in turn results in the marginalization and repression of the history of slavery itself. Solibo magnifique (1988)9 continues this dialogue and highlights the author’s concern with written language, which is seen as inferior to the vitality of the spoken word, the cornerstone of Creole storytelling. In her analysis of Une Enfance créole, McCusker suggests that the first two texts ‘are perhaps truest to the “totalité kaléidoscopique”, the “chaos originel et (la) mangrove de virtualités” lauded in Eloge de la créolité’.10 The later addition of A Bout d’enfance marks the author’s development away from the militancy of the first texts towards an engagement with the Glissantean concept of the Tout-monde, stressing an adolescent subject position increasingly marked by openness to the infinite possibilities of the world through lived – and imagined – experience. The childhood trilogy also sits in a close intertextual relationship with Ecrire en pays dominé (1997),11 an extended essay on the complexities of writing in the Francophone Caribbean. Ecrire takes childhood as a departure point, and incorporates autobiographical details which explicitly overlap with the trilogy.12 When referring to his child self, the very name of Chamoiseau’s infant surrogate is provocative: the term le négrillon is a pejorative, racially determined label. It was first reappropriated as a figure of poverty and pathos in Césaire’s Cahier, and it is to Césaire’s ‘négrillon somnolent’ (p. 76), who is the despair of his teacher and priest, that Chamoiseau nods as he affectionately moulds le négrillon into his own protagonist. The term unmistakably evokes the slave past, although this link is never explicitly made by Chamoiseau. Lucien Taylor has pointed out that most English-language editors would refuse to translate the term, given that ‘little nigger boy’ or ‘piccaninny’ are possible renderings.13 A nod to the reader which evokes Lejeune’s pacte at the opening of Antan makes the autobiographical intentions clear and invites the reader on this journey of introspection. Chamoiseau’s adult narrator is also occasionally referred to in the third person as l’homme d’aujourd’hui or (from Chemin-d’école onwards) in the creolized form l’homme d’à-present,

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who recounts the adventures of his child counterpart, relishing in rediscovering the intensity of infancy. This narrative cleavage creates a space for retrospection, as well as exploiting the potential for humour between the naive child and the knowing adult narrator. The name le négrillon appears to have been chosen by the narrator himself. This sets Chamoiseau apart from his older siblings, who receive more flattering (if comical) epithets from le Papa who is ‘maître ès l’art créole du petit-nom’.14 Anastasie becomes la Baronne, Marielle is la Choune (referring to her silky hair worn in a ponytail or choune), his brothers become Paul-le-musicien and Jojo-l’algébrique, and his mother, Man Ninotte, is honoured with the Creole name for pole star, Gros Kato, as she guides her family through the perils of quotidian life.15 Chamoiseau relishes his status as the youngest child and underdog, and insists upon his solitude and difference throughout the trilogy, exemplified by comments on his surname in Chemin-d’école: En pronançant son nom, le négrillon suscita […] de petits ricanements parmi les petits-gens […] Son nom était un machin compliqué rempli de noms d’animaux, de chat, de chameau, de volatiles et d’os. Comme si cela ne suffisait pas, il se découvrit affublé d’une pronunciation réfugiée en bout de langue […] Cela transforma son nom en un mâchouillis d’un haut comique qui acheva son anéantissement. (p. 54)

Such statements find echoes throughout Chamoiseau’s wider literary project, where he invokes a range of narrative voices. His favoured narrative persona is that of the marqueur de paroles, or word-scratcher, which is indicative of his humble pose when attempting to set down the spoken word on paper. The marqueur de paroles is only too aware that the spoken word’s vitality will be lost in transcription. The above quotation from Chemin-d’école, with its reference to ‘volatiles’, also alludes to another narrative alter-ego favoured by Chamoiseau: L’Oiseau de Cham, an epithet which underscores the Antillean slave ancestry. In Solibo Magnifique, Solibo himself unpacks the surname for Chamoiseau’s narrator: ‘Chamoiseau? Parce que pour eux, tu étais descendant (donc oiseau de…) du Cham de la Bible, celui qui avait la peau noire’ (p. 57). The biblical character known in English as Ham is called Cham in French, and his descendants were condemned to slavery. In Chemin-d’école, however, rather than evoking the curse of Ham, it is the curious and comic sound of the name which is emphasized in the classroom. And to compound the child’s embarrassment, as soon as he is compelled to speak French, he discovers that in this language he suffers

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from a speech impediment. Chamoiseau has explained in interview that it was this childhood lisp which encouraged his turn to literature: ‘J’étais muet […] Je zozotais. Et j’ai compensé cette mutité par l’écriture.’16 In Antan, despite growing up in a large, close family in a crowded house divided into apartments, the narrator remembers ‘des périodes de solitude aujourd’hui inexplicables car la maison était full back’ (p. 25).17 Solitude is a consequence of the child’s predilection for daydreams and ‘le goût d’être hors du monde’ (p. 24). Yet it is precisely the child’s talent for observation which will fuel the adult’s poetic creativity, and this insistence on the child’s singularity does not prevent le négrillon, like Césaire’s négrillon, from becoming emblematic of wider social issues. The child is repeatedly figured as one of a group: ‘bande de morpions des villes’ and ‘sacrés couillons’ (Antan, p. 127), ‘la marmaille’ (Chemin-d’école, p. 39), ‘le troupeau’ (ibid., p. 70), ‘cette engeance crréole’ [sic] (ibid., p. 91). A Bout d’enfance introduces the affectionate term ‘les virgules’, suggesting the scrawny appearance of the young black child (a term also used in Emerveilles). Such groupings reinforce the collective dimension of le négrillon, although collectivity does not eclipse individuality. The first volume, Antan d’enfance, is divided into two sections, ‘SENTIR’ and ‘SORTIR’.18 The initial section deals with the exploration of the boundaries of the ‘home’ context, la vieille maison. A host of characters are introduced, from le négrillon’s family of five children led by the formidable Man Ninotte and her husband le Papa, whose presence endures throughout the entire trilogy, to the short-lived animals which fascinate the young protagonist. These are divided into two groups: on the one hand, the insects he takes a cruel pleasure in torturing and the rat he desperately tries to catch, and on the other, the albino rabbits and Matador the pig which are the family’s domestic pets – and future supper. The narrative bears testimony to Man Ninotte’s strength, singing her praises as a heroic mother who repeatedly ‘réussit l’impossible’ (p. 73) for her brood. There is a discreet clue about the family’s poverty when the narrator matter-of-factly describes how after dinner he would lay out his ‘lit de camp’ in the main room at bedtime (p. 87); other insights into the family’s unfavourable financial situation are scattered throughout the collection. Antan focuses on the child’s regard, a significant conceit for Chamoiseau and his fellow créoliste authors. The text exploits the full potential of the regard intérieur called for in Eloge, which the authors want to deploy to counteract alienation and bring about a new relationship between

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Antilleans and their culture. Childhood is a unique moment of insight, because, the narrator of Antan suggests, this ­perspicacity dwindles with the onset of adulthood: On ne quitte pas l’enfance, on se met à croire à la réalité, ce que l’on dit être le réel. La réalité est ferme, stable, tracée bien souvent à l’équerre – et confortable. Le réel (que l’enfance perçoit en ample proximité) est une déflagration complexe, inconfortable, de possibles et d’impossibiles. Grandir, c’est ne plus avoir la force d’en assumer la perception. Ou alors c’est dresser entre cette perception et soi le bouclier d’une enveloppe mentale. Le poète – c’est pourquoi – ne grandit jamais ou si peu. (pp. 93–94)

In the process of growing up, the rejection of the child’s vision, with its ability to accommodate fantastical elements, in favour of a regulated, linear view marks a fundamental shift which closes down the endless possibilities of childhood. In contrast, the poet channels all his imaginative wiles in order to avoid such a fate. Antan and Chemin-d’école are bridged by the fraternal call: ‘Ô mes frères, je voudrais vous dire’. This vocative appeal is both a nod to Saint-John Perse and a reminder of the Creole oral storytelling tradition, which resonates throughout the trilogy and is exemplified by frequent use of ‘ô’ and ‘ho’. 19 As the final line of Antan, the phrase suggests the unsatisfactory and elusive task of recreating memory and there is no sense of a definite ending (leaving the way clear for a sequel), emphasized by the absence of a full stop. At the opening of Chemin-d’école, the phrase is enlarged, introducing the main concern of the second novel: ‘Ô mes frères, je voudrais vous dire: le négrillon commit l’erreur de réclamer l’école’ (p. 17). Here, it laments the intrusion of French into the négrillon’s previously undisrupted Creole imaginary. Antan alluded to the ‘influence démesurée’ (p. 88) accorded to teachers, and this wry suggestion of teachers’ overimportance anticipates the stance of Chemin-d’école. The négrillon’s desire to emulate his older siblings and go to school is initially realized with happiness at the maternelle under the guidance of Man Salinière, whose very name marks her as a maternal surrogate: ‘de Man Ninotte à Man Salinière il glissait sans angoisse’ (p. 41). Her gentle methods encourage and stimulate the children, although she achieves discipline through the threat of the cachot, a confined space under the stairs (p. 42). No child is ever actually placed in the cachot, but its existence is enough to compel the pupils to behave. 20 In contrast, l’école Perrinon (named after the abolitionist François Perrinon, although this link to slave history remains undiscussed in the text) is focused on the

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assimilation of European values and the eradication of the Antillean cultural heritage acquired in Antan. The optimistic tone at the beginning of Chemin-d’école gives way to frustration, fear and apathy, indicated by the telling wordplay that divides the novel into the sections ‘ENVIE’ and ‘SURVIE’. Whereas Antan combines exploration of Creole society with self-conscious reflections on strategies for rediscovering childhood, Chemin-d’école is more militant. The foreword appeals to the linguistically dispossessed from all the ‘terreurs nationales’ in the Francophone world (an ironic corruption of ‘territoires’), addressing a long list of peoples ‘qui avez dû affronter une école coloniale’ (p. 13). The text is offered as ‘cette parole de rire amer contre l’Unique et le Même, riche de son propre centre et contestant tout centre, hors de toutes métropoles, et tranquillement diverselle contre l’universel …’ (p. 13). Despite this politicized agenda, the epigraphs deflate any tendencies towards pomposity. The first, ‘Lè ou poet, fout ou ka pwan fè…!’ (‘it’s tough when you’re a poet!’), attributed to Jean-Pierre-Arsaye, a Martinican translator, suggests that a poetic disposition can be both a gift and a burden. The second epigraph is even less conventional: ‘Il faut prier le ciel/ pour disposer chaque jour/ de quelque chose à rire – mais/ sans rire de personne. M.J.C. – Coiffeur’. This comment by a non-literary source from the world of hairdressing sets the tone for the text which follows by promoting humour, humility and compassion. The final volume of the trilogy, A Bout d’enfance, appeared in 2005, fifteen years after Antan was originally published, and investigates the end of childhood and the onset of adolescence. The child’s discovery of les petites-filles irrevocably alters the perceived order of the world and the discovery of sexuality ushers in new, unforeseen complications. Whereas the previous volumes have a bipartite structure, this novel is divided into eight sections: ‘Ordre et desordre du monde’, ‘Contraires et antagonismes’, ‘Mystère et illusion’, ‘Fractales et impossibles’, ‘Errances et égarements’, ‘Magies’, ‘Mélancolie première’ and ‘Le contact froid du mabouya’. These headings, when read against their simple one-word counterparts in the earlier volumes, suggest an escalating awareness of the complexities of the world. A Bout d’enfance reflects developments in Chamoiseau’s thought, progressing beyond the concerns of Eloge. Instead there is a shift towards Glissant’s theory of the Tout-monde, and a more globalized outlook, represented by metaphors of colonialism and terrorism – this is a self-consciously post-9/11 text. As the trilogy draws to a close, self-reflexive passages on memory assume increasing

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importance and are typographically centred, italicized and introduced by ellipsis. A Bout d’enfance is marked by a discernible change in tone, a sign of increased maturity and introspection. Written after Man Ninotte’s death, the text opens up new narrative vantage points and offers a eulogy to the author’s deceased parents. Reviving the Genre of the récit d’enfance Chamoiseau has commented that his récits d’enfance have two dimensions. Firstly, they explore the complexity of an individual, attempting to ‘plonger dans cet espace en clair-obscur, pour bien comprendre ce qui s’était passé’. 21 Questions of identity are at the core of this literature, and are associated with self-reflexive analysis of the origins of the author’s literary vocation. The socio-historical context provides a second axis of investigation, as Chamoiseau emphasizes that his childhood occurred during ‘un moment très particulier de bascule. On assistait à l’effondrement du système des plantations.’22 Scattered references indicate the social and technological changes sweeping through society, notably the installation of (sporadically) running water, heralded by the cry, ‘l’eau est arrivée!’ (Antan, p. 94), while the addition of an escalator to a Fort-de-France shopping mall must be explained to sceptical customers in Creole – a language which inspires greater trust in the local clientele: ‘La direction dut affecter à l’entrée du robot le plus savant de ses employés avec pour mission d’expliquer en créole que ce n’était qu’un escalier qui montait tout seul …’ (A Bout, p. 122). Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance have established another important feature of the post-1990 tradition: the trilogy, with its own interlocking dynamics of intertextuality, sits in a porous relationship with his wider œuvre. The world of le négrillon refracts, through the vantage point of childhood, the Fort-de-France of Solibo or Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the heroine of Chamoiseau’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, Texaco. 23 This is not to say that in the récits d’enfance, the child is completely shielded from the grittier realities tackled in these novels. Les Majors, ruthless gang leaders, feature in both Texaco and Antan, and the child is fully aware of their violent altercations: ‘l’infortuné se bat […] au rasoir sillonnant, le Major lui a déjà signé six ou sept fois son nom’ (Antan, p. 168). The trilogy creates a backdrop, or literary key, against which other works may be more readily explored; a reader familiar with Antan will be all the better prepared for Texaco.

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Chamoiseau’s trilogy presents one striking difference when compared to other post-1990 récits d’enfance: there is no scene of recognition, and references to the slave past are minimal. Although Man Ninotte, and to a lesser extent le Papa, undoubtedly play an important role in le négrillon’s education, his father in particular encouraging scepticism in the face of the Eurocentric school syllabus, there are very few scenes of dialogue and discussion between them and their youngest son. Slavery is acknowledged, but as McCusker has observed, there is a ‘relative scarcity of explicit historical signposting’ in Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance. 24 In Chemin-d’école, on the first day at primary school, the teacher, known only as ‘le Maître’, admonishes his pupils for their lacklustre responses to the register, reminding them of the significance of their surnames: ‘il n’y a pas si longtemps, esclaves, nous n’en disposions pas!’ (p. 53). The reference is intended to spur the children along the path of social advancement, but also betrays the Maître’s obsessive concern with moving away from the structures of Creole plantation society. Later in the same text, a mother’s objection to the teachers’ harsh treatment of her offspring includes a similarly vague reference to abolition: ‘l’esclavage étant fini depuis nanni-nannan, personne n’était en droit de manier un cheveu de sa marmaille …’ (p. 125). Over the course of the text, le négrillon comes to understand that Creole’s illict status as ‘ce sabir de champs-de-cannes’ (p. 90) is inextricably linked to a history of oppression and plantation slavery. Any discussion of this history is immediately shut down – particularly ironic in a school named after an abolitionist. The Eurocentric history lessons, represented with considerable irony, teach the children that the arrival of Christopher Columbus brought civilization to the inhabitants of the Americas, ‘qui durant une nuit immémoriale, soustraits à l’humanité, l’avaient attendu’ (p. 171), but the discussion of slavery which might then logically arise never happens. Africa, the Middle Passage and plantation slavery are all subsumed into the constructed logic and order of the mission civilisatrice: ‘Les races supérieures, il faut le dire ouvertement à l’instar de Jules Ferry, ont, vis-à-vis des races primitives, le droit et le devoir de ci-vi-li-sa-tion!’  (p. 171). Yet behind this depiction of school indoctrination lurks the narrator’s opposition to these reductive, so-called universal accounts of history promoted by French republicanism. The famous republican Jules Ferry is singled out for particular criticism for his role in promoting the mission civilisatrice. In contrast, the novel Texaco does include a scene of recognition in the early section entitled ‘Le Sermon de Marie-Sophie Laborieux’.

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As Marie-Sophie begins the tale of her life, she provides an axiomatic summary of its organic relationship to wider Antillean history: ‘mon intelligence de la mémoire collective n’est que ma propre mémoire’ (p. 48). Her cyclical, digressive story significantly opens by foregrounding her parents’ evasiveness concerning the slave past. Her aged parents are a palpable link to slavery; through them, the lived pre-1848 memory is still alive, immediate, yet steeped in the unsaid, a silence that chills and frightens the child: Quand je suis née mon papa et ma manman s’en revenaient des chaînes. Un temps que nul ne les a entendus regretter. Ils en parlaient oui, mais pas à moi ni à personne. Ils se le chuchotaient kussu kussu, et je les surprenais quelquefois à en rire, mais au bout du compte cela ravageait leur silence d’une peau frissonnante. J’aurais donc pu ignorer cette époque. Pour éviter mes questions, manman feignait de batailler avec les nattes de mes cheveux et ramenait le peigne ainsi qu’un laboureur au travail d’une rocaille, et qui, tu comprends, n’a pas le temps de paroler. Papa, lui, fuyait mes curiosités en devenant plus fluide qu’un vent froid de septembre. (p. 48)

This fundamental scene prefaces Marie-Sophie’s long narrative, and maps out the same concerns which are central to the scene of recognition. It immediately draws attention to the intergenerational silence surrounding the slave history and the intuitive discomfort this silence causes in the child. Given his exploration of intergenerational communication elsewhere in his œuvre, the absence of a scene of recognition in Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs would seem to indicate that his overriding concern in the trilogy is to launch a strident attack on the despised Universal French culture which threatens to stifle diversity. Nonetheless, in their exploration of both the overt and insidious ways in which domination and subjugation operate, the narratives contain echoes of the slave past, as uneasy attitudes to the slave history underpin the contemporary stigmatization of Creole. ‘Marquer sans démarquer’: Style and Childhood Attempts to chart childhood in Chamoiseau’s trilogy are purposefully disorderly, apt to wander and contradictory: paragraphs may develop logically, be loosely thematically connected, or undertake a complete and unsignalled departure from the previous subject under discussion. Memory’s reciprocity is playfully held up for consideration, as the

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narrator wonders, ‘est-ce, mémoire, moi qui me souviens ou toi qui te souviens de moi?’ (Antan, p. 22). This dialogic approach to memory surfaces in frequent interjections which question or reproach the narrator’s account, a technique reminiscent of Sarraute’s alter-ego in Enfance, who constantly scrutinizes the presentation of events and creates a space for reflection and externalization of the narrative. Chamoiseau’s ludic manipulation of perception is a reminder of the texts’ self-aware position as artificial re-creations of memory, which knowingly challenge the boundaries of verisimilitude. In Antan, this is apparent in the episodes of the pacotilleuse and the death of le vieux rat which are recounted as fact, then revealed to be a figment of the child’s imagination a few paragraphs later. As Patrick Crowley notes, the original Hatier edition of Antan is marked as a récit, a ‘genre that can more easily embrace the interweaving of fact and fiction’. 25 This calls to mind Jacques Lecarme’s observation that ‘on perçoit des évolutions à l’intérieur du genre [du récit d’enfance]: après l’époque des romans pseudo-autobiographiques, voici venir les autobiographies pseudo-romanesques’. 26 Slippage between genres is an inherent feature of the récit d’enfance. Chamoiseau excels in describing events and situations, although his own personal responses remain largely mute (characteristic of the appearances of the Marqueur de paroles throughout his work). Reflection, when it does occur, guides the reader to conclusions which echo the principles of Eloge. In contrast, A Bout d’enfance acts as a counterbalance, in which the author reflects more explicitly on the significance of events for his subsequent personal development. In this text, flashes of indiscretion – and thus of amplified intimacy – are enabled by the death of his muse and guardian of the content of the first texts, Man Ninotte. Chamoiseau hints at his father’s possible promiscuity, records the social disapproval caused by his parents’ marriage, which transcended the rigid ethnoclass hierarchy of the French Antilles, and, from his vantage point of adult success, relishes in disproving racist predictions that the children of the darker-skinned Man Ninotte would be ne’er-do-wells. Chamoiseau’s linguistic innovation sets him apart from other contemporary authors from the Francophone Caribbean, or indeed the Francophone world more generally. His style is influenced by oraliture, a term Glissant uses in Le Discours antillais. 27 The neologism represents an attempt to combine orality and literature. Moreover, Chamoiseau walks the tightrope of cultural specificity between the transmission of

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otherness and a perplexing opacité. His preoccupation with depicting Antillean culture in its diversity is reflected in his innovative, hybrid language forms, which frequently embrace Creole terms or calques; texts constantly surprise and wrong-foot readers accustomed to metropolitan French. He confidently employs the metonymic gap, the ‘cultural gap formed when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, allusions or references that may be unknown to the reader’28 to elicit humour, pathos or poignant lyricism. Chamoiseau exploits the tension between French and Creole throughout the trilogy, and the texts are peppered with references juxtaposing the two languages, using synonymous pairs of words to demonstrate the author’s enhanced awareness of register. Thus in Antan, after the passage of the cyclone, le négrillon sees ‘ce que les vieux-nègres appellent […] an tÿou-manman, et Césaire: un désastre’ (p. 120). The French term appears rather uninspired next to the more figurative Creole, and this pattern of juxtaposition recurs in all three volumes: ‘On ne dit pas: Je parle pour mon corps, on dit: Je me parle à moi-même’ (Chemin-d’école, p. 159); ‘ce qu’un vieux-nègre appellerait “vice” et tout psychiatre “une addiction”’ (A Bout, p. 106); ‘consumés sans reliques, aurait dit le poète – ou même: défolmantés, ricanerait un vieux nègre’ (ibid., p. 160). The anonymous poet is Saint-John Perse, and the lines close the first poem of the cycle Pour fêter une enfance. 29 In opposing the speech of the vieux nègre with that of a more elite subject, Chamoiseau demonstrates the cohabitation of the two languages, and plays off an evocative Creole phrase against a drier French term, demonstrating Creole’s capacity for nuanced imagery, metaphor and aural appeal. Shelly observes that, despite instances of simultaneous translation within the body of the text, and in contrast to the récits d’enfance by Condé and Confiant, ‘Chamoiseau himself has made a conscious decision not to provide Creole-French glossaries for native Francophone readers’, 30 meaning that significant textual layers remain concealed from the non-Antillean reader. However, Chamoiseau points out that he forges a polymorphic, idiosyncratic language which privileges neither the Creolophone nor the Francophone reader: ‘le langage que j’utilise dans mes livres est personnel, ce n’est pas la langue de tout le monde. C’est-à-dire qu’un créolophone est aussi démuni devant mes livres, devant le langage que j’utilise, qu’un non-créolophone.’31 The stratified composition of the texts reveals postmodern influences,

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notably in interventions that challenge and contradict the narrative. In Antan, multiple textual layers reveal the pricking of the narrator’s conscience after particularly inventive episodes: ‘Pour la haute confidente, cette sornette est une baboule. Il n’y eut jamais dessous les tôles le moindre rat …’ (p. 46). The opening establishes Man Ninotte as la confidente d’aujourd’hui, the author’s muse and guardian of his childhood, and this admission is aimed at her, anticipating her cynicism or objections to these exaggerations. The term baboule is another instance of unexplained Creole meanings in the text, although it is tacitly explained in the following lines: ‘Tant pis si c’est mentir, plaide le scribe honteux. – C’est pas tant pis, c’est un menti, répondelle, implacable’ (p. 46). In Chemin-d’école, the narrator must answer to a second group: the Répondeurs. This collective voice, a nebulous chorus of past sensations and emotions, is the essence of memory, and is summoned early in the text: Ô sensations sédimentées … connaissances du monde qui ne font plus que sentiments … lots de larmes et d’alarmes … sculpteurs de chair et d’âme … vous qui dans du vif avez fait mémoire d’homme … voyez, il vous convoque, encore renversé, toujours démuni, à peine affermi devant vous qu’au temps du prime émoi …Voici l’ordre: Répondez! (p. 29)

The Répondeurs serve to emphasize the call-and-response pattern of oral Creole storytelling, as they pass comment on the narrative action, intervene in poetic fragments and even rebuke Chamoiseau if he bows to European influences: Répondeurs: J’ai dit ‘bille’. En fait, on disait ‘mab’. C’est ça l’ennui. (p. 139; original layout)

The narrator has overwritten his original, Creole memory of playing with marbles, using metropolitan French terms (‘bille’), yet the Répondeurs remind him that this was not a term used during his Creole childhood, drawing attention to the cultural distortion of his memory. Gallagher suggests that these insertions are markers of cultural validity aimed at an internal, Caribbean audience. 32 For McCusker, they are characteristic of Chamoiseau’s use of snatches of Creole throughout his work to produce an ‘effet de créole’33 (here McCusker rephrases Barthes in his influential reading of Flaubert’s Trois contes). 34 Since snippets of Creole are immediately translated into French within the text, the gaze of the author, she argues, remains ‘turned in two directions’; indeed, the first

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works of the trilogy appeared shortly after Eloge placed its authors in the cultural spotlight, and potential readers in metropolitan France are not neglected. Reconnecting with memory is intimately linked with examining the origins of the author’s literary vocation. Recollections about the writing process itself, from the act of reading to the act of writing, are rich in irony given the négrillon’s future literary vocation. At the beginning of Chemin-d’école, the discovery of chalk allows him to literally leave his mark all over the house (p. 27), and his individual development is described in epic terminology – the first scribbles are termed ‘pétroglyphes’ (p. 27) – humorous hyperbole recalling the sense of amazement and significance each child feels when individually discovering the world. The same term is also used at the opening of Chamoiseau and Confiant’s literary survey Lettres créoles, a text which situates the Amerindian petroglyphs discovered in rock faces as the origins of Caribbean, and more specifically Martinican, writing. 35 The négrillon’s development thus humorously parallels the development of Martinican literature as conceived by the créoliste aesthetic. In Chemin-d’école, a key moment in Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance again demonstrates the genre’s intertextual resonances, when the scribbling child is given the epithet of ‘Marqueur’, which inevitably calls to mind the Marqueur de paroles used elsewhere in Chamoiseau’s œuvre. In this self-consciously formative moment, the Répondeurs urge: ‘Marquez, Marqueur!.../ Marquez sans démarquer!... Marquez!...’ (p. 28). Here, Chamoiseau engages in characteristic wordplay: the double connotations of ‘démarquer’ warn against losing the markers of his Creole origins, as well as acting as a comic reminder to the author not to copy or plagiarize. In contrast, A Bout d’enfance examines the modern act of writing through typing – ‘L’homme d’à-présent regarde ses mains. Elles écrivent. Stationnent sages sur un clavier’ (p. 91) – and acknowledges the psychological functions of literary creation: ‘Combien de monstres l’homme d’à-présent expédie-t-il dans son écrire […] Toute écriture est nécessité presque organique de clarifier en lui un indicible chaos, un mal-être qui réclame une voie d’équilibre et que lui tente d’inventer dans quelques pages organisées, toujours nécessaires, toujours ratées’ (pp. 75–76). These interjections once again pinpoint the friction between memory and imagination. The adult author is aware that, in attempting to revive bygone episodes, he elaborates and invents; yet this knowledge of the objective impossibility of his project engenders its innovative aesthetic success. As the final volume draws the literary

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exploration of childhood to an end, the narrative becomes increasingly aware of the necessity of artifice and invention: J’essaie, négrillon, de t’inscrire dans cette continuité … que de mensonges dans ces fragments de souvenirs, ce clignotement de la mémoire soumis à des odeurs, des associations, des sensations, et des reconstructions que l’on sait fausses mais qui dessinent du vrai! … La cordelette est fausse, mais le collier est juste … (p. 101; original layout and italics)

The project of remembering is reliant on inventiveness and even, paradoxically, forgetfulness. While claiming to expose the foibles of the quest to remember, the narrator relishes this literary sleight of hand. The boundaries of time are also playfully distorted, conveying the elasticity of time during childhood, and a common tactic is the hyphenation of numbers to form temporal hyperbole, such as ‘il dut haler mille-douze-mille fois’ (Antan, p. 58). Furthermore, in Antan, the specific desire to rediscover the child’s perception of time, ‘les saisons d’enfants’ (p. 181), leads the narrator to recall ‘La saison des yo-yo, la saison des cerfs-volants, la saison des mabes [sic] que les Français crient billes, la saison des combats-d’coqs, la saison des crabes’ (p. 182). In contrast, early passages in Antan are classed as ‘l’âge du feu’, ‘l’âge de l’outil’, indicative of Chamoiseau’s ironic reconstruction of his own childhood development. The opposite pole of this engagement with the wonder of childhood, however, is the realization of the linguistic and cultural domination which shape Antillean society. The Shock of Language: Gros-Lombric, the Maître and Mimicry Language in the Caribbean is a site of violent clashes, where a speaker’s linguistic choices invoke socio-cultural politics. This is, of course, assuming that the speaker has a degree of choice; in childhood, under the school system Chamoiseau depicts, any choice is categorically denied. Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance emphasize the capacity for Antillean – and specifically Creole – culture to oppose European hegemony, and the texts play out a number of postcolonial scenarios of resistance. The battles between the Maître and Gros-Lombric, who, as the author has acknowledged, are two symbolic ‘personnage[s] composite[s]’, 36 evoke the daily struggles of life in a diglossia. As Antan has made clear, the first language the child encounters is Creole, an emphatically oral form of communication: ‘[la langue créole]

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nous fascinait […] par son aptitude à contester (en deux trois mots, une onomatopée, un bruit de succion, douze rafales sur la manman et les organes génitaux) l’ordre français regnant dans la parole’ (p. 69). Creole children, subject to the dual subordination of French domination and their own diminutive status in society, have a natural affinity with this vivid, intuitive and combative language: ‘Avec elle, on existait rageusement, agressivement, de manière iconoclaste et détournée. Il y avait un marronnage dans la langue. Les enfants en possédaient une intuition jouissive et l’arpentaient en secret’ (p. 69). Creole becomes synonymous with resistance and resilience, as the children turn to Creole in an act of resistance or marronnage, a term which originated to describe the act of a maroon (un marron), a slave who escaped from the plantation and survived in the inaccessible hills. In Antan, after a devastating cyclone hits Fort-de-France, Creole comes into its own through the arrival of the rural storyteller Jeanne-Yvette, who initiates the children into: Un univers de résistances débrouillardes, de méchancetés salvatrices, riche de plusieurs génies. Jeanne-Yvette nous venait des mémoires caraïbes, du grouillement de l’Afrique, des diversités d’Europe, du foisonnement de l’Inde, des tremblements d’Asie …, du vaste toucher des peuples dans le prisme des îles ouvertes, lieux-dits de la Créolité. (p. 124)

Chamoiseau here invokes the diverse ethnic heritage recorded and transmitted through Creole folklore, in addition to suggesting a Creole unity between ‘le prisme des îles’ in an echo of Eloge. Significantly, Jeanne-Yvette’s narratives teach a form of resilience which is implicitly linked with the slave past and images of escape and marronnage: [Jeanne-Yvette] nous révéla les victoires de la ruse, de la vicerie, de la patience, du coup de cerveau frappé au moment pile. Il ne servait à rien, disait-elle en secret, d’aller à grande gorge mais au murmure. […] Aller tout droit n’était pas le meilleur moyen d’arriver aux endroits, et si les Tracées tournoyaient dans le bois, il fallait savoir tournoyer avec elles […] Il fallait prendre les Tracées, gribouiller leur ordre d’une déraison marronne. Jeanne-Yvette nous enseigna une vie de sa méthode opaque. (pp. 126–27)

In an astute critique of créolité and gender relations, Lorna Milne points out the paucity of female characters who are granted the status of literary creators. In the work of Chamoiseau, she argues, Marie-Sophie in Texaco and Jeanne-Yvette in Antan function as important counterexamples to the phallocentric views expounded in his collaborative

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theoretical writings Eloge and Lettres créoles. The female storyteller does not survive the transition from the récit d’enfance into his theoretical texts: ‘this real-life initiator who introduces Chamoiseau to story-telling is replaced in the symbolic scheme of créolité by the paternal figure of the Conteur’. 37 Nonetheless, the verb ‘gribouiller’ suggests that JeanneYvette’s methods will directly influence Chamoiseau in his future literary career. The term la tracée, of importance elsewhere in Chamoiseau’s work, also deserves further comment. 38 Linguistically, the term strikes the metropolitan reader as unusual. According to the Dictionnaire Le Robert, the word tracée has existed since 1330, but from 1792 it was replaced by the more popular synonym la trace; both terms refer to lines, outlines and contours. Chamoiseau’s use of tracée rediscovers the earlier word and imbues it with its specifically Creole nuance: tracée is ‘the word used in Martinique to designate tracks through the mornes’. 39 For Chamoiseau, la tracée assumes metaphorical value from this Antillean meaning of forest path, conveying the evasive action which the Antillean maroons (and their culture) had to take, and recalling Glissant’s discussion of la trace (and the trace-mémoire) from Le Discours antillais onwards. La tracée is barely perceptible, only appearing to the initiated (again recalling the maroon who used the tracées to evade capture), and must be taught and passed on: Chamoiseau’s literature is itself performing this pattern of knowledge transferral. The Creole–French tension assumes a new urgency in Chemind’école, where the power balance is rigidly set against Creole. School is equated with domination, and the language of the mission civilisatrice abounds in colonial clichés laden with irony, including Chamoiseau’s own thinly veiled jibe at the ubiquitous colonial mantra to which Damas and Fanon had previously drawn attention as a fundamental childhood influence: ‘En ce temps-là, le Gaulois aux yeux bleus, à la chevelure blonde comme les blés, était l’ancêtre de tout le monde. En ce temps-là, les Européens étaient les fondateurs de l’Histoire’ (p. 170). Le négrillon’s days are now structured by the mission civilisatrice, and the Maître is figured as its most ardent devotee, ironically described as distributing ‘la lumière qu’apportait le Savoir aux âmes enténébrées’ (p. 70). Paradoxically, the Maître, the agent of linguistic persecution, is himself unmistakably of Creole origin: ‘il lui arrivait aussi, en quelque heure de fatigue, d’atténuer ses r ou de perdre son u. Mais il se reprenait en sursaut’ (p. 89); the repression of his Creole roots will be examined in greater detail below. Moreover, the Maître is ‘très noir de

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peau’ (p. 56), although he exhibits a preference for his lighter-skinned charges. This racial alienation is replicated linguistically: ‘sa langue n’allait pas en direction des enfants comme celle de Man Salinière, pour les envelopper, les caresser, les persuader. Elle se tenait au-dessus d’eux dans la ­magnificence d’un colibri-madère immobile dans le vent. Ô le Maître était français!’ (p. 68). This creolized image captures the loftiness of French to the Antillean schoolchild: resplendent yet tantalizingly inaccessible. In Chemin-d’école, academic failure is equated with images of black socio-economic disempowerment. At school, the spectres of history loom large, reminding the children (and the reader) of imperialist racial divisions which highlighted black inferiority and threatened to consign black people to ‘les champs-de-cannes, les dalots balayés, les tambourset-ti-bois […] L’obscurité bestiale où l’on perdait à jamais de l’idée de l’Homme’ (p. 70). Thus the Directeur chastises a pupil caught speaking Creole in the playground with the loaded command, ‘Parlez correctement et comportez-vous de manière civilisée’ (p. 65). His overbearing attitude saps the energy from his pupils, his appearance alone causing activity to cease as ‘toute vie s’anesthésiait’ (p. 64), a metaphor for the effect produced by the school system itself. The Maître is, significantly, introduced through speech: ‘Permettez-moi sans plus attendrre, nonobstant les aléas du moment, de vous souhaiter bien le bonjourr, messieurs’ (p. 51). This affected French immediately undermines the teacher’s welcome message: the narrator mockingly responds ‘on se sentit bien mal’. The Maître’s exaggerated ‘r’ sounds offer insights into his psychology. The sound ‘r’ in French is commonly (mis)pronounced as ‘w’ by Creole speakers, as there is no ‘r’ in the Creole language. In France, as Fanon points out, this mispronunciation gave rise to derision, in ‘le mythe du Martiniquais qui-mange-les-R’. Fanon observes that emphasizing the ‘r’ was a method of fighting against this stereotype through linguistic over-compensation: ‘Le Noir entrant en France […] s’appliquera non seulement à rouler les R, mais à les ourler.’40 ‘Ourler’ suggests forced diction, hemming and embroidering ‘r’ sounds unnecessarily. This technique is mockingly attributed throughout Chemin-d’école to the Maître, who strives to sauver la race by dissociating himself from the stigma of Creole, with its links to plantation servitude, instead immersing himself in French culture. For a brief moment it appears that the Maître’s supremacy might be threatened when he is temporarily replaced by le Maître-indigène, the personification of négritude. Although he is the inverse of the Maître,

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he, too, reduces the world to black/white binaries: ‘Quand le Maîtreindigène voyait Blanc, il mettait Noir. Il chantait le nez large contre le nez pincé, le cheveu crépu contre le cheveu-fil, l’émotion contre la raison. Face à l’Europe il dressait l’Afrique’ (p. 182). There is no attempt to engage with Antillean cultural specificities or métissage. The Maîtreindigène’s method, intended to reach out to the children, is revealed to be an impasse, denying the ‘creolized’ reality of the Antilles and ultimately leaving the children as confused about their position in the world as they had been under the leadership of the Eurocentric Maître. The Maîtreindigène reproduces the overdeterminism against which Fanon rails, as once again ‘le Blanc est enfermé dans sa blancheur. Le Noir dans sa noirceur.’41 In criticizing overdetermined approaches such as négritude in this manner, it is implied that créolité will propose a space for discourse between different cultures, a site of negotiation, inviting comparison with Bhabha’s notion of a ‘third space’ which will allow precisely such negotiation and hybridity: [F]or me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.42

Through the figure of the Maître-indigène, Chamoiseau demonstrates the inadequacy of trying to replace the existing Eurocentric education system with an Afrocentric alternative, drawing attention to the need for new discourses on Caribbean identity. In Chemin-d’école, the exploration of linguistic hybridity will prove the most potent means with which to argue for the recognition of the plurality of Caribbean culture. The first part of Chemin-d’école, ‘ENVIE’, concludes with the child’s stunned realization of the Creole–French diglossia: ‘le négrillon prit conscience d’un fait criant: le Maître parlait français’ (p. 67). In addition, he reflects on the occasional code-switching of his early infancy and the dominance of Creole up to this point: Man Ninotte utilisait de temps à autre des chiquetailles de français, un demi-mot par-ci, un quart-de-mot par-là, et ses paroles françaises étaient des mécaniques qui restaient inchangées. Le Papa, lui, à l’occasion d’un punch, déroulait un français d’une manière cérémonieuse qui n’en faisait pas une langue, mais un outil ésotérique pour créer des effets. (p. 67)

His older siblings who are already at junior school, on the other hand,

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have already learned to use French with adults as a marker of respect, although Creole remains the instinctive language of emotion: Quant aux Grands, leur expression naturelle était créole, sauf avec Man Ninotte, les autres grandes-personnes et plus encore avec le Papa. Pour s’adresser à eux, il fallait reconnaître la distance en utilisant un rituel de respect. Et tout le reste pour tout le monde (les joies, les cris, les rêves, les haines, la vie en vie …) était créole. (pp. 67–68)

The second part of Chemin-d’école, ‘SURVIE’, negotiates these perilous linguistic strata. The dominance of one language over another is immediately presented as threatening; this is not a recognition of linguistic hybridity which will enable new positions to emerge, but an outright repression of Creole. Le négrillon discovers he can only survive in this French-language environment by becoming introverted to the point that ‘parler devint héroïque’ (p. 88). Creole is illicit and stigmatized: Précipité en contrebande, [le créole] se racornit sur des injures, des mots sales, des haines, des violences, des catastrophes à dire. Une gentillesse ne se disait pas en créole. Un amour non plus. Elle devint la langue des méchants, des majors, des bougres-fous en perdition. (p. 92)

Through this process of linguistic abjection, Creole becomes associated with negative, crude expression, seemingly confirming it as a vulgar, unsophisticated language, epitomized by Gros-Lombric telling Creole tales in the sanctuary of the toilet block. The resultant feelings of alienation and inferiority experienced by the négrillon demonstrate how little Antillean society has evolved since Fanon’s exasperated account of the long-term psychological harm inflicted by a colonial education: Je me demande parfois si les inspecteurs d’enseignement et les chefs de service sont conscients de leur rôle aux colonies. Pendant vingt ans, ils s’acharnent par leurs programmes à faire du nègre un Blanc. A la fin, ils le lâchent et lui disent: vous avez incontestablement un complexe de dépendance vis-à-vis du Blanc.43

Chamoiseau’s trilogy documents how a systematic alienation is imposed on the children through an insidious colonization of the mind.44 Language is set against lived experience, and the French language imposes unfamiliar images such as ‘un vol d’hirrondelles au-dessus du clocher enneigé de votrre village’ (Chemin-d’école, p. 102),45 which brings about a complete and permanent displacement of Creole until ‘l’équilibre linguistique du négrillon s’en vit tourneboulé. Sans remède’

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(p. 92). This scenario will be familiar to readers of Caribbean texts such as V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, in which disillusioned anti-hero Ralph R.K. Singh becomes conditioned to long for ‘different landscapes […] where, in essays at least, days were spent on temperate farms’.46 In Chemin-d’école, the négrillon’s imaginary becomes increasingly marked by European fairy tales and stories, altering the way in which he pictures his own home, la vieille maison, in the heart of Fort-de-France: ‘il dessinait la maison entre chênes et sapins, coiffée d’une cheminée fumante’ (p. 44), a distortion which presents a striking contrast to his total synthesis with la vieille maison in Antan. Now, his notion of how home should appear has been transformed – deformed – as he adds chimneys where there are none, which leads his father to wryly comment that ‘[il] transforme notre case en chaudière d’usine’ (p. 45). In Chemin-d’école, the child’s socialization at school runs counter to the lived experience in the home environment, and this even comically undermines the moral lessons the teacher tries to impart to his charges. The pompous French motto, ‘Je ne cueillerai pas des pommes qui ne m’apartiennent point’, is challenged by le Papa, who asks where one might pick these apples, ‘vu qu’inconnues au pays, elles arrivent par bateau, dans des boîtes fermées et à moitié pourries?’ (p. 80). Yet le négrillon absorbs these new images and they take root in his imaginary: ‘[il] compléta ses dessins de la maison d’un lot de pommiers rougis de pommes énormes, environnés de gendarmes levant de gros bâtons’ (p. 80). Bhabha’s theory of mimicry proves illuminating in this context. For Bhabha: colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. […] Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an imminent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers. [original emphasis]47

This desire to mould the colonial subject into a ‘reformed, recognizable Other’ is evident, Bhabha argues, in the ‘absurd extravagance of Macaulay’s “Minute” (1835)’ in which Macaulay demands that the English train ‘a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English

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in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.48 For Bhabha, the emergence of such a group, which is ‘almost the same, but not quite’,49 became a means of unexpectedly subverting colonial power hierarchies. The emergence of mimic men, Bhabha argues, was more threatening to the colonizer than the colonized, because when the colonizers encountered these educated and accomplished (colonized) mimic men, the fact of the colonized peoples’ humanity became an inescapable truth. This in turn undermines the principles of superiority which underpin the colonial endeavour: ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ [original emphasis]. 50 Bhabha’s concept of mimicry also owes a debt to a fundamental episode in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. In Naipaul’s novel, set on the fictional island of Isabella (modelled on Trinidad), the protagonist Singh remembers a school day when he gave an apple to his teacher: My first memory of school is taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have. 51

The innocuous apple is actually a figment of Singh’s colonized memory, as notions of how childhood and schooling ‘should’ appear have overwritten what actually happened. As Naipaul comments in his Nobel Lecture, ‘It [The Mimic Men] was about colonial men mimicking the conditions of manhood, men who had grown to distrust everything about themselves.’52 Bhabha draws on Naipaul to develop mimicry from a hollow shadowing of European culture into a mode of resistance. European contact with the generation of indigenous civil servants who were formed under colonial rule is a process which will ultimately trigger the undermining of the colonizer’s apparently stable, original identity. In Chemin-d’école, mimicry troubles the white French authority which the black Martinican teacher has assimilated and is trying to impose upon his younger compatriots. The school system does not present the immediate encounter of colonizer and colonized which Bhabha presupposes. Instead, the black Maître stands for white colonial authority; he is the mimic man, in the model of Singh, although his own mimicry has served to uphold French hegemony rather than challenging it. Now the Maître is attempting to indoctrinate the next generation. While the négrillon teeters on the edge of his own process of internalized mimicry, the strength of his attachment to Creole culture will ultimately

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prevent this, asserting the agency of the dominated Creole culture and people. A lesson on the alphabet exemplifies Creole’s irrepressible ability to trouble the world order that the Maître strives to establish. Believing he is making a concession to the sphere of Antillean reference – ‘vous connaissez parrfaitement ce que je vais vous montrer’ (p. 84) – his plan to begin with A for ananas is literally turned on its head when the children remind him that the object before them begins with Z in Creole: zannana (p. 85). 53 It is Gros-Lombric who personifies resistance and diversity in the face of methodical acculturation under the mission civilisatrice. From his first appearance in the text he is the underdog, taunted on his first day at school by his fellow pupils for not knowing his ‘proper’ (French) name during registration. Such insults demonstrate the pernicious influence of the Maître, whose hostility to Creole the pupils immediately imitate. Ironically, their taunts are in Creole, and later in the text the narrator suggests that their own difficulties with French spur them on in their cruelty: ‘Leur propre incapacité décuplait leur méchanceté. I fè an kawô. I fè an kawô. Il a fait une faute!’ (p. 88). The very polyphony of Gros-Lombric’s name is crucial to an understanding of his character: Gros-Lombric has been interpreted by critics to mean worm (as it does in French)54 or to suggest ‘coarseness and vulgarity’. 55 These readings illuminate some aspects of the character, but Lombric/lonbrik is actually Creole for nombril. The Creole meaning is ‘big bellybutton’, evoking the character’s ur-bond with Creole society. Gros-Lombric’s name exemplifies French–Creole linguistic cohabitation, as the apparently familiar metropolitan French term is distorted by the Creole meaning – a linguistic layer only accessible to Creolophones. Gros-Lombric’s creative evasiveness in the face of (French) domination epitomizes Creole tenacity, and the child’s gift for maths and rapid ability to calculer are metaphors for his quick-witted attitude. Although regarded as the class dunce, Gros-Lombric’s ingenuity repeatedly undermines the school authority: the fine-looking branch he presents to the Maître becomes supple and flaccid once used as a cane; the snake-skull he brings to school causes turmoil in the playground. Yet by the end of Chemind’école, he cuts a lone, tragic figure, whose ‘impalpable destruction’ (p. 194) only the négrillon perceives. A Bout d’enfance resurrects the character, re-endowing him with his original audacity and wiles without alluding to this supposed decline; some ten years on, the prognosis for Gros-Lombric and the culture he represents is perhaps not as bleak as Chamoiseau once believed.

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In A Bout d’enfance, the impassioned promotion of Creole evident in the first volumes gives way to a less militant tone. The impact of Eloge and subsequent literary successes may have brought about this change, and now Creole mainly surfaces in passages dealing with the language of love and courtship. Again, French reigns supreme when boys try to approach girls – ‘prononcer Kel hêr? au lieu de leur broder Quelle heure? les plongeaient dans une liesse explosive’ (p. 161) – but linguistic cohabitation and the code-switching it entails has become a source of humour rather than bitterness. The compelling defence of Creole in the earlier volumes and the need to demonstrate its endurance and survival have given way to a more moderate view, still keen to assert the resilience of the language but now focusing on humour and diversity. Le négrillon gradually harnesses multiple cultural references, as he resists the effacement of either component of his identity. This unusual marriage of influences is often humorous, as shown by his daydreams: il ne maîtrisait que le point de départ … Agonies dans les prés … malheurs dans les forêts de chênes … […] avec de temps en temps, l’insolite irruption d’un zombi tombé des contes créoles … Et c’est ainsi que le Chat botté mena bataille contre des diablesses à cornes et ne dut la vie sauve qu’aux lapins du moulins de Jemmapes … Robinson Crusoë en lieu et place de Vendredi fit la rencontre d’une Manman Dlo … (p. 33)

Now it is the cohabitation of different cultural influences which the narrator wishes to underscore. The use of intertextual references in the trilogy also illustrates such cohabitation: allusions to Perse, Césaire and Zobel force the reader to situate Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs within a wider Antillean literary context, while references to La Fontaine, Sand, Daudet, Saint-Exupéry, Chateaubriand and Hugo are reminders of the value placed on a Eurocentric education in the Antilles, which nonetheless convey the narrator’s admiration for their work. Ecrire en pays dominé further explores the authors who have influenced Chamoiseau. The first section, bearing the subtitle ‘Où l’enfant qui lisait va devoir tout relire …’ places childhood at the heart of the text, outlining the challenge facing Antillean authors: Comment écrire alors que ton imaginaire s’abreuve, du matin jusqu’aux rêves, à des images, des pensées, des valeurs qui ne sont pas les tiennes? Comment écrire quand ce que tu es végète en dehors des élans qui déterminent ta vie? Comment écrire, dominé? (p. 17)

Ecrire condemns literature written through the prism of Eurocentric

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perceptions, composed of ‘reflets volés à la lumière du Centre et que l’on impressionne minutieusement en soi afin d’accéder aux illusions d’une existence’ (p. 55), once again offering a similarity with Bhabha’s use of Naipaul to illustrate the forced structures of ‘reality’ under mimicry. Despite these conflicts, Chamoiseau’s final volume of récits d’enfance advocates cultural reconciliation. The celebration of diversalité, a term introduced towards the close of Eloge, unlocks creative potential; in A Bout d’enfance, it becomes evident that Chamoiseau rails against the imposition of artificial, universal norms and efforts to denigrate Creole, rather than railing against French culture per se. As summarized in Ecrire, an author must seek to ‘se construire en flexibilité, innover en polyvalence, cultiver sa rapidité de relations internes-externes […] c’est moins une résistance qu’une poétique’ (pp. 344–45). This precept is echoed by comments Chamoiseau made in 2006 during an interview, when he suggested the need to ‘sortir de l’absolu linguistique’ in order to ‘se rapprocher de l’imaginaire multilingue qui nous permet d’avoir “le désir imaginant de toutes les langues du monde” (dans la phrase de Victor Segalen)’. 56 This challenge approaches Glissantean conceptualizations of literature: in his Introduction à une poétique du divers, Glissant states, ‘L’écrivain contemporain écrit en présence de toutes les langues du monde’, 57 an idea which underpins his work on the Tout-monde and which unmistakably influences Chamoiseau in the final text of Une Enfance créole. A Bout d’enfance: the resolution of a trilogy A Bout d’enfance consciously closes Chamoiseau’s investigation of childhood. The passing of time and the death of Man Ninotte enable the narrator to contemplate events from a new perspective, a shift which suggests that his childhood is becoming increasingly distant (just as the fire which destroys la vieille maison reduces his ability to reimagine his infancy). 58 The deaths of both parents usher in a more mature analysis of physical and mental degeneration and the ravages of old age. Repeated references to Basile suggest the topic of death to the Antillean reader; the observant non-Antillean reader must spot the brief explanation of the character Basile la mort in the litany of characters from European and Creole fairy tales who cohabit in le négrillon’s imagination (p. 33). A Bout d’enfance strikes a balance between French and Creole influences, particularly in its climax. In the final, mock-epic chapter, ‘Le

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contact froid du mabouya’, the négrillon is subjected to the trials of a medieval paladin, the name given to Charlemagne’s legendary knights. This cryptically entitled episode is alluded to mysteriously throughout the narrative, and remains obscure to the European reader until the end of the text, although the Antillean reader will know that the mabouya is a lizard with feet that resemble suction-pads. 59 In the final chapter, the narrator must successfully survive the trial of the mabouya, which is anti-climactic when actually enacted. The decision to borrow from chivalric discourse is reminiscent of the medieval practice of composing ‘enfances’ about the deeds of knights in their infancy. This common practice served to close the cycle of poems relating an individual knight’s story, much as they seal Chamoiseau’s literary exploration of childhood. The third text in the trilogy is less marked by the concepts of Eloge than Antan or Chemin-d’école and displays a pronounced desire for a broader field of reference, aligned with the views elaborated in Ecrire. In A Bout d’enfance, the narrator repeatedly uses terms from the lexical fields of colonization in provocative ways. The world, le négrillon concludes, has been colonized by adults: ‘les Grands et GrandesPersonnes étaient des barbares qui, en des temps hors-mémoire, avaient colonisé cette terre et asservi les êtres-humains’ (the term used for boys in this volume) (p. 29). Similarly, le négrillon sees the everyday in terms of processes of conquest – ‘L’espace vital était colonisé par [le Papa]’ (p. 50) – just as he finds that girls begin to ‘coloniser sa conscience dans une lenteur magnifique’ (p. 106). In this final volume, Chamoiseau plays with the lexicon of colonialism, and structures of dominance appear as inevitable and even humorous facets of human behaviour. The text is also concerned with contemporary events: Chamoiseau draws on images of the computer virus (p. 112) and terrorism. The Tout-monde has surfaced, as the global political present alters the manner in which the personal past is depicted; thus at school, le négrillon must now survive ‘les djihads de la récréation’ (p. 145) and in his chivalric games, he imagines undertaking ‘quelque mission-suicide’ (p. 243). Despite this pronounced turn towards inclusion and diversalité, the narrator’s critical appraisal of the colonial past remains evident. All three récits d’enfance include recurrent leitmotifs of postcolonial literature and, notably, A Bout d’enfance passes comment on both shoes and hair combs. Shoes hold a particularly charged emotional value in Antillean literature. Their prohibitive cost, the requirement to wear them during the later stages of schooling (and the hopes for a better future that this conferred), as well as the historical legacy that slaves were forbidden

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to wear shoes60 make them an important locus of memory. Le Papa, a trained cobbler, is able to make shoes for his children, a rare opportunity for them to have desirable material goods. Man Ninotte, aware of the scarcity of opportunities for her brood, forbids her husband to make shoes for their neighbours, anxious to retain this one advantage. In addition, the narrator scathingly refers to the comb, an everyday object which was notorious in colonial times for ‘deciding’ how black or white a child was (one test to determine a child’s degree of ‘darkness’ depended on whether or not a comb could be passed through their hair). The nefarious importance accorded to the comb is wryly alluded to in Antan: ‘sans jamais penser à injurier ce maudit peigne, ils maudissaient leurs propres cheveux’ (p. 116). Similarly, in A Bout d’enfance, when Man Ninotte ‘s’attaquait même à la chevelure impossible de la Baronne pour la civiliser en douze mille papillotes’ (p. 138), the verb civiliser is freighted with irony. In 2006 Chamoiseau stated in an interview that the greatest challenge for living authors is the need to deal with the globalized world, 61 and his trilogy of récits d’enfance closes in a celebration of diversity and plurality. Although adamant that this marks the end of his childhood trilogy, Chamoiseau frames events such as the death of parents as moments which themselves transcend definite endings. This is due to the living memories they elicit in those who survive them: their children, or the adults those children have become. At the trilogy’s conclusion, the enduring role of childhood creativity in the writer’s career is underscored: Et, dans une lucidité de rêves, de poésie et de romans, au cœur même de l’écrire, intact peut-être, attentif toujours, et même à bout d’enfance, l’enfant est là ... (p. 284)

Conclusion For Chamoiseau, childhood yokes together solipsistic exploration and socio-historical investigation. The child’s open and unbiased regard is offered as a tool of resistance in the face of the realities imposed both by adulthood and cultural imperialism. Although there is no scene of recognition, no fundamental moment of transmission, Chamoiseau weaves subtle references to the slave past and its cultural legacy into his trilogy. These resonate with his wider literary output, particularly Texaco, which does furnish a scene of recognition. Une Enfance créole is

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a vivid elucidation of many of the ideas advanced in Eloge, emphasizing the resilience of Creole language and culture in the face of imperialism and the subversive potential of mimicry. If the despised Universal promoted by the mission civilisatrice is to be opposed, the value of regional culture and local specificity must be recognized and championed, requiring an education system which acknowledges the need for local knowledge in contrast to the inflexible Eurocentric syllabus of l’école Perrinon. This line of thought finds resolution in A Bout d’enfance, through the assimilation of two systems of knowledge, allowing the narrator to draw on both French and Creole culture in his interpretations of the world. The volume moves towards a Glissantean, all-encompassing, Tout-monde approach, which Chamoiseau sums up as a method of writing ‘en mobilisant toutes ces influences qui me constituent et qui me permettent aujourd’hui d’être ce que je suis’.62 The formative years of the marqueur de paroles serve as an initiation into Antillean society past and present, as well as captivating the reader through their poetic sounding of the ‘fragilités indicibles de l’enfance’ (Chemin-d’école, p. 155).

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chapter three

The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour and Le Cahier de romances The Poetics of Ethnicity

In the Francophone Caribbean, the process of métissage began in 1635, when Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc first established a French settlement in Martinique. Initially, the French colonizers concluded peace treaties with Pilote, a Carib chief who took an active role in supporting and extending the French reign over the island,1 and as a publication by the priest and early colonial chronicler Jean-Baptiste du Tertre shows, Martinique became divided into two roughly equal parts between the ‘demeure des François’ [sic] who settled along the Caribbean coast, and the ‘demeure des sauvages’ who took refuge in the hilly interior and along the more rugged Atlantic coastline. 2 Violence between the French and the Caribs escalated, however, and it became apparent that this small territory would not be successfully shared. In 1660 the treaty of Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe) decreed that the Carib population would be forcibly removed from the Lesser Antilles. A number of Caribs fled to the island of Dominica, which to this day is home to the only Amerindian reserve in the Caribbean. Although the Amerindians were all but exterminated from Martinique and Guadeloupe by the beginning of the eighteenth century, contemporary authors repeatedly reassert Amerindian ties. This is an ongoing ‘travail de mémoire’ in the Caribbean, and a particularly fine cultural example is the Musée Départemental d’Archéologie précolombienne et de préhistoire in Fort-de-France. 3 The Amerindian past pre-dates European ‘discovery’, colonization and slavery, and invoking this

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aspect of Caribbean cultural heritage becomes an important method of resisting European hegemony. In the extended essay Ecrire en pays dominé, Patrick Chamoiseau imagines the conquest of Martinique from a number of perspectives, including those of D’Esnambuc and an Amerindian. He notes that Amerindian customs live on in contemporary society, and can be accessed both through archaeological findings and in the more fluid form of everyday language: les techniques et des mots caraïbes ont traversé les siècles. Les mots désignent surtout des outils de pêche, des poissons et des produits de la mer. J’ai rêvé-mots, coui, yole, mabouya, waliwa, caye, ouicou …, étendre leurs résonances, proroger leurs vibrations, les détacher de ce qu’ils désignent aujourd’hui et des réalités dont ils proviennent, pour les suprendre neufs.4

Words can awaken historical memory, as well as inspiring authors to think differently about their relationship to language. Other words which have passed into metropolitan French and other European languages, such as colibri (humming-bird), hamac (hammock) and ouragan (hurricane), confirm the enduring importance of the Amerindian linguistic heritage. In contrast, in Ravines du devant-jour (1993), Raphaël Confiant’s first récit d’enfance, it is the genetic link to the Amerindians which is proclaimed in the glossary: Nègre-caraïbe: Avant de se jeter d’un énorme rocher du nord de la Martinique, qui devint dès lors le Tombeau des Caraïbes, les autochtones eurent le temps de disperser tout un lot de gènes dans la population nègre. Alors, ici et là, de temps à autre, on voit naître un bébé aux pommettes saillantes, aux yeux bridés et à la chevelure ondulée. Le caraïbe survit donc à travers le nègre. (p. 259)

Le tombeau des Caraïbes is a cliff in northern Martinique, and the name records a Carib tribe’s decision to jump to their deaths rather than surrender to the French. Yet while drawing attention to a genocide, Confiant also suggests métissage’s potential as an act of survival and preservation. The theme of ethnicity is a leitmotif in Confiant’s work, and his récits d’enfance are shaped by childhood discoveries of métissage and the ethnoclass hierarchy. The child gradually becomes aware that his appearance modifies the way his fellow Martinicans treat him. In their attempts to represent the poetics of encountering and negotiating the stereotypes associated with a marginalized ethnic identity, Confiant’s texts reveal similarities with Coulée d’Or (1995), a récit d’enfance by Ernest Pépin, and Maurice Virassamy’s Le Petit

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Coolie noir (1972), the first récit d’enfance to explore childhood from the position of a minority ethnic group. Confiant, Language and Identity Confiant was born in Martinique in 1951, and is a staunch Creole activist. Since the late 1970s he has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, many of which are in Creole. His first novels were in Creole, and were well received by a local audience, after which he sought to reach a wider public by publishing in French. Le Nègre et l’Amiral (1988)5 and Eau de café (1991)6 received critical acclaim and brought Confiant to the attention of metropolitan readers; Eau de café was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 1991. Confiant’s role as a co-author of the manifesto Eloge de la Créolité secured him an international audience. His uncompromising stance and emphatic defence of Creole has led to him being termed the ‘enfant terrible of Créolité’.7 In 1993 Confiant published Ravines du devant-jour, for which he received the Prix Casa de las Americas. The narrative focuses on the author’s early childhood in the rural community of Macédoine, in northern Martinique. A sequel, Le Cahier de romances, was published seven years later in 2000, and depicts Raphaël on the cusp of adolescence, now living in Fort-de-France. This title, which is the French term for a sheet music collection of love songs, indicates a nascent interest in the opposite sex, as well as faintly echoing the title of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Ravines is divided into 19 thematic chapters, each bearing its own cryptic title. Episodes are not recounted chronologically; instead, each chapter strives to excavate specific striking memories, as the author has commented: ‘Je ne voulais pas raconter une enfance linéaire; je voulais plutôt choisir des moments forts. Donc cela commence par la mort du grand-père.’8 For Confiant, the retrieval of the past is centred on thematically grouped pockets of memory, which intersect and overlap. His decision to address his child counterpart by the informal, affectionate ‘tu’ evokes the visual process of recalling memory, which becomes a ‘re-viewing’. ‘Tu’ indicates the distance – physical, mental and temporal – between the adult author Confiant and his former child self, and underscores the adult’s prerogative to comment on key formative moments. This narrative division provides the retrospection which Lejeune identifies as a defining feature of autobiography. Yet this

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retrospection remains muted and brief – it is left to the reader to absorb the scenes presented and draw their own conclusions. Furthermore, it is a narrative device which emulates Saint-John Perse’s use of the secondperson singular in Eloges, and the Guadeloupean author proves an important reference in Confiant’s text. Each chapter undertakes a nuanced exploration of the terms in its title. ‘Les anolis et le decalitre’ is rich in cultural nostalgia, recalling the former glory of the family distillery which is now symbolized by a defunct ‘decalitre’, a large barrel. This is indicative of an urgent wish to depict the abrupt linguistic and cultural shift from childhood to adulthood, as Confiant has discussed in interview: nous [les écrivains antillais] sommes des gens qui avons vécu dans un double-monde. Notre enfance est le monde lié à l’habitation de canne à sucre en général, ou à la ville, comme Chamoiseau, mais la ville urbaine très pauvre. Quand nous sommes devenus adultes, nous avons commencé à vivre dans le monde français, il n’y a pas eu de continuum entre le monde de notre enfance et le monde adulte, nous avons l’impression d’avoir vécu dans deux civilisations différentes. […] Personnellement, j’ai eu l’impression de changer de monde quand j’ai quitté l’enfance, de sortir du monde créole et d’entrer dans le monde français.9

In Ravines, the adult world is figured as uncharted linguistic territory – ‘le monde des grandes personnes est une maçonnerie de mots terribles’ (p. 61) – and throughout the text the child protagonist shows a heightened sensitivity to language, indicative of Confiant’s future vocation as a wordsmith and lexicographer. Like Chamoiseau, Confiant rejects European linguistic domination by developing a stylistic dexterity that champions Creole’s pervasive creative influence. His style is dense, allusive and rich in creolisms and neologisms, and the predominantly French narrative is peppered with Creole direct speech and calques which are translated into French in parenthesis immediately afterwards. In Le Cahier, Raphaël’s comedic struggle to carry Le Gaffiot, his enormous Latin–French dictionary, up the hill to the Lycée Schœlcher is a metaphor for his complex relationship with the French language: the narrator must endure the physical burden of the book and the Creole jokes of passers-by and observers (pp. 60–67). Yet it is precisely this linguistic conflict which fosters artistic innovation. Confiant sets out to destabilize metropolitan French when he employs terms which are unusual or archaic such as ‘heureuseté’, ‘belleté’, ‘mésintelligence’, ‘incomprenable’, ‘désachalandée’ and ‘déshonnêteté’. The metonymic gap, which destabilizes ‘standard’ French through the insertion of terms

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which evoke another cultural framework, is also in evidence through the use of Creole words such as the verb ‘jargouiner’, and substantives ‘accoreur’ and ‘macaquerie’. Confiant’s linguistic inventiveness is deliberately distinct from misuse of the French language. For example, the only character who repeatedly speaks in incorrect French is the old nègre-marron. Although in Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance, marronnage has been positively interpreted as a strategy of resistance, in Ravines there is a different nuance: this character is untrustworthy, idle and manipulative, and indeed the term nègre-marron can indicate someone who shirks their responsibilities. When the nègre-marron strives to flatter the townsfolk, his comical pseudo-French is riddled with errors and qualified by the narrator as ‘français-banane’ (p. 115). This is attributed to his lack of formal schooling rather than a lack of intelligence, as the nègre-marron emerges as a sly and wily character. In interview, Confiant is careful to contextualize ‘français-banane’: Le français-banane […] est une variété de français qui a existé aux Antilles jusque dans les années soixante. Cela venait des gens du peuple qui n’étaient pas allés à l’école et qui voulaient à tout prix parler français et qui, du coup, faisaient beaucoup de fautes. […] Ces gens étaient principalement les gens de la campagne et on aurait pu qualifier leur parler de ‘français-canne-à-sucre’ ou ‘français-cacao’ mais bon, on l’a nommé ‘français-banane’ pour montrer que c’est une variété de français utilisée par les couches populaires […]10

The author then goes on to distinguish the term from his own hybrid use of language: Je tiens à dire aussi que certains esprits mal-intentionnés qui ne nous aiment pas disent que ce que Chamoiseau et moi en avons fait est du français-banane, mais c’est une aberration, une imbécillité. Le françaisbanane est un français fautif, alors que notre français n’est pas un français fautif; à la limite c’est un français créolisé, mais ce n’est pas un français-banane.11

The créoliste authors test the limits of the French language, and Confiant is keen to point out that this bending of linguistic norms is fully intentional. Nonetheless, in the same interview he acknowledges that by writing predominantly in French, he and Chamoiseau lay themselves open to the criticism that ‘nous exploitons le créole au profit du français et que le créole n’est pas gagnant en fin de compte’.12 Yet Confiant’s other literary enterprises offer firm evidence of his ongoing commitment to the

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promotion of Creole. The most substantial contribution to date is his comprehensive Dictionnaire créole martiniquais-français, completed in 2007. This fascination with explaining language is also evident at the close of Ravines, with the inclusion of a lengthy eight-page glossary, entitled ‘Petit lexique du pays créole’. In contrast to Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, which inserts asterisks in the text to indicate that a word features in the glossary, Confiant does not indicate which words are glossed. The text’s integrity is not challenged by continual indications that a specific word requires explanation, and the narrative flow remains unbroken. Moreover, the glossary at the end of Ravines eschews the conventions of a measured, neutral list, and its heavily ironic tone brings race and the ethnoclass hierarchy to the fore. In addition to describing flora, fauna and traditions specific to Martinique, several entries ‘explain’ the ethnic groupings which are so important to an understanding of the text: béké, câpresse, chabin, couli, échappéecoulie. The glossary includes the text’s most racially inflammatory statements, written in a style which mockingly imitates French colonial ethnological discourse. The author’s predilection for crudeness and parody has led one critic to suggest that ‘Confiant’s models appear to come not from the tradition of the bourgeois realist novel, but from the older tradition operating at the novel’s birth as genre: the comic, parodic, peasant grotesque Mikhail Bakhtin finds in Rabelais’.13 In the glossary, humour is used to exaggerate the kinds of racial stereotypes which are upheld by the ethnoclass hierarchy. The glossary thus becomes complicit in racial typecasting in order to expose its deep-rooted nature in society, while also holding it up to ridicule. Turning the Gaze Inwards: Intertextuality In Ravines, Confiant forges a series of intertextual links with other Antillean authors, in a manner reminiscent of the demands for ‘un regard intérieur’ made in Eloge which, as was discussed in the Introduction to this study, operates as a mechanism with which to bolster awareness of the authors’ own position as readers. The epigraph is taken from La Lampe captive (1978) by a Guadeloupean writer, Henri Corbin, whose inclusion will appeal largely to a local audience: Il est vrai qu’ici tout est obstacle, Que la lumière paraît encore plus lointaine, Que les étoiles dévorent le front des hommes qui pensent.

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Il est vrai que d’inutiles roues tournent dans le délire de l’aube La difficulté consiste à balayer le ciel A fertiliser l’oubli, à différer la tristesse inexplicable.

Corbin’s volume of poetry expresses the difficulty of retrieving the past and provides an apt opening to Confiant’s récit d’enfance. In addition, there are several allusions to the Guadeloupean poet Saint-John Perse in Ravines, often in the form of unacknowledged direct quotations (akin to Chamoiseau’s references to the poet in his own childhood trilogy). Ravines closes with the quotation ‘Dit le Poète: sinon l’enfance, qu’y a-t-il qu’il n’y a plus?’ (p. 251). Saint-John Perse is the unnamed poet, in a quotation from Eloges which proves inspirational for a number of récits d’enfance because of its success in capturing the tension between childhood, memory and loss.14 In Le Cahier, Saint-John Perse proves a source of literary inspiration once again. Now at the Lycée Schœlcher, Raphaël becomes fascinated by literature and is struck by his inability to find Antillean literary models.15 A turning point occurs in the chapter ‘Ecrire déjà…’, which focuses on the excitement in Martinique when Glissant won the Prix Renaudot for La Lézarde in 1965. After a long search, Raphaël finds a copy of La Lézarde at the Bibliothèque Schœlcher, and plucks up the courage to read just the first page, feeling ‘un choc, une sorte de foudroiement immédiat’ (p. 206) at Glissant’s hybrid, creolized language. He is in awe of ‘les phrases, ciselées et gorgées de sève créole tout à la fois’ (p. 206). Having recognized the work’s originality, however, the narrator has his child protagonist utter the prophetic realization: ‘Si jamais je lis ce roman, jamais je ne deviendrai un écrivain!’ (p. 209). Glissant’s influence is problematic; he is inspirational, but his presence threatens to overwhelm others in their own attempts to write. Instead Raphaël turns his attention to the half-finished stories he has jotted down in old school books, until he realizes that his writing, although set in the Antilles, is filtered through the French language. At this point Raphaël is guided by a philosophy teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher, Emile Yoyo, who had written a controversial thesis claiming that ‘le poète béké Saint-John Perse était plus antillais dans son écriture que son alter ego noir Aimé Césaire […]. Yoyo appuyait sa démonstration sur la présence d’images empruntées au créole par l’auteur d’Eloges’ (p. 217). Le Cahier thus voices a tension which remains unspoken in other récits d’enfance: Saint-John Perse’s ethnoclass status as a béké makes him a contentious literary model for black authors. And yet Confiant’s narrator reclaims the béké author, admitting that Saint-John Perse’s style of poetry moves

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him, ‘alors que les vers de Césaire, dont tu mesurais confusément la hauteur, te laissaient de marbre’ (p. 218). This rediscovery of Saint-John Perse demonstrates that poetry and art cannot be contained by the constraints of the rigid ethnoclass hierarchy – at their most potent, they underscore a shared humanity which this hierarchy, with its colonial origins, constantly seeks to deny. Ethnicity and the Child Although ethnicity is a recurring theme in all the texts in this study, in Confiant’s récits d’enfance it is the exploration of the ethnoclass hierarchy which drives the narrative. The child discovers that his identity in society appears to be inextricably bound to the body – and skin tone – he finds himself possessing. In Ravines, Confiant’s forename is replaced by an ethnic indicator, chabin, a choice reminiscent of Chamoiseau’s decision to name his own narrative surrogate le négrillon. Whereas Chamoiseau’s ethnic marker is in some respects a racially problematic term, it also has a symbolic collective dimension, an effect heightened by the distancing use of the definite article, positioning le négrillon as representative of all black children. In Confiant’s case, the label chabin indicates a marginalized minority within the black Caribbean population, and its symbolic potential is thus reduced. Nonetheless, Ravines is dedicated to Confiant’s mother (who is a chabine) and ‘à tous les petits “chabins” du monde’, suggesting that the chabin’s position may symbolically relate to people who find themselves in a marginalized position in any socitey. The chabin is mixed race, typically having a ‘light skin colour and hair and eyes that can also be light in colour, but with African hair texture’ and sometimes referred to as ‘un noir blanc (literally, a white black)’.16 Although this lightness of skin confers a certain superiority in the ethnoclass hierarchy, the chabin occupies a difficult in-between status, constantly set apart from his peers by his different racial appearance. In the glossary to Ravines, the term is equated with a tendency towards passionate emotions: Chabin: Qualité de nègre ayant l’inouïe faculté (dont il abuse) de rougir de colère ou de honte, cela à cause d’une charge de sang blanc datant du temps-l’esclavage. Ses yeux, souvent bleus ou verts, brillent de colère retenue et la chabine, ô femme dorée, te mordille les oreilles jusqu’au sang au zénith du coquer. (p. 255)

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The narrator is a nègre, but not a négrillon. The glossary does not allow for the possibility of recent métissage, but claims that the chabin’s white ancestry dates from the time of slavery, rendering him a repository of colonial dominance and traumatic memory. Linguistically, Confiant spells the term as chabin in French, and chaben in Creole. In his Creole– French dictionary, Confiant’s entry under chaben quotes at length from French ethnographer Michel Leiris’s study, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (1955).17 Leiris suggests that a chaben is an unusual and visually striking example of métissage who, ‘au lieu d’un amalgame’, presents ‘une combinaison paradoxale de traits des races noire et blanche’.18 He adds that ‘certaines idées ont cours sur eux: on parle volontiers de la méchanceté des “chabines” et de leur caractère impétueux; selon le Dr Rose-Rosette, les “chabins” sont réputés “ou tout bon ou tout mauvais” et on les tient pour des gens souvent résistants et volontaires.’19 In the glossary to Ravines, Confiant also mischievously equates the term with stereotypical ‘méchanceté’: ‘Souvent roux de poils et de cheveux (et donc méchant!)’ (p. 255). The first chapter of Ravines, ‘La prophétie des nuits’, immediately introduces the notion of the ethnic diversity of Antillean society, and also offers a neat exposition of Confiant’s domestic situation. As young children, he and his cousin Roland were sent to live in the north of Martinique with their grandparents Man Yise and Papa Loulou, in the rural area of Macédoine. At the text’s opening, Man Yise is described as combing her ‘chevelure de mulâtresse’ (p. 13), an evocative motif reminiscent of the ‘comb test’, a notorious method of judging how white or black a child was under slavery. With this seemingly innocuous comment, the narrator immediately signposts the fact that his grandmother belongs to an ethnoclass type which results from having one white and one black parent and which is often associated with wealth. The family appears affluent, as they have servants and Papa Loulou is pictured reclining in a ‘dodine’, a kind of luxury chair (as Confiant’s glossary explains). It is Papa Loulou who first announces Raphaël’s identity as a chabin, when he voices his frustration that Raphaël believes in the Creole folklore of l’oiseau-Cohé, the harbinger of death: ‘ton père fait l’école, ta maman fait l’école, alors toi, petit chabin, tu feras l’école aussi. Ne commence pas à emplir ton esprit de ces couillonnaderies de vieux nègres à chiques’ (p. 19). A chabin is positioned as the antithesis of the ‘vieux nègres à chiques’ (‘old tobacco-chewing blacks’ [my translation]), who symbolize the interminable poverty of life on the plantations,

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where Creole folklore about creatures such as l’oiseau-Cohé originated. Despite this, the narrator’s fascination with Creole folklore remains unshaken and, ironically, Papa Loulou is indeed about to die. In the second chapter, Raphaël experiences his grandfather’s veillée as an enticing initiation into the orality of Creole culture, in a scene which is reminiscent of the wake held for M. Médouze in Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres. Raphaël’s racial identity comes into its own in the third chapter, entitled ‘Chabin’. This is the only chapter to have a one-word title, suggesting the totality of the noun for the narrator, as the child becomes brutally aware of the negative, racist stereotypes that his chabin identity confers. Chantal Maignan-Claverie homes in on the emotive pull of the ethnoclass hierarchy, borrowing a term developed by the literary critic Boris Tomachevski, as she notes that: ‘le facteur ethnique intervient alors dans les œuvres antillaises, pour complexifier les schémas narratifs, dans la mesure où il influence fortement les “directives émotionnelles” pour reprendre l’expression de Tomachevski, que l’auteur donne au lecteur’. 20 In a chapter laden with emotional turmoil, the reader witnesses at first hand the social conditioning and humiliating treatment that Raphaël must endure because he is a chabin. Significantly, Raphaël’s first degrading encounter with the term chabin occurs when he is in trouble. The boy is fascinated by his neighbour, Man Cia, who is said to be capable of quimbois (sorcery), and he creeps around outside her house until she flings the contents of a chamber pot over him. She simultaneously lets fly a string of Creole insults which do not chastise him for his misbehaviour, but rather racially abuse his ethnicity: ‘Sakré vyé chaben ki ou yé! Sakré chaben prèl si! Chaben, tikté kodenn! Chaben tikté kon an fig mi! Foutémwalikan, chaben sé an mové ras Bondyé pa té janmen dwèt mété anlè late!’ (Espèce de mauvaise race de chabin! Espèce de chabin aux poils suris! Chabin au visage tacheté comme un coq d’Inde! Chabin tiqueté comme une banane mûre! Fous-moi le camp, les chabins sont une mauvaise race que Dieu n’aurait jamais dû mettre sur la terre!) (pp. 41–42)

The cruelty of this list of terms, and their racial specificity, create a deep-seated malaise and confusion in the child. As a consequence, Raphaël experiences an ethnic awakening and discovers that his skin tone denotes a certain set of racial stereotypes: Le mot te pétrifie pour la première fois de ton existence: chabin! D’ordinaire, il est prononcé avec gentillesse par ceux qui t’entourent,

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encore qu’il t’est arrivé de t’étonner qu’on te désigne toujours par ce vocable tandis qu’on ne dit jamais ‘noir’ ou ‘mulâtre’ à tout propos aux gens de cette complexion. Tu sens confusément que le chabin est un être à part. Nègre et pas nègre, blanc et pas blanc à la fois. Toutefois, tu ne t’es pas encore rendu compte de l’ampleur de la distance que la couleur de ta peau et de tes cheveux crée entre les gens du commun et toi. (p. 42)

The narrator’s feeling of difference persists, despite his mother’s status as a beautiful chabine. Her physical absence in the early years of his life (and narrative absence from most chapters in Ravines) leads to Raphaël being surrounded by mulâtres and nègres, even though Macédoine is known as ‘pays-Chabin’ (p. 44). As a result of the Caribbean practice of othermothering (discussed in Chapter 7), Raphaël lacks role models from his own ethnic group, a fact which increases his anxiety about his ethnic status. Moreover, the chabine is generally considered more beautiful than her male counterpart (as Confiant’s glossary notes); thus Raphaël despairs that the uneven reddish skin tone of his face renders him ‘la pire espèce de vieux chabin laid’ (p. 43). Le Cahier returns to this theme, as a pretty chabine, Maryse, receives special treatment on a bus, whereas Raphaël is relegated to a cramped seat at the back of the vehicle, convinced that Maryse would never deign to look at him (pp. 61–62). Even within the same ethnoclass, there is no guarantee of any gender parity, and Raphaël observes that ‘les couples de chabins n’étaient pas monnaie courante’ (p. 211). In Ravines, Raphaël’s chabin identity modifies the way his teacher and classmates approach him. When he fails to achieve academically, his teacher reprimands him in a manner which foregrounds his ethnoclass and the expectations it confers: Eux, ce sont des petits nègres noirs comme hier soir qui finiront tôt ou tard dans la canne ou la banane donc ce n’est pas grave s’ils réussissent pas à l’école mais toi, avec ta peau blanche, comment vas-tu faire, hien? Un nègre couillon, c’est laid mais un chabin couillon, c’est encore pire, quelle affreuseté! (p. 78)

The teacher’s racial prejudice is a disturbing indication of the manner in which ethnoclass discrimination is upheld and perpetuated even by educators. The school’s location, perched over ‘l’étroite coulée de Fond-Massacre où les champs de canne commencent à céder la place aux bananeraies’ (p. 76), implies the limited future prospects of its ­darker-skinned pupils. Raphaël’s appearance leaves even his formidable classmate Sonson

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awe-struck. Sonson can be likened to Chamoiseau’s Gros-Lombric; he represents a typical Creole child, as is suggested by his name, which is a common Antillean nickname for a young boy. He comes from a poor family, is physically robust and possesses an ‘éloquence inouïe en créole’ (p. 67): [Sonson] n’a peur de rien. Ni des nègres-marrons qui hantent les chemins isolés, ni des prêtres indiens à la recherche de chair enfantine, ni des commandeurs d’habitations […], ni même du féroce Blanc-pays de Cassagnac dont la seule apparition ensemence une terreur incontrôlable au cœur de la négraille. Il ne sera vaincu plus tard (ou plus exactement, il ne baissera sa caquetoire) que devant ta formidable démesure de ­chabin-kalazaza. (p.  67)

Confiant’s Dictionnaire glosses kalazaza as ‘type de chabin ou métis de Noir et de Blanc à la peau très blanche et aux cheveux jaunes ou roux (var. Chaben-kalazaza)’. In Ravines, the emphatic ‘chabin-kalazaza’ goes unexplained, although the repetition at the end of this onomatopœic term suggests a triumphant tone. In Macédoine, as a chabin, Raphaël is allocated a paradoxical status which oscillates between derision and respect. In contrast, when he visits his mulatto cousins in Fort-de-France, their urban sophistication and polished French make him self-conscious of his rural habits. This is described in terms of a ‘darkening’ of his skin, implying a step down in the ethnoclass system: ‘ici, c’est toi qui es le négrillon. Les rôles sont inversés’ (p. 194). Nonetheless, people in the town are struck by his appearance, as chabins are rare in town: ‘Joy modèl chaben! (Quel chabin!)’ (p. 202). He now learns that he can turn the stereotypes to his advantage in the urban setting: ‘tu mets ton masque de mauvais chabin et même la marchande de cornets de pistache de la rue Saint-Louis hésite à te couillonner sur la monnaie’ (p. 206), demonstrating that he is becoming conditioned to adopt – and exploit – his role in the ethnoclass hierarchy. Métissage and the Scene of Recognition Reflections on ethnicity generate several episodes which prefigure the scene of recognition in Ravines. In the chapter ‘Chabin’, the confusing treatment he has received prompts Raphaël to ask his grandmother, Man Yise: ‘Un chabin, c’est quoi?’ Man Yise does not respond immediately, but remains silent and ‘pensive’ (p. 42). When she does answer, her

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words reinforce racial stereotypes, adhering to the clichéd vision of a chabin rather than exhorting Raphaël to be free of it: ‘Mais, Bondieu-Seigneur-la-Vierge-Marie, qu’est-ce qui m’arrive là? Qu’est-ce que je vois devant moi là: un chabin mol? Mais c’est impossible. IMPOSSIBLE! Un chabin, ça crie, ça trépigne, ça frappe, ça injure, ça menace. Jamais ça ne mollit, mon vieux!’ De ce jour naît ta férocité. (p. 42)

These comforting words appeal to Raphaël’s tenacity and are clearly meant to goad him out of his confusion. Yet the narrator emphasizes that he is just six years old in this chapter, and it is disturbing to observe a guardian impose a set of predetermined characteristics upon such a young child. From early infancy, then, Raphaël is inculcated with the belief that his ethnoclass status predetermines his behaviour. At the end of a chapter which has seen him subjected to racist abuse but also paradoxically expected to assimilate ethnic stereotyping into his very personality, he concludes that such expectations did shape his identity: ‘On t’a appris, tonnerre de Brest, à devenir chabin. Mauvais chabin’ (p. 45), a tacit nod to Confiant’s outspoken adult persona. 21 A similar narrative development is found when Sonson and Raphaël are preparing for their catechism. The boys plague the religious instructor Annaïse with questions about the absence of black people in the Bible. Religion is a recurring site of tension and questioning in récits d’enfance, and the child protagonists in Ega and Condé are also struck by a lack of black religious figures in church. 22 In Ravines, Annaïse can only respond to the boys’ questions with an embarrassed silence: – Pourquoi il n’y a pas de personnes noires avec Jésus? – -------------– Pourquoi Jésus, Joséph, Marie sont blancs? renchéris-je. – ------------ (p. 86)

These episodes culminate in the scene of recognition in Ravines, which occurs in the final chapter. Raphaël notices that in the books his mother reads to him, all Egyptians are black. 23 This prompts him to formulate a clumsy but astute question about his appearance: ‘Pourquoi je suis un nègre et, pourtant, je ne suis pas noir’ (p. 245). Continued reflection on this perplexing issue leads to the scene of recognition, in the final pages of the text. The scene is catalysed by questions about hybrid skin tones in Martinique – questions which clearly invite a response explaining the colonial past:

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Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean – Manman, pourquoi dans tes livres, les gens d’un même pays ont tous la même couleur? – -----------– Les Romains sont tous roses tandis que chez nous chacun a sa couleur à lui … Ni Chantou, ni Miguel, ni Monique nous n’avons la même peau, hein? (p. 245)

As in the church scene with Annaïse, this exchange is transcribed as a one-sided dialogue, drawing attention to the repeated maternal silences. His mother’s eventual response conveys her acute embarrassment: ‘sa réaction te surprend encore plus: elle éclate de rire et ne t’explique rien. Elle parle très vite d’autre chose sans te laisser une miette de temps pour reprendre le fil de ton idée’ (p. 245). Silence gives way to semi-hysterical laughter, a classic symptom of repression. The same passage at the close of the text relates how on another occasion, after the narrator endures racial taunting for being a chabin, he returns to the question of racial identity. Once more his mother’s awkward posture leaves a deep psychological impression on the child: ‘Elle est contrainte de céder. Elle cherche ses mots, elle si volubile et si charmeuse dans la langue des Blancs. Elle est gênée d’en parler, si-tellement gênée qu’elle se perd dans des vocables savants et des phrases alambiquées que tu as peine à saisir’ (p. 246). She even prefaces her explanation by chastising him for his inquisitiveness: ‘tu veux savoir trop de choses qui ne te regardent pas à ton âge’ (p. 245). In a brief and elliptical summary of slavery, the mother tells her son that racial mixing occurred because slave women ‘faisaient des enfants avec les maîtres blancs pour éclaircir la race … pour sauver la peau, tu vois’ (p. 245). This account problematically suggests complicity on the part of the black woman, although such views are vehemently rebuked by feminist critics, who underscore the dual exploitation – physical and sexual – to which the black woman was subjected under slavery (discussed in detail in Chapter 7). His mother’s speech nervously ends with a weak ‘tu vois’, although it is unlikely that the child will ‘see’. In a further example of his fascination with language, in the scene of recognition Confiant also draws attention to the etymology of terms used in the ethnoclass hierarchy. His mother explains that many of these terms are derived from the names of animals, in a passage which again supports Maignan-Claverie’s observation that the discussion of the ethnoclass hierarchy heightens the emotional stakes of a passage: Elle m’explique que les maîtres blancs avaient choisi de tels noms dans

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le but d’animaliser les rejetons qu’ils procréaient, afin que ces derniers n’aient pas l’audace de réclamer des droits sur les richesses de leurs géniteurs. Ainsi mulâtre vient de mulet, chabin est le nom d’une variété de moutons au poil roux de Normandie et câpre ou câpresse dérive bien sûr de chèvre. (p. 246)

Once the mother’s initial reluctance has been overcome, the narrative is uncompromising in its detail. Although the child’s reaction goes unreported, the event suddenly offers a new way of interpreting his world. This systematic practice of identifying mixed-race people with reference to animals is a distinctive feature of métissage in the Caribbean and the Americas. The term mulâtre (and the English borrowed term mulatto) derives from the Portuguese and Spanish word mulato, which means mule: a mule is the infertile offspring of interbreeding between a horse and a donkey. The mania for obsessively categorizing race was an insidious, degrading act of psychological aggression that rendered race a particular site of anxiety. Given the population imbalance between the dominant white group and the increasing non-white population, this means of control was both a psychological tool and a means of legally defining, and controlling, the status of mixed-race people. It gave rise to terms such as métis, mulâtre, chabin, câpre, sang-mêlé, gens de couleur, nègre, noir and créole. Although not all these terms relate to animals, in focusing on the three most common terms with etymological links to animals the mother’s explanation is rendered all the more distressing.24 Despite her initial nervous silence, Raphaël’s mother provides an explanation of the ethnoclass hierarchy which does help to explain the numerous humiliating and confusing reactions to the term chabin scattered throughout Ravines, reactions which have so marked her son’s infant experiences. Her words even reactivate an older memory, as the narrator recalls that his grandmother Man Yise had once provided him with a similar account of the ethnoclass hierarchy, which his ‘frêle mémoire d’enfant […] avait oublié’ (pp. 246–47). The perplexing word chabin has finally been contextualized, and the discussion of its etymology operates on two levels. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the ethnoclass hierarchy aimed to make people of mixed-race origins internalize their subaltern status, by obsessively classifying them with restrictive racial categories. On the other hand, read in the context of the author’s wider work, it also suggests that the term chabin, with its opaque Normandy origins, exemplifies the positive aesthetics of diversity celebrated by créolité and promoted in Eloge.

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His mother’s tardy explanation of what it means to be chabin is offset by his father’s ready insistence on his black identity, ‘de toute façon, dès qu’on a une seule goutte de sang noir, on est un nègre, mon fils. Prends garde de ne jamais l’oublier!’ (p. 247). The tone of this comment remains ambiguous; although it cements the bond between Raphaël and his darker compatriots, it also echoes the rigid, discriminatory United States ‘one drop’ and ‘colour line’ rhetoric. From the earliest colonial times, race and racial métissage rapidly became an obsessive concern in the Americas, as exemplified by the work of colonial jurist and historian Moreau de Saint-Méry. At the end of the eighteenth century, Moreau produced ‘an extensive tabular, arithmetic and narrative typology of “nuances of the skin” along a continuum between white and black’, 25 in which he attempted to scientifically tabulate the offspring of different combinations of métissage. Lest it should appear that he was demonstrating how whiteness could be achieved, he proclaimed that ‘le préjugé colonial a adopté comme maxime que quelque rapprochée que puisse être du Blanc, la femme non-blanche, il ne saurait provenir un Blanc de leur procréation’. 26 Once métissage has commenced, whiteness is fetishized, overdetermined and figured as eminently desirable, and in order to protect their elite status the colonial masters pre-emptively deny whiteness to any group but themselves. Racial Outsiders: Confiant and Virassamy Confiant’s concern with depicting the position of the chabin as a marginalized minority within the black Caribbean population invites comparison with another marginalized group: coolies (referred to in Ravines as ‘Coulis’). The coolies, descendants of Indian indentured labourers, occupy the lowest rungs of the ethnoclass hierarchy. In Ravines, the Indian population is introduced in terms reminiscent of a fairy tale, exemplifying the mythologization of their difference in Antillean society: ‘A l’en-bas du chemin […] cachée derrière l’armure d’un manguier-bassignac […] gîte une race étrangère à la nôtre’ (p. 94). Ravines demonstrates several striking parallels with Maurice Virassamy’s Le Petit Coolie noir (1972), the first récit d’enfance to unpack the intricacies of the ethnoclass hierarchy and one of the few Francophone Caribbean works to examine the coolies’ situation. 27 Reading Confiant and Virassamy, important comparisons emerge between the status of the chabin and the coolie. Most disturbingly, both Confiant and

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Virassamy demonstrate that the victims of racism can all too quickly become its perpetrators. In Le Petit Coolie noir, the mixed-race narrator Maurice finds his status as a coolie is in no way mitigated by the fact that his grandmother was of black African descent. At school, his black peers automatically expect him to lose in playground fights: Psychologiquement, je partais avec un gros handicap car les gens disaient que jamais un coolie n’avait battu un nègre. J’avais certes 20% de la race noire en moi, mais à leurs yeux, j’étais à jamais diminué par mon côté hindou. (pp. 61–62)

As a coolie, Maurice is repeatedly rejected by black Antilleans, and his need to quantify his exact degree of blackness echoes Moreau de Saint-Méry’s preoccupation with tabular calculations of race. The narrator is first alerted to his difference when he overhears racist remarks about his father: ‘“Qui eût cru qu’un coolie serait un jour secrétaire de mairie?” Cette parole me glaça. Pour la première fois de ma vie j’entendais quelqu’un dire étourdiment du mal de mon père, en l’attaquant sur sa race avec mépris’ (pp. 55–56). Similar racist attitudes are apparent in the behaviour of the boys who bully him at school (p. 61), and in a distressing incident when his sister is attacked and kicked by older boys, he is unable to defend her: ‘Nous ne pouvions rien contre eux: ils étaient trop nombreux. Tout ce que je pouvais faire, c’était d’essayer de rendre mes cheveux plus crépus, pour leur ressembler davantage’ (p. 62). Wracked with shame at having witnessed his own sister being demeaned in this manner, the narrator consoles himself that sheer numbers made it impossible to stand up to the bullies. The post-1990 récits d’enfance by Confiant and Chamoiseau foreground hair as a site of racial anxiety, expressing a wish for hair to be straighter and thus more European. Here, however, it is his African ancestry which Maurice wishes to highlight, in order to gain acceptance from his black peers. Yet when he visits his Indian relatives, this same African heritage causes him to feel inadequate: Cela m’ennuyait un peu, parce qu’on m’avait tellement traité de coolie, que j’étais gêné de me trouver parmi d’autres coolies et, qui plus est, de pure souche. Ils avaient de beaux cheveux noirs et plats et des traits fins. Je me serais sans doute plu parmi eux sans ce satané complexe. (p. 63)

An outsider even in his own family, the narrator is unable to identify with any racial group and is aware that he has been psychologically

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scarred by his experiences of racism and the troubling notion of ethnic purity. As a result he makes repeated attempts to analyse the racism to which he is subjected. What makes his black Antillean neighbours treat him and his family with such vitriolic disdain? This leads him to deconstruct their racism as symptomatic of the inhumanity with which they themselves had been treated: On a décrit dans maints ouvrages l’abêtissement des moujiks [a term referring to peasants in imperial Russia]. Pour comprendre la situation des esclaves noirs face à leurs possesseurs, il suffit d’ajouter à la situation de ces paysans russes, la notion aggravante de races prétendues inférieures. Certes il ne me fut pas donné dans mon enfance d’assister au spectacle du knout s’abattant sur des dos décharnés, mais les séquelles psychiques d’un passé inhumain étaient reconnaissables en tous lieux. (p. 183)

The narrator presents the psychic consequences of slavery as unhealed scars, comparing them to the wounds inflicted by the Russian knout, a metal whip. Crucially, the narrator suggests that these mental scars can be transmitted across generations. The text does not include a scene of recognition, but Maurice learns about the slave past in traumatic detail through his father’s clinical explanation of a mysterious ‘petite construction en ciment’: De près on lui reconnaissait deux parties: l’une était un lourd couvercle rectangulaire en ciment, accolé à l’autre, sorte de parallélépipède rectangle fixé au sol. Mon père m’avait appris que l’intérieur de l’ensemble avait la forme d’une femme enceinte. Par un trou du couvercle on faisait couler l’eau d’un robinet visible au-dessus. C’est de cette façon que les esclavagistes se débarrassaient des domestiques noires qu’ils avaient engrossées. (pp. 184–85)

This abandoned chamber, which according to the narrator’s father was built to facilitate the murder of both mother and unborn child, is a horrific monument to the inhumanity of slavery. Unusually, it is the child’s father who plays a significant role in transmitting this traumatic memory. The account is not softened for the ears of a child, and it presents the slave woman’s body as sexually accessible and, along with her unborn child, ultimately expendable for the white master. Surprisingly, Juliette Sméralda-Amon, the author of a major study on Indian immigration to the Antilles, finds that in Le Petit Coolie noir engagement with Indian identity is minimal. In a rare critical appraisal of Virassamy’s work, the experimental psychologist has commented that the text ‘n’est pas un roman indien à proprement parler […] l’on

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trouve plusieurs références que constitue le fait d’être “coolie”, mais l’auteur n’y défend aucune cause indienne’. 28 This statement underplays the text’s repeated attempts to articulate what it means to grow up as a mixed-race coolie in a French colony, torn between two racial identities and victimized as a result. At the close of the text, Maurice’s identity is firmly constructed around two poles: his Indian ancestry and France. He becomes increasingly proud of a diasporic Indian identity when he learns about the figures of Gandhi and Tagore, which engenders a belief that his Indian heritage might, despite the racist taunts he has endured, even confer an advantage over black Martinicans: ‘je sus aussi que certains pays ne pouvaient se prévaloir de noms aussi célèbres’ (p. 190). As a constant victim of his own particular métissage, Maurice finds himself drawn to preferring one racial identity over another: thus the idea that his Indian heritage is more illustrious than his black heritage becomes seductive. Yet he is also vehemently opposed to the idea of ethnic segregation within Martinican society: ‘La solution à tous les problèmes qui m’opposaient aux gens du pays n’est sans doute pas à un retour aux diverses sources et une démarche dans ce sens n’aurait pour résultat que de diviser le pays en autant de clans’ (pp. 190–91). At the novel’s close, Maurice is increasingly aware of a pan-Caribbean Indian identity through an encounter with ‘des hindous originaires de Trinidad’ who sing ‘I want to go back to India’ (p. 209). However, the narrator does not advocate such a return, and instead his next journey will be to metropolitan France, thanks to a scholarship. Virassamy’s second novel, Ne crachez pas sur Sangaré (1983), 29 in a sense continues where Le Petit Coolie noir left off, and probes the question of a tripartite mixed-race identity in France. The novel describes the reversal of the Martinican ethnoclass hierarchy; in Europe, Indians enjoy a socially superior status to their black Antillean counterparts. The Martinican mixed-race hero, Sébastien Mohandas, gives each of his different ethnic identities a name: ‘Christophe, qui symbolise l’Europe, Krishna l’Asie et Sangaré l’Afrique’ (p. 9). In Europe, it is Sangaré, representing his African ancestry, who according to Mohandas ‘a fréquemment besoin de ma protection’ (p. 9). For Virassamy’s coolies noirs characters, the solution would appear to be to leave Martinique and seek out a new life in metropolitan France. The focus is shifted away from the location and circumstances in which this particular kind of métissage occurred, and the Caribbean becomes lost from sight as a quest for origins in Europe, Africa and India becomes predominant. The issue of how to situate a tripartite mixed-race identity

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in Martinique remains unsolved, and appears an almost impossible conundrum, a troubling indictment of the extent to which ‘intrigues socio-coloro-raciales’ (Le Petit Coolie noir, p. 168) pose a challenge to cohesion in Antillean society. In Ravines, Confiant’s portrayal of his family’s racism towards the coolie population is harrowing. Both Man Yise and Tante Emérante forbid the children to play with coolie children who are ‘tous censés vivre dans la pouillerie et l’immoralité’ (p. 94). The women’s overt racism is disturbing. However, Ravines does offer hints of a shared if covert bond between different ethnic groups as Man Yise discreetly donates the family’s old clothing to their coolie neighbours, gives food to the children and dotes on the prettiest daughter, Laetitia (p. 49). Nonetheless, in public a show of hostility towards the coolies is maintained: the women refuse to allow the coolie workers to take a short-cut across their property, commenting that the public roads are open to ‘même les chiens et les Coulis’ (p. 94). This dehumanizing attitude is epitomized by the expression ‘coolie mangé chien’ (p. 147), which Virassamy also quotes as evidence of black Antillean racism towards coolies at the opening of Le Petit Coolie noir (pp. 14–15). In Ravines, these attitudes are exacerbated by the rumours that coolie priests need ‘la chair d’enfant’ to satisfy their numerous gods, who are demonized and opposed to the Catholic gods of French Caribbean society. A symbol of the impenetrability of coolie culture is the ‘Bon Dieu Coolie’, a mysterious ceremony which Raphaël witnesses. The Guadeloupean author Ernest Pépin also devotes one chapter of Coulée d’or to the mysterious Malaba (another term used to refer to Indians; Malabar is a region of southern India). Pépin describes how, as a child, he witnessed a maliémin ceremony organized by the Malaba community, which is similarly marked by mystery and otherness. 30 Illustrating another example of the overt racism shown towards the coolie population, Virassamy, Confiant and Pépin all discuss the stereotype of the seductive beauty of coolie women. This beauty is demonized through the commonly held superstition that their pubic hair is razor sharp. In Ravines, Tante Emérante warns the case-à-rhum clientele that ‘Qui s’y frotte s’y coupe!’ (p. 95). This is a direct echo of an episode in Le Petit Coolie noir: ‘ces hommes prétentieux affirmaient qu’il était dangereux de coucher avec une femme hindoue parce que ses poils pubiens coupaient comme des rasoirs’ (pp. 167–68); the same expression is also found in Pépin: ‘Pwel a fanm zendyen ka koupé lolo aw’, which is translated in a footnote as: ‘les poils de la femme indienne te coupent

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le pénis’. 31 These phrases undermine coolie women’s beauty, marking it as prohibited. Moreover, they serve as a warning against sexual contact and métissage between the black and Indian populations, keeping the two ethnic groups firmly apart. Critiquing Martinican Society: the Ethnoclass Hierarchy and Politics In Confiant’s récits d’enfance, ethnicity is a decisive factor in the formation of Caribbean social hierarchies, and can bestow or deny power. This becomes particularly evident in the depiction of political struggles. Raphaël’s chabin identity serves as a lens through which he views the external world. In Ravines, just as it alters the way others treat him, it also modifies the way in which he views the béké Paul-Marie de Cassagnac. De Cassagnac is a recurring character in Confiant’s œuvre, and also features in Eau de café. In Ravines, he is presented as an inured racist. He persists in addressing Papa Loulou as ‘la couleur’ (p. 123) and decides to send his children to university in the United States rather than France, ‘pour qu’ils apprennent comment dompter la négraille’ (p. 120). However, Raphaël’s skin hue means he is able to view De Cassagnac without racial discomfort: ‘sa peau blanche ne t’impressionne pas car elle ne l’est pas plus que la tienne’ (p. 121). De Cassagnac is described as ‘le Blanc créole, l’Ange dépeigné des Anges dépeignés’ (p. 122). The phrase is borrowed from Saint-John Perse and indicates colonial privilege, being originally used by the Guadeloupean poet to describe his father’s friends, who were the white colonial elite. 32 The name De Cassagnac is particularly significant. A Gascon surname, it originates from the French region now known as the department of the Gers. It was a tradition of Gascon nobles to send their younger, often penniless, sons away to seek their fortune, as represented in several classic works of literature from the nineteenth century, including Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) by Alexandre Dumas and Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand. Ravines contains an oblique reference to this tradition, as the narrator recalls hearing ‘les aventures de d’Artagnan que l’instituteur nous lit à l’ombre du manguier-bassignac’ (p. 129). The character of Paul-Marie de Cassagnac is unquestionably linked with an identifiable historical model: Paul-Adolphe-Marie-Prosper Granier de Cassagnac was born in 1843 in Guadeloupe into a colonial

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family, although from early infancy he was raised in metropolitan France. His father, Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, was a belligerent colonial figure born in 1806 in the Gers. Granier de Cassagnac senior was a vociferous supporter of the pro-slavery lobby, and his views elicited pointed criticism from André Cochut during the struggle for abolition. 33 In Ravines, Confiant takes great pleasure in ridiculing the De Cassagnac family, and in the chapter ‘Anges depeignés’ they are duped into giving their fortune to a conman who poses as a future son-in-law, before absconding with his dowry. De Cassagnac’s children represent the terrible legacy of the ethnoclass hierarchy for the white béké population. His daughter, Virginie, is never seen because she is mentally handicapped, the result of a series of intermarriages designed to keep the family fortune intact. His son, Joseph-Charles de Cassagnac, squanders money on gaming and cock-fights and abuses his position as a béké in ways which replicate the sexual violence of plantation slavery: ‘[il était] chef dévirgineur de négrillonnes, en toute impunité’ (p. 126). The De Cassagnacs, however, are not the only white family in Ravines. Renaud de Valminier has lost his family fortune and as a consequence he is accepted by black society, having descended in the ethnoclass system to the rank of béké-goyave. White power is intrinsically linked with wealth, the loss of which can invert the ethnoclass hierarchy, and so De Valminier actually transcends ethnic groups: ‘Renaud de Valminier est beaucoup plus gentil depuis que monsieur est devenu un nègre’ (p. 120). The inclusion of De Valminier’s story at the beginning of the chapter ‘Anges dépeignés’ explains De Cassagnac’s anxiety to marry his daughter to a wealthy man and thus secure his family’s fortune. If the rural setting of Macédoine initially seems an unlikely locus of politics, political aspects are nonetheless convincingly woven into Ravines. When Confiant was growing up in the 1950s, communism was on the rise in Martinique. In 1945 Césaire was elected as maire of Fort-de-France after joining the Communist Party, although in 1958 he left to form his own political movement, the Parti progressiste martiniquais. In Ravines, the Sorbonne graduate Firmin Léandor incites black workers to go on strike: ‘il leur tenait des plaidoiries sur l’injustice des békés, sur la voracité de De Cassagnac, sur la race noire qui doit se remettre debout sur ses pieds et prendre son avenir en main, et tout un bataclan de paroles révolutionnaires, oui. Monsieur est un communisse’ (p. 56). Like De Cassagnac, Léandor is a recurring figure in Confiant’s œuvre, also appearing as the hero of the novel Commandeur du Sucre. 34 The villagers regard Léandor with scepticism rather than hailing him

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as a local hero and future Martinican leader, an attitude summed up by Raphaël’s Aunt Emérante: ‘Communisse! Ils croient qu’ils vont bouleverser le monde et mettre le Nègre en haut et le Blanc en bas. Ils rêvent, pauvres bougres. C’est comme s’ils voulaient faire le soleil éclairer la nuit et la lune éclairer le plein jour’ (p. 60). Léandor’s political activity ends in tragic failure, proving an abortive attempt to achieve greater Martinican independence. In the penultimate chapter of Ravines, ‘Décembre ‘59’, racial divisions are brought to the fore. The chapter is set during the Christmas riots which took place in Fort-de-France in 1959. Raphaël is now living in the Martinican capital with his parents. When the whole town is under a quasi-curfew, he is sent on an errand by his mother and observes the damage caused in Fort-de-France. 35 The only other figure in the deserted streets is a man described as ‘solitaire et dérisoire’, a ‘grand nègre’ whose words ring out unheard into the empty streets: ‘[il] hurle en créole: “Nègres de la Martinique, debout! L’esclavage a été soi-disant aboli en 1848 mais ce sont toujours les Blancs qui nous gouvernent”’ (p. 237). In Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (which appeared in 1993, the same year as Ravines), 36 Confiant provides a more journalistic account of the 1959 riots, which were triggered when a Martinican’s moped was knocked over by a metropolitan French driver. The heavyhanded intervention of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (the French riot police) exacerbated the situation. This is reflected in Ravines when Raphaël is scared by ‘une grappe de CRS rouges de sueur qui trottinent, fusil prêt à tirer au jugé’ (p. 237). The riots escalated into three nights of widespread violence in the centre of Fort-de-France and resulted in three deaths. In Aimé Césaire, Confiant reads the events as an example of Césaire’s political shortcomings, quoting ironically from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: En décembre 1959, au cours de ce Noël brisé […] ce sont ‘ceux qui n’ont pas de bouche’ qui se sont levés, qui se sont battus et qui ont chèrement payé leur audace. ‘La voix de ceux qui n’ont pas de bouche’, elle, s’est tue puis a apporté des paroles d’apaisement sans jamais prendre en charge la juste colère du peuple. 37

Confiant further explores the riots in the novel L’Allée des soupirs, 38 which presents the December uprisings as ‘what now seems the last occasion for Martinique to have chosen autonomy over assimilation’. 39 In Ravines, the chapter ‘Décembre ‘59’ intertwines three historical events: the Fort-de-France riots, the war France was waging in Algeria

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and the upheaval in the Greater Antilles in Cuba, where Fidel Castro led a communist revolution in 1959. Pan-Caribbean politics are foregrounded when Raphaël becomes concerned that the riots in Fort-de-France are part of a plot by Castro to invade Martinique, while the wider French colonial context is evoked by the Algerian war. When his landlady’s son is killed in Algeria, the old lady’s despair is miraculously healed by the visit of ‘un gradé blanc’. She repeats the official’s explanation like a mantra: ‘Il est mort à l’honneur, les armes à la main et au service de notre mère la France’ (p. 239), an ironic indication of her cultural indoctrination. Subsequently, in the children’s games, a ‘baddie’ ceases to be called a ‘nègre-marron’ and becomes a ‘fellagha’, the term used to refer to armed Algerian nationalists from 1954 (p. 240). Reference to Martinique’s status as French ‘depuis l’an de grâce 1635, c’est-à-dire bien avant Nice, la Savoie et bien entendu la Corse’ (p. 242) ironically conveys the Martinicans’ conviction that, given their status as les vieilles colonies, their ties to France are particularly strong (in contrast, Algeria was colonized only in 1830). Martinican attachment to France emerges as a political tool with which the French can exploit Martinican manpower in the military, while simultaneously denying equal civil rights and, through the békés, continuing to maintain power structures reminiscent of those under slavery. Conclusion Confiant’s presentation of his Antillean childhood highlights the everyday prejudices and racism encountered between ethnic groupings in the Antilles, which he illustrates by focusing on his marginalized status as a chabin. The figure of the coolie is another symbol of otherness within the Caribbean population, and Confiant’s post-1990 text homes in on aspects of internal Antillean racism which are upheld and ‘rationalized’ by the ethnoclass hierarchy, and which had first been discussed several decades earlier by Virassamy. Ravines explores the historical origins of racist divisions with greater attention to racial typecasting within the ethnoclass hierarchy than in any other récit d’enfance. The transition between childhood and adulthood causes a fracture in the child’s identity, as at school Creole values are replaced by French culture. Exposure to this system results in Raphaël adopting a quintessentially French manner of thinking, as the text’s close emphasizes: ‘simplement, à l’aube de tes neuf ans, tu as commencé à te dire: “c’est

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lundi, j’aurai un devoir d’arithmétique” ou “Faites que vendredi soit là pour que manman ne me fasse pas réciter mes leçons”’ (p. 251). These sentiments are bound up with the ethnoclass hierarchy – whereas for Sonson and the other négrillons at school, the transition will not be as marked, the bourgeois chabin is expected to embrace French culture and dismiss Creole elements as infantile, an expendable component of childhood. The paradox of créolité, as found in Confiant’s récits d’enfance, is that the desire to represent and unite Creole populations in all their diversity is inevitably accompanied by an assertion of the racial tensions and divisions which continue to structure this society. Disturbingly, the discussion of métissage does not so much look to the post-colonial future as serve to underscore – in ways which often prove uncomfortable – the colonial past.

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chapter four

Alienation and Estrangement in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer Alienation and Estrangement

From the publication of her first novel Hérémakhonon in 1976,1 critics have sought to establish autobiographical ties between Maryse Condé’s life and her fictional works. 2 Attempts to draw the Guadeloupean author to comment on such ties recur throughout her substantial body of published interviews, and Françoise Pfaff’s opening question in Entretiens avec Maryse Condé homes in on childhood: ‘Vue de façon positive et négative, l’enfance est un thème important dans tes œuvres. Est-ce que tu peux nous parler de ton enfance en Guadeloupe?’ At this, Condé protests that her childhood ‘n’était pas intéressant du tout’. 3 Nonetheless, in 1999, over two decades after Hérémakhonon appeared, Condé’s decision to focus on childhood in Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: contes vrais de mon enfance demonstrates that her early years do indeed provide rich material for literary exploration. The critic Leah Hewitt has suggested that Le Cœur and Hérémakhonon depict different stages in Condé’s life: D’une certaine façon, on pourrait imaginer Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer comme une introduction tardive à Hérémakhonon qui évoquait déjà certains détails exemplaires sur l’identité antillaise. Le personnage autobiographique de ce récent ouvrage, Maryse Boucolon (nom de jeune fille de Condé) est la version en plus jeune de Véronica, l’intellectuelle guadeloupéenne aliénée. De longs passages d’Hérémakhonon incluaient des souvenirs d’enfance de Véronica très semblables à ceux de Maryse.4

The author has long endured questions about links between her fiction and her life. By fictionalizing a series of autobiographical events in Le

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Cœur, Condé responds to her critics through her medium of choice, moving their speculative attempts at dissecting her past firmly back into the literary domain. Le Cœur was published when Condé was in her sixties, making her the oldest author of a récit d’enfance to be considered in this study. She was born in Guadeloupe in 1934, although the text does not include this information and provides few precise temporal indicators throughout. 5 The text is characterized by a succinct, measured prose style which, despite comic interludes, tends towards melancholia. Although the possessive article in the subtitle contes vrais de mon enfance appears to forge an authoritative link between author and text, Le Cœur is nonetheless characterized by a questioning, searching tone. The distance between the mature author and her child protagonist is foregrounded from the opening lines, and Condé’s childhood is recounted from an adult vantage point, with her adult narrator repeatedly intervening to pass comment on events. More than any other récit d’enfance, the text fulfils Lejeune’s autobiographical pact due to the clear identification of author, narrator and protagonist and a predominantly retrospective tone. Yet the device of hindsight is often used to draw attention to inconsistencies and ambiguities, rather than functioning as a method of clarification. Le Cœur also differs from earlier récits d’enfance by créoliste authors Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, who argue for a revalorization of Creole culture in the face of French linguistic and cultural domination. For them, Creole is intimately connected with the child’s domain, and then usurped by French upon the child’s entry into the adult world at school. In contrast, Condé presents a different Creole childhood, in which Creole language and culture are relegated to a secondary role. Instead, the text focuses on the paradoxes and contradictions that Condé’s child surrogate, Maryse, encounters as she struggles to develop her own identity. The conte vrai The idiosyncratic subtitle, contes vrais de mon enfance, ensures that an enigmatic tone prevails.6 Condé eschews traditional autobiographical forms by labelling her work as contes vrais (‘true tales’), an oxymoron which strikes a subtly different tone than the term ‘chapters’. This subtitle signals a certain slippage between fact and fiction which is

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exploited throughout the text. The narrative is divided into 17 short contes, and in interview the author explains this structure as follows: Quand j’ai décidé de parler de mon enfance, les scènes sont venues comme cela. Je crois que ce n’est pas vrai de dire qu’on se rappelle toute sa vie. Cela m’étonne toujours, les gens qui écrivent leur autobiographie et prétendent se souvenir de tout. Les choses se suivent d’une manière ordonnée. A mon avis, il y a seulement les flashes des moments qui vous ont marquée, et que vous retenez.7

The final lines of each conte break down any notion of definite endings; they are thought-provoking and raise further questions rather than authoritatively closing the debate, suggesting that the author herself still turns these formative episodes over in her mind. These are not didactic, firm conclusions, but lessons of experience and increased awareness, which highlight the perplexing complexities Maryse perceives in bourgeois Guadeloupean society in the 1930s and 1940s. Structurally, the gaps between each conte leave ample space for reflection, and the reader is left to make their own connections between different episodes of the narrative. The first conte, ‘Portrait de famille’, provides a general exposition of the Boucolon family. The setting, Paris, immediately reveals that Condé’s childhood was not static, and the cultural influence of la ville lumière radiates throughout the collection. As civil servants, her parents were entitled to regular visits to metropolitan France, meaning that from an early age Maryse was raised between Guadeloupe and Paris. The family’s visits to Paris were interrupted by the Second World War, and resumed ‘dès le mitan de l’année 1946’ (p. 11). The tales then move chronologically through Condé’s childhood, from ‘Ma naissance’ to ‘Olnel ou la vraie vie’, this final conte recording her transition from the later stages of childhood into adolescence. Each tale marks a step in the child’s development as she navigates the perilous adult world. Condé refers to herself as ‘je’ throughout, rather than differentiating between child and adult selves, in a pronounced difference from récits d’enfance by Chamoiseau and Confiant. In addition, Condé’s predilection for the past historic also sets her narrative apart, conveying the impression of distance and authority over the narrative, in a manner reminiscent of Barthes’ comments that the tense creates order and logic: ‘un monde construit, élaboré, détaché, réduit à des lignes significatives’.8 In Le Cœur, while the adult narrator does develop the ‘lignes significatives’ of her childhood into an ordered account of formative moments,

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she nonetheless repeatedly draws attention to ambiguities, and still continues to be perplexed by events. Le Cœur intertwines objective personal history with narrative embellishment. By packaging the narrative as contes vrais, Condé offers a conspiratorial wink to the reader, who subsequently becomes receptive to the blurring of fact and fiction. The epigraph, a quotation from Proust, supplies a further clue: ‘Ce que l’intelligence nous rend sous le nom du passé n’est pas lui.’ This paratextual information draws attention to the fallibility of memory, and positions Le Cœur in a reverential relationship to Proust, the most celebrated twentieth-century French explorer of childhood. The quotation comes from the preface to Proust’s collection of literary essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve, which attacks the critic Sainte-Beuve for his determination to closely associate texts with their author’s biography.9 The reader of Le Cœur must spot the early caveats of the subtitle and epigraph to realize that, despite the text’s prevailingly solemn tone, it makes no claims to complete accuracy or honesty. Condé’s 1989 interview with Vèvè Clark constitutes an important reference for the consideration of boundaries between reality and fiction in Le Cœur.10 In the first section of this interview, Condé discusses her childhood, providing factual information which differs from that published in her récit d’enfance. In the interview, Maryse’s siblings from her father’s second marriage to her mother, Jeanne, are named as Ena, Jeanne, Gillette, Auguste, Jean, René and finally Guy, who was eleven years older than her, and who died at a young age.11 In contrast, in Le Cœur, her siblings have completely different names. The sisters who feature in the narrative are called Thérèse and Emilia, while Guy is recognizable in the character of Alexandre, Maryse’s beloved brother who dies of leukaemia. Armed with this information, the reader is immediately alerted to Condé’s deliberate manipulation of the truth in Le Cœur. Fact is, however, sometimes stranger than fiction: in ‘The bluest eye’ and ‘Paradis perdu’, Condé explains that her parents lived in the rue Condé in Pointe-à-Pitre, before moving to a bigger house after her birth. This detail, which would appear to be a fictitious addition, signposting her future route to marriage with Guinean Amadou Condé and her subsequent fame using his surname, is in fact true, a remarkable coincidence when read against Condé’s later life.

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Est-ce cela être ‘aliéné’? Le Cœur depicts Maryse’s dawning realization that the world of her bourgeois Guadeloupean family is calqued on European models, and the text presents her subsequent attempts at rebellion. As Maryse navigates the mores of Antillean society, she becomes a vehicle for the articulation of political and cultural tensions within the Caribbean. The narrator unfurls a web of intersecting and conflicting European and African influences, including the stigma of the colonial past and slavery, which come to bear on Guadeloupean society and which influence the formation of her own identity. At the time of Le Cœur’s publication, Chamoiseau, Confiant and Gisèle Pineau had all written récits d’enfance in which the clash between Creole culture and French hegemony was foregrounded. In their texts, each child protagonist displays a deep connection with Creole folklore and language. In Le Cœur, Maryse’s bourgeois upbringing means that she does not feel this deep connection to Creole culture. Instead, her text concentrates on the psychological consequences of the mission civilisatrice. In interview, Condé has commented on the difference between herself and other Antillean writers: Il est très difficile que je sois entièrement pareille à eux [les Créolistes], parce que mon histoire individuelle est très différente. Mes parents étaient des gens qui étaient très – peut-être trop – francophiles, et qui m’ont coupée de la réalité profonde du pays, ce qui veut dire que je n’ai jamais eu le sens de la collectivité, de l’importance de la langue créole, de l’origine commune qui font que les auteurs antillais – guadeloupéens, martiniquais – ont tendance à parler d’un ‘nous’ collectif. J’ai toujours été une personne un peu à part. Je pense néanmoins que, malgré toutes ces différences, nous disons tous la même chose. La force et la résistance de notre culture qui, malgré l’esclavage et la colonisation, arrive à s’opposer à l’assimilation.12

The notion of being ‘coupée de la réalité profonde du pays’ explains Condé’s distance from the créolité movement. The author’s rejection of the rigid cultural model of créolité is well documented and led to the publication of her response to the créoliste authors: Penser la Créolité, co-edited with Madeleine Cottenet-Hage.13 Condé’s stance is also epitomized by her comment, ‘are we condemned ad vitam aeternam to speak of vegetable markets, storytellers, “dorlis”, “koutem” …? Are we condemned to explore to saturation the resources of our narrow land? We live in a world where, already, frontiers have ceased to exist.’14 The author is acutely aware that life in Guadeloupe cannot

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be summed up by one all-encompassing model of identity, and that her childhood experience, although different to that of the créolistes, is no less authentic. The opening conte, ‘Portrait de famille’, immediately establishes the clash of cultures inherent in Maryse’s upbringing, to which the critic Erica L. Johnson has drawn attention by analysing Condé’s childhood through the lens of diaspora. Johnson comments that the text is a transatlantic affair in which Guadeloupe and France are posed in constant contrast to one another, and Condé’s theme of resistance, personified in the rebellious child, enables her to interrogate the colonial dialectics that seem to define her parents’ preference for all things French over life in Guadeloupe.15

‘Portrait de famille’ exposes a certain metropolitan French ignorance of overseas territories by drawing attention to the incongruity of a black French family in post-war Paris. Condé introduces the idea of nationality through the concept of language, and the surprised words of Parisian café waiters hang accusingly in the first pages: ‘Que vous parlez bien le français!’ (p. 15). In this early episode, the narrator holds up to ridicule the notion of égalité et fraternité among all French citizens: the waiters’ attitudes demonstrate that, in post-war France, black skin was regarded as incongruous with French nationality. In relating the café scene, Condé challenges a set of metropolitan French preconceived values which steadfastly equate nation with racial and cultural homogeneity, and by challenging this assumption the scene stages a postcolonial attempt to decentre nation through the articulation of heterogeneity. Her parents do stand up for themselves, yet their answer is frustratingly impotent: – Pourtant, nous sommes aussi français qu’eux, soupirait mon père. – Plus français, renchérissait ma mère avec violence. Elle ajoutait en guise d’explication: Nous sommes plus instruits. Nous avons de meilleures manières. Nous lisons davantage. Certains d’entre eux n’ont jamais quitté Paris alors que nous connaissons le Mont-Saint-Michel, la Côte d’Azur et la Côte basque. (p. 13)

The parental response is not uttered directly to the waiters, but held back and spoken only to the family’s children, drawing them into a complicity which supposes that openly ‘answering back’ would not be welcome. This reinforces the very notion of a divide between two different groups of French citizens. Their actions covertly reaffirm the waiters’ reactions, emphasizing, not dissipating, difference:

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Il y avait dans cet échange un pathétique qui, toute petite que j’étais, me navrait. C’est d’une grave injustice qu’ils se plaignaient. Sans raison, les rôles s’inversaient. Les ramasseurs de pourboires en gilet noir et tablier blanc se hissaient au-dessus de leurs généreux clients. Ils possédaient tout naturellement cette identité française qui, malgré leur bonne mine, était niée, refusée à mes parents. Et moi, je ne comprenais pas en vertu de quoi ces gens orgueilleux, contents d’eux-mêmes, notables dans leur pays, rivalisaient avec les garçons qui les servaient. (p. 13)

The narrator draws attention to the fact that, even as a child, she recognized that her parents’ feeble response was a particularly weak strategy of resistance. In this opening conte, it becomes apparent that Maryse’s position as the youngest child in a large family also has a strong influence on her personal development, and heightens her feelings of difference and isolation. Distanced from her eldest siblings by an age gap of over two decades, Maryse is closest to her brother Alexandre, who is vividly portrayed as the male counterpart Maryse wishes to emulate. Alexandre exhibits the same inquisitive nature and youthful exuberance: ‘mon frère Alexandre qui s’était lui-même rebaptisé Sandrino “pour faire plus américain”’ (p. 13). Significantly, Condé’s introduction to her favourite brother highlights his attempts to (re)define identity, and is the first of several moments in the text which suggest that identity is a malleable commodity. Through Sandrino, Maryse comes to question the values promoted by her family. He is the first to mock his mother’s decision to pin up a photo from the American magazine Ebony: ‘On y admirait une famille noire américaine de huit enfants comme la nôtre. Tous médecins, avocats, ingénieurs, architectes. Bref, la gloire de leurs parents’ (p. 15). Ebony was launched in 1945, and in an article published in its twentiethanniversary issue in 1965, Langston Hughes praised the magazine for its ambition to present ‘the positive side of Negro achievement’. Defending Ebony against claims that it glossed over serious social realities, Hughes went on to argue for the ‘need in Negro lives to see themselves pictured beautifully, to view on the printed page something other than slums’.16 As Condé demonstrates, the magazine’s cultural influence radiated beyond the United States. Yet the photo is not linked with French culture in any way; if Ebony offers a photographic template for success, it is relevant in the framework of the black diaspora, but goes no way towards reconciling black skin colour with French identity. Condé’s parents consider all those who do not compare favourably

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with the Ebony photograph as being unworthy of their company. They are fiercely proud of their status as members of the Race de GrandsNègres (p. 17), an elite group which is the antithesis of the petits-nègres, the social class from which both parents had escaped through success in the French education system. It falls to the outspoken Sandrino to undermine his parents’ bourgeois aspirations, as is evident in his reaction to the photograph: ‘Cette photo inspirait les pires railleries à Sandrino qui […] jurait qu’il deviendrait un écrivain célèbre’ (p. 15). Sandrino rejects bourgeois templates; for him, becoming an author promises individual fulfilment and thwarts his parents’ expectations that he will follow a stable professional career. This is just one instance of dramatic irony in the narrative, which plays on the tension between the child Maryse and the successful adult writer she would become. From the outset, writing conveys a sense of rebellion, and Maryse’s early attempts at writing cause further familial problems in the contes ‘Yvelise’ and ‘Bonne fête, Maman’ (discussed below, and in Chapter 7). In Le Cœur, the more the narrator’s parents cultivate their bourgeois French identity, the more she senses a discrepancy in their behaviour. While Maryse is embarrassed to notice that her mother wears tights that are ‘deux tons trop clairs’ (p. 15), she is unable to articulate why she feels uneasy. It is Sandrino who begins to identify the cause of her discomfort, and to help her make sense of her world, sealing his importance in the text. He provides the narrative’s major refrain: ‘Papa et maman sont une paire d’aliénés’ (p. 14), which equips Maryse with the terminology she requires to decipher her parents’ behaviour. This key comment is rather abruptly introduced, in amongst descriptive detail of the family’s living arrangements in Paris. It appears to be an answer to questions formulated by Maryse in a previous paragraph, when she decides to ask Sandrino whether he ‘comprenait quelque chose au comportement de nos parents? Pourquoi enviaient-ils si fort des gens qui de leur propre aveu ne leur arrivaient pas à la cheville?’ (p. 14). These questions are not included as direct speech, but are presented as Maryse’s personal musings, a kind of interior monologue. Her actual moment of questioning goes unrecorded, meaning that Sandrino’s answer strikes the reader with its unexpectedness and runs as a leitmotif through the text. Half-way through the first conte, Maryse concocts a childish definition of alienation: ‘une personne aliénée est une personne qui cherche à être ce qu’elle ne peut pas être parce qu’elle n’aime pas être ce qu’elle est’ (p. 16). Although clumsy, it sums up her parents’ determined avoidance of any sustained debate on the different aspects of their identity. In Le

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Robert, the second definition of ‘aliénation’ is ‘trouble mental, passager ou permanent, qui rend l’individu comme étranger à lui-même et à la société où il est incapable de mener une vie sociale normale’. The term’s medical connections to alienism, an early form of what is now known as psychiatry, suggest the psychological exploration at the heart of Le Cœur. At the close of ‘Portrait de famille’, Condé returns to the same question, presenting a challenge to her adult self and to readers of the text: Mes parents étaient-ils des aliénés? Sûr et certain, ils n’éprouvaient aucun orgueil de leur héritage africain. Ils l’ignoraient. C’est un fait! […] En même temps, ni l’un ni l’autre n’éprouvaient le moindre sentiment d’infériorité à cause de leur couleur. Ils se croyaient les plus brillants, les plus intelligents, la preuve par neuf de l’avancement de leur Race de Grands-Nègres. Est-ce cela être ‘aliéné’? (p. 17)

The narrative presents her parents’ behaviour in neutral or ironic tones, without passing overt judgement, and the rhetorical closing formula indicates that this question is a challenge running through the text. This discussion of the family and the extended meditation on the themes of alienation and estrangement invite comparison with Fanon. In ‘Le Nègre et la psychopathologie’, chapter 6 of Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon argues that there is a disjunction between societal and family authority in the Antilles, a disjunction that Condé’s café scene would appear to stage. Maryse is socialized by metropolitan society in a manner which conflicts with parental authority, and while her parents’ aspirational goals appear positive, their position is ultimately undermined by the fact that their identity relies on the sustained repression of their Creole origins. This is reminiscent of Fanon’s insistence that the clash between Europe and the Antilles leads to a racially aware inferiority complex: On a vite dit: le nègre s’infériorise. La vérité est qu’on l’infériorise. Le jeune Antillais est un Français appelé à vivre avec des compatriotes blancs. Or la famille antillaise n’entretient pratiquement aucun rapport avec la structure nationale, c’est-à-dire française, européenne. L’Antillais doit alors choisir entre sa famille et la société européenne; autrement dit, l’individu qui monte vers la société – la Blanche, la civilisée – tend à rejeter la famille – la Noire, la sauvage – sur le plan de l’imaginaire.17

The narrator claims that her parents did not for one moment feel inferior because of their colour. The couple protest their Frenchness too much, however, thereby accentuating the very difference they aim to deny.

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Maryse’s situation is actually a permutation of Fanon’s model. Her parents underwent a process of dissociation from Creole culture and over-association with French, and consequently her family did resemble the European French family model. This cultural realignment and social success might have spared the second generation, Maryse and her siblings, the discomfort Fanon describes. Nonetheless, despite the fact that her parental socialization in La Pointe instils in her a firm belief in her own ability and a certain social superiority, contact with both white Parisian society and Creole Guadeloupean society still troubles, and undermines, this carefully constructed parental authority. The Intelligence not to Question: the Scene of Recognition In Le Cœur, the scene of recognition occurs in the fifth conte in the collection, ‘Leçon d’histoire’, and is catalysed by a childish game of role play. This game is an example of an extended tableau in which Maryse’s identity is dictated by another person, with painful results. At the conte’s opening, Maryse wishes her parents were from a lower social class, in a reversal of a Freudian Family Romance.18 In Freud, the child fantasizes about having parents of higher social status, whereas Maryse wishes simply to be ‘la fille de gens ordinaires, anonymes’ (p. 41). Her parents’ constructed image as paradigms of bourgeois behaviour is oppressive and isolates her from the local Creole community. This isolation explains why, during an evening stroll with her parents, Maryse is delighted to meet another girl of her age, the white Creole child Anne-Marie de Surville. Anne-Marie addresses Maryse in Creole and does not shy away from using even the most crude Creole profanities. Whereas Maryse’s parents consider it socially unacceptable for Maryse to speak Creole, white Guadeloupeans, automatically superior in the ethnoclass hierarchy, do not appear to have been affected by such complexes; Anne-Marie may also have been socially conditioned to address black people in Creole. In the course of their games, Maryse finds herself re-enacting the role of a slave girl in the service of a capricious and violent béké mistress. Unusually, headstrong Maryse allows herself to be demeaned by Anne-Marie: ‘Je fus la mauvaise élève et elle me tira les cheveux. […] Je fus le cheval. Elle monta sur mon dos et elle me bourra les côtes de coups de pied. Je fus la bonne et elle me souffleta’ (p. 42). When Maryse remonstrates, Anne-Marie attempts to justify her abusive behaviour in

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a racist statement which is dressed up as a logical fact: ‘je dois te donner des coups parce que tu es une négresse’ (p. 42). Maryse is tormented by Anne-Marie’s pseudo-explanation for her cruelty, and one night before bedtime, she asks her mother, ‘Pourquoi doit-on donner des coups aux nègres?’ (p. 43). Jeanne’s dumbstruck reaction is portrayed as physical revulsion: ‘[elle] sembla estomaquée’ (p. 43). She can only respond with further rhetorical questions. She admonishes her daughter, saying ‘comment une petite fille aussi intelligente que toi peut-elle poser pareilles questions?’ (p. 43). With this, she rapidly exits the bedroom. The next morning, Maryse summons up the courage to ask her mother again, and on this occasion she receives a deft tap from her mother ‘avec le dos du peigne’ (p. 43). Jeanne then abruptly ends the conversation: ‘enfin, cesse de raconter des bêtises. Est-ce que tu vois quelqu’un donner des coups à ton papa ou à moi?’ (p. 43). These maternal responses indicate that Maryse’s line of questioning is inappropriate. Jeanne flatters Maryse by reminding her of her intelligence, but paradoxically – and disturbingly – teaches her daughter to equate unquestioning, silent acceptance with intelligence. Exasperated, Maryse resorts to asking her father, yet he, too, responds to her question with a further question: ‘Qu’est-ce que tu racontes? On nous donnait des coups dans le temps. Va trouver ta maman, veux-tu?’ (p. 44). These three, vague, loaded words, ‘dans le temps’, constitute the only explanation her parents are prepared to offer about the past. This parental discomfort arouses Maryse’s curiosity, and she becomes convinced that she has hit on something which could explain the discrepancies she has sensed in her parents’ behaviour: ‘Je sentais que la réponse fournirait la clé à l’édifice souvent mystérieux de mon monde. La vérité sortirait de la jarre où on la tenait enfermée’ (p. 43). In order to answer Maryse’s questions, of course, an answer is required which explains the slave past in Guadeloupe – an answer her parents are determined to avoid at all costs. Le Cœur is remarkable for its direct, poignant approach to the intergenerational Antillean silence surrounding the slave past. The narrator exposes the fact that her parents’ status as members of the Race de Grands-Nègres is contingent on such silences, and the scene of recognition is a pivotal moment at which Maryse becomes aware of the fragile boundaries of her bourgeois world. In Le Discours antillais, Glissant identifies a similar historical malaise regarding the slave past, and describes the temporal rupture and discomfort it occasions: ‘Le passé, notre passé subi, qui n’est pas encore histoire pour nous, est pourtant là (ici) qui nous lancine.’19

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Anne-Marie can be read as a kind of crossroads for past and present (in the Antilles, the carrefour is also a place where spirits can be contacted). She is an unknown figure who surges up, embodying ‘le passé […] qui nous lancine’, and the conte includes shades of the spectral, particularly at its conclusion. 20 Firstly, there is the complete disappearance of Anne-Marie and her relatives, and then in the final lines, the adult narrator uses terms which suggest a haunting, connecting the event to a residual cultural trauma that has not yet been addressed by the Antillean population: Aujourd’hui, je me demande si cette rencontre ne fut pas surnaturelle. Puisque tant de vieilles haines, de vieilles peurs jamais liquidées demeurent ensevelies dans la terre de nos pays, je me demande si Anne-Marie et moi, nous n’avons pas été, l’espace de nos prétendus jeux, les réincarnations miniatures d’une maîtresse et de son esclave souffre-douleur. (p. 44)

This uncanny encounter with the slave past is beyond the bounds of Maryse’s comprehension, and torments her present. Her parents’ policy of silence – symptomatic of social attitudes at large – leaves her ill-equipped to deal with the questions, emotion and anguish that Anne-Marie provokes. Jacques Derrida suggested that marginal spectral elements remain in the public consciousness as a sub-stratum of society, finding expression in supernatural manifestations or silhouettes of the spectral. For Derrida, the ghost not only represents the past, but also projects into the future: Au fond, le spectre, c’est l’avenir, il est toujours à venir, il ne se présente que comme ce qui pourrait venir ou re-venir […] Quelle est exactement la différence entre un monde passé – quand le spectre y représentait une menace à venir – et un monde présent, aujourd’hui où le spectre représenterait une menace que certains voudraient croire passée …21

Prolonged denial leaves future generations of Antilleans ill-equipped to deal with unexpected, distressing ghosts from the past, which continue to haunt their individual and collective future. Furthermore, in Le Cœur, the implication is that this ‘ignorance’ is self-conscious denial, an ‘édifice’ (p. 43) masking an inherent knowledge of the truth. Maryse’s parents’ resolute avoidance of any discussion of the slave past renders her introduction to it all the more distressing. This is underscored by the conte’s title, which is rich in irony: the encounter with Anne-Marie is the antithesis of a planned didactic lesson and takes place outside any classroom, occurring around the famous Place de la Victoire in the centre of Pointe-à-Pitre. Despite attempts to avoid and

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suppress the slave past, this history will inevitably surge up when it is least expected. The act of writing these past fears and hatreds transports them from the periphery to the forefront of society, creating a literary space, the scene of recognition, where Antilleans – and readers from beyond the Antilles – can confront the events of the past. In her role as founding president of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, Condé has explicitly equated her politics with her literature, and an article she published in L’Humanité in 2006, ‘Parce que tu es une négresse’, takes as its title a direct quotation from Le Cœur; it is the exact phrase uttered by Anne-Marie. In the article, Condé refers to her récit d’enfance and focuses on the scene of recognition in order to emphasize the importance of open discussion about the colonial past: Dans mon livre de souvenirs d’enfance intitulé Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, j’ai raconté comment pour la première fois j’ai découvert l’existence de l’esclavage dont mes parents ne me parlaient jamais. Je jouais sur la place de la Victoire avec une petite béké en cachette de nos parents qui se seraient opposés à cette rencontre. Elle m’injuriait, me frappait, me brutalisait en répétant: ‘Je dois te donner des coups parce que tu es une négresse.’ L’illogisme de l’affirmation me confondit. Quelle absurde relation existait-il entre le fait d’être noir et celui de recevoir des brimades? J’interrogeais mes parents, mais je ne pus en recevoir aucune réponse, aucune explication. Ils manifestèrent un embarras qui me troubla. Il me fallut attendre des années pour découvrir que l’homme noir, la femme noire avaient été traités pendant des siècles comme des bêtes de somme. Le fait n’est pas exceptionnel. Si l’esclavage est présent dans la sociologie, la psychologie antillaise, le sujet reste un tabou, enseveli dans la honte et le sentiment de culpabilité […] Voilà pourquoi je suis heureuse et fière de participer aux travaux du Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, dont une des tâches principales consiste à restituer à l’ensemble de la nation française non seulement le souvenir des souffrances qu’a endurées le peuple noir, mais qui permettra à chacun de connaître la place et l’importance de l’esclavage dans le développement des sociétés. Ce n’est pas un geste passéiste, il augure au contraire d’un avenir plus juste et plus tolérant entre tous les citoyens qui composent la France plurielle d’aujourd’hui. 22

The measured tones in which Condé sets out her political convictions testify to her belief in the positive consequences of a collective prise de conscience. The dialogue catalysed by the scene of recognition is not framed as a vindictive or accusatory process: it is the first step in a coming to terms with the past. Le Cœur raises many difficult

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questions, but leaves scant space for recrimination, creating a dignified and informative enquiry into the personal and historic past. Intertextuality and the Politicization of Perception The entire collection of contes pushes at the boundaries of Maryse’s bourgeois world. Important devices in this exploration are intertextuality and the politicization of perception, which are both used to expose the rigid confines of black bourgeois life. Condé’s use of intertextuality subtly corrodes Le Cœur’s mimetic sheen, drawing attention to the artifice which must necessarily be present in a work of literature. In Condé’s works, intertextuality often goes unexplained, and ‘without its discovery and decrypting, therefore, the semantic charge of the intertextual moment remains inactivated, resulting in a problematic deficit of meaning in the text’. 23 The reader will need to actively choose to unlock the meanings of intertextual moments, which forge links to other literatures and confirm the author’s position as an avid reader. The seventh conte, ‘The bluest eye’, exemplifies these intertextual references at their most pronounced. The title alludes to The Bluest Eye (1970), 24 the first novel by African American author Toni Morrison. Like Le Cœur, the novel deals with the clash between black aspirations and a society dominated by white culture (it also explores a far darker vision of childhood and sexuality by raising the theme of incest). Morrison’s black child heroine longs for blue eyes, so that she might correspond with American concepts of beauty, and in Le Cœur, blue eyes are also equated with beauty. Condé’s conte recounts the innocent flirtation between Maryse and her neighbour, a mulatto boy named Gilbert. The tale commences in a humorous manner, as the narrator describes the first love-letter she received from Gilbert, which was a scribbled note on the back of an old photograph of him, taken when he was about six years old. His German Shepherd dog occupies centre stage, and the infant Gilbert appears awkward and dwarfed: ‘si petit qu’on aurait dit un cornac à côté de son éléphant’ (p. 54). Maryse finds it hard to equate this comic image with her daily sightings of the boy-next-door (who is now about nine years old). Humour rapidly gives way to melancholic bewilderment, as Gilbert’s sincere but maladroit second letter reinforces the themes of confusion and alienation which run through the collection. 25 In this second offering,

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ironically written on blue paper, he gushes: ‘Maryse adorée, pour moi, tu es la plus belle avec tes yeux bleus’ (p. 54). In doing so, he compliments Maryse for features which she evidently does not possess. The episode demonstrates the pervasive influence of European and Westernized models; Gilbert has lifted this phrase from a book. His lack of creativity in copying is only discovered because the formulas he plagiarized cater to a white European readership: ‘Pour s’aventurer sur le terrain inconnu de la correspondance amoureuse, il avait sans doute cherché des guides. Hélas! Nos guides étaient des romans français de quatre sous’ (p. 55). As is the case throughout Le Cœur, the very act of writing is treacherous and causes unintentional hurt. In ‘The bluest eye’, Condé also sets up deliberate intertextuality with Proust, as Nick Nesbitt has pointed out, specifically with the episode of the hawthorn bush in Combray, the opening section of Du côté de chez Swann. 26 In this seminal scene, Marcel sees Gilberte through a hawthorn bush and is struck by her beauty, which he equates with the natural beauty of the countryside around him, changing her eyes from ‘noir’ to ‘azur’ to match the dazzling blue of the sky. This modification is repeated with bitter consequences in ‘The bluest eye’. Gilbert sees nothing amiss in praising Maryse for her blue eyes, even though her ethnicity is patently incompatible with this trait. This serves as a reminder that Antillean society was conditioned through the mission civilisatrice to think and create using French models. Gilbert’s rewriting of Maryse is painful both as an insincere compliment and because it suggests that the mulatto boy might be preconditioned to elect white women as the unconscious objects of his desire. The narrator has hinted that her flirtation with Gilbert transcended rigid racial barriers: ‘En ce temps-là, en Guadeloupe, on ne se mélangeait pas. Les nègres marchaient avec les nègres. Les mulâtres avec les mulâtres. Les blanc-pays restaient dans leur sphère’; nonetheless, she draws attention to the fact that children were not affected by the same prejudices: ‘Heureusement, les enfants ne s’occupaient pas tellement de ces affaires de grandes personnes’ (p. 52). ‘The bluest eye’ and a later conte, ‘La plus belle femme du monde’, both demonstrate the politicization of perception. In the later tale, Maryse’s innocent admiration of a white woman is transformed into a loaded, taboo issue by her mother. Maryse naively tells her mother that a white woman she sees at church, Amélie Linsseuil, is ‘la plus belle personne que j’aie jamais vue … mon idéal de beauté’ (p. 78). Her words unwittingly trigger a severe scolding. Maryse realizes that in openly

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admiring a white woman, she has, in her mother’s view, committed an act of racial betrayal: Silence de mort. Elle resta sans voix […] Elle exposa mon crime: comment mon idéal de beauté pouvait-il être une femme blanche? N’existait-il pas de personnes de ma couleur qui méritaient cette distinction? Passe encore si j’avais choisi une mulâtresse, une capresse, une koolie même! (p. 78)

Jeanne’s vitriolic reaction is, to an extent, understood by the adult narrator, who recognizes that her mother feared that her daughter had been preconditioned to reject her own racial identity. The narrator points out that Jeanne’s arguments foreshadowed those which later became associated with the ‘Black is beautiful’ movement (p. 78). As a child, however, she struggled to comprehend why her words caused such violent disapprobation. Just as Gilbert’s attempt at praising beauty disappoints Maryse because it (perhaps unwittingly) conforms to European stereotypes, her own early attempt at appreciating beauty is also criticized for its (again unwitting) Eurocentric bias. Her mother aims to consolidate Maryse’s pride in her racial identity, but ironically, by specifying the kinds of women it would be acceptable for Maryse to find beautiful (‘une mulâtresse, une capresse, une koolie même!’), Jeanne only underscores the extent to which the ethnoclass hierarchy continues to rigidly define Antillean behaviour. Maryse is denied the basic freedom to develop her own opinions, and learns as a child that, as a black woman, her identity is politicized and overdetermined and the choices she makes are open to being interpreted in politically loaded ways, a process which begins in the home context. 27 Intertextuality takes a variety of forms in Le Cœur. A range of references to English-language literature, from Morrison to Keats (p. 129) and Shakespeare (p. 130), ensures that Condé’s récit d’enfance is open to influences from beyond the Caribbean sphere. The titles of two later contes highlight this openness. ‘La maîtresse et Marguerite’ plays on the title of Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, Le Maître et Marguerite, although the body of the conte does not bear any resemblance to Bulgakov’s sprawling text. In contrast, the title of the final conte, ‘Olnel ou la vraie vie’, contains more sustained similarities with another Francophone novel, Elise ou la vraie vie by Claire Etcherelli. 28 Both texts discuss sexual awakening, and in Elise ou la vraie vie, the eponymous heroine faces hostility and danger when she falls in love with an Arab against the backdrop of the conflicts leading to independence in Algeria. Whereas Elise is edified by her love, Condé suggests that her

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own adolescent love affair with the enigmatic Olnel will be troubled. 29 In her 2012 autobiography La vie sans fards, which commences where Le Coeur ends, Condé relates how in 1956, after a passionate affair with a Haitian intellectual named Jean Dominique, she found herself a single mother aged just 22, after Dominique abandoned her to return to Haiti (his life and assassination in 2000 is recounted in the 2003 documentary film The Agronomist30). As suggested by the title, Condé’s adult autobiography paints an uncompromising picture of the personal and political difficulties she encountered in Paris, London and Africa. In Le Cœur, however, her encounter with Olnel enables Maryse to overcome the ‘solitude’ that is personified towards the end of the collection: Ce soir-là, sans que je m’en aperçoive, ma solitude se détacha de moi et me fit ses adieux […] Je venais de la rencontrer, la vraie vie, avec son cortège de deuils, de ratages, de souffrances indicibles, et de bonheurs trop tardifs. Elle resta debout au coin de la rue Cujas agitant faiblement la main. Mais moi, ingrate, je ne la regardai même pas tandis que je m’avançais faussement éblouie vers l’avenir. (p. 136)

These closing words of Le Cœur capture the essence of the boundless expectations of youth, while alluding to the hindsight of experience, meaning that the presentation of the passage into ‘la vraie vie’ is tinged with retrospective irony. By borrowing or adapting the titles of several of her contes, as well as including other intertextual references in the body of the text, Condé draws attention to the literariness of her reconstruction of childhood scenes. Her récit d’enfance is constructed as a dense and allusive series of self-aware moments. Tableaux and Masques On many occasions in Le Cœur, characters are depicted as self-consciously projecting an image, or trying on a different identity. Maryse finds that her identity is repeatedly manipulated by others who seek to Europeanize or exoticize her. These attempts to explore identity are linked with universal childhood inquisitiveness, and also serve to illuminate the postcolonial context. In ‘Portrait de famille’, Condé describes her family in two detailed tableaux, interpreting the image and identity they project. Their presence in the Parisian café defines them as a wealthy, exotic family whose black skin colour presented ‘un spectacle peu fréquent’ (p. 12). They are the

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personification of ‘otherness’ in post-war Paris. The family photograph set in the prestigious jardin du Luxembourg, on the other hand, echoes the aspirational Ebony photo, showing the proud parents at the head of a large, prosperous family. Maryse’s ‘mine boudeuse’ (p. 16) contrasts with her mother’s satisfied smile; she is already singled out and placed in opposition to this façade of bourgeois respectability. Le Cœur is peppered with references to masks, foreshadowing Condé’s allusion to Fanon towards the end of the collection. The first instance of a mask occurs in the crucial scene when Sandrino asserts that their parents are ‘une paire d’aliénés’. Before uttering these words, Sandrino’s face clouds over: ‘sa figure joviale, encore marquée par les joues rondes de l’enfance, se recouvrit d’un masque sombre’ (p. 14). Sandrino’s perplexed ‘masque sombre’ contrasts with the ‘masque blanc’ that he implies his parents are wearing. The next reference is directly linked: in ‘Leçon d’histoire’, the narrator explains that, as a child, she was convinced that her parents would meet with an accident. This is because they kept themselves separate from mainstream society, and seemed to perceive any interaction with people who did not belong to their Race de Grand-Nègres as a threat. Maryse senses that their fragile world is constructed of walls and barriers and becomes consumed with fear that something will happen to them, but is aware she must hide her true feelings at any cost: ‘je masquais ce sentiment tant bien que mal par des affabulations et une agitation constantes, mais il me rongeait’ (p. 41). It is Maryse’s mother, Jeanne, who is most often associated with masks. In ‘Mabo Julie’, Maryse has her first encounter with death at the wake for her mabo (the Creole term for a nanny). Initially, Maryse is shielded from Mabo Julie’s corpse, but ‘les voisins et les voisines, qui me masquaient la couche jonchée de fleurs, s’écartèrent à la vue de ma mère’ (p. 49). Jeanne is responsible for the brutal manner in which Maryse confronts death for the first time. Anxious to uphold social mores, she forces her daughter to kiss the cheek of her dead mabo, an experience Maryse finds extremely distressing. The conte’s ending is set several weeks after the wake, and shows an increasingly agitated Maryse finally being comforted by Jeanne. The narrator’s wry conclusion, ‘sans doute venait-elle de se souvenir que je n’avais que neuf ans’ (p. 50), is a stinging reaction to her mother’s pitiless behaviour. Jeanne is figured as wearing a mask in ‘Bonne fête, maman’, in which the strained mother–daughter relationship comes to a climax. In this conte, placed at the centre of the collection, Jeanne’s haughty attitude is challenged when Maryse holds a mirror up to her, unwittingly reflecting

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uncomfortable truths. At Jeanne’s birthday party, Maryse, drawing on her school work on ‘L’Orient et la Grèce’, reads a short piece comparing her mother to a terrifying Gorgon and the temptress Leda. In the face of this volley of naive insults, her mother resolutely wears an imperturbable mask: ‘Mais le beau masque de ma mère resta impassible’ (p. 71). Jeanne then withdraws from the gathering, causing a double estrangement by creating a physical and emotional barrier between herself and Maryse: ‘J’eus beau hurler, cogner sur le bois des deux poings et aussi des deux pieds, elle ne s’ouvrit pas’ (p. 72). The only clue to her true feelings comes towards the close of the conte: Brusquement, elle me fixa. Ses yeux étaient recouverts d’une pellicule brillante. Bientôt, celle-ci se déchira et des larmes dessinèrent des sillons le long de ses joues poudrées. – C’est comme ça que tu me vois? Interrogea-t-elle sans colère. (p. 71)

Again, the description of powdered cheeks being corroded by tears suggests concealment and an outer mask being cut through by an outpouring of emotion. The episode is an early attempt to gain maternal approbation through writing and represents the very essence of the project Condé undertakes with Le Cœur, which is dedicated ‘à ma mère’ (the strained maternal relationship is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). Maryse has learned that writing is a dangerous act, particularly where loved ones are concerned: ‘Il ne faut pas dire la vérité. Jamais. Jamais. A ceux qu’on aime. Il faut les peindre sous les plus brillantes couleurs. Leur donner à s’admirer. Leur faire croire qu’ils sont ce qu’ils ne sont pas’ (p. 72). Masks of a different kind are dwelt upon at length in ‘Ma naissance’. In this conte, the narrator imaginatively recounts her own birth, which occurred during carnival season. On the Sunday before she was born, she imagines the roads became a sea of mas, carnival masks: ‘Mas à fèye, mas à konn, mas à goudron. Moko zombie, juchés sur leurs échasses’ (p. 24). On Mardi-Gras, the day of Condé’s birth, the arrival of the mas coincides with her mother going into labour: ‘A une heure de l’aprèsmidi, déferlant de tous les coins des faubourgs, les mas envahirent La Pointe. Quand les premiers coups de gwoka firent trembler les piliers du ciel, comme si elle n’attendait que ce signal-là, ma mère perdit les eaux’ (p. 25). Here, Condé clearly signals her link to carnival. Her birth takes place against a backdrop of the quintessential rhythms of Creole culture, and her Creole descriptions of the carnival masks resist easy comprehension as the narrator fully exploits the metonymic gap,

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inserting Creole terms which are only explained in the text’s glossary. Her first cries, she suggests, would have been obliterated by the noise of the carnival, a fact she reads symbolically: ‘Je veux croire que ce fut un signe, signe que je saurais dissimuler les plus grands chagrins sous un abord riant’ (p. 25) The verb ‘dissimuler’ further implies the masks assumed by the adult Condé to conceal any emotional vulnerability. The final occurrence of the term ‘masque’ combines the comical and the sinister. In ‘Olnel ou la vraie vie’, Maryse is involved with a student group, ‘le cercle Luis Carlos Prestes’ (p. 133). The adult narrator admits that she no longer has any idea who Prestes was, further evidence of her desire to highlight authorial fallibility in Le Cœur. 31 One evening, the guest speaker is a young François Duvalier. Condé describes him with dry humour, judging him by his appearance rather than his politics: ‘J’ignorais ce qu’on lui reprochait, à ce François, à part son masque un peu simiesque’ (p. 134). While describing Duvalier’s face as a mask hints at his duplicity and foreshadows the terrible events he will bring about in Haiti, the decision to term this mask ‘un peu simiesque’ is bold and troubling, conveying disrespect for the future leader but doing so by echoing a racist cliché which was prevalent in imperialist colonial rhetoric. This scene acquires tragic force when contrasted with the brutal future events of which the adult author (and reader) is aware: the narrator comments that she had two Haitian admirers as an adolescent, who were both persecuted by Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes, with tragic consequences. Similarly, Maryse’s enthusiastic envy of her Haitian peers at the meeting, ‘Ah, être née dans un vrai pays, un pays indépendant et non dans un krazur de terre départemental!’ (p. 134), emerges as idealistic and naive when read against subsequent events in Haiti. To use ‘masques’ in Francophone Caribbean literature inevitably evokes Fanon, and direct reference is made to the author at the close of ‘Chemin d’école’. This later conte, the 13th of 17, provides an extended example of Maryse assuming a mask. Maryse’s parents have now undertaken a lengthier stay in France and she is attending school in Paris. The conte opens with a subtle allusion to Fanon through the narrator’s observation that her presence in Paris continued to surprise metropolitan French citizens. Comments such as ‘elle est mignonne, la petite négresse!’ (p. 97) upset Maryse as she senses that her race is more often associated with an image that is ‘repoussante et barbare’ (p. 98). This creates an echo of Fanon’s famous description of the reactions he himself experienced in metropolitan France, epitomized by the phrase ‘Tiens, un nègre!’32

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In ‘Chemin d’école’, Maryse is asked to give a school presentation on a book about her country, and is once again forced to confront the issue of her identity. It appears that evasive brushes with this question earlier in the text may finally be resolved. Once again, however, Maryse realizes that she is unable to find any model which satisfactorily presents her identity. Panicked at the prospect of finding a book to represent Guadeloupe, Maryse initially considers Haitian texts, but decides that they are too far removed from her sphere of reference. The discovery of a récit d’enfance, Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres, proves invaluable. Although Zobel is Martinican, Maryse sees this as no obstacle, as ‘la Martinique est l’île sœur de la Guadeloupe’ (p. 100). More problematically, the text’s hero, José Hassam, has nothing in common with her own experiences. La Rue Cases-Nègres takes place against a backdrop of Creole plantation society, where the link to Africa remains visible through riddles, dance and folklore. José grew up in the very petit-nègre society from which Maryse’s parents shielded their daughter, and to Maryse, José’s world is absolutely foreign and exotic. Nonetheless, his récit d’enfance offers a badge of identity, a blueprint for Antillean life, and Maryse decides to ‘fake it’ and pass herself off as ‘Josélita’ rather than admit that her world is poles apart from that depicted by Zobel: j’eus peur de faire pareil aveu. J’eus peur de révéler l’abîme qui me séparait de José. Aux yeux de ce professeur communiste, aux yeux de la classe tout entière, les vraies Antilles, c’étaient celles que j’étais coupable de ne pas connaître. Je commençai par me révolter en pensant que l’identité est comme un vêtement qu’il faut enfiler bon gré, mal gré, qu’il vous siée ou non. Puis, je cédai à la pression et enfilai la défroque qui m’était offerte. (pp. 102–103)

Maryse’s existing anxiety about her identity is exacerbated by the expectations of her schoolteacher and classmates, who project ‘difference’ on to her. In producing her exoticized account of Guadeloupe, she plays on their misconceptions, confirming metropolitan views of the Antilles. As a result, Maryse becomes complicit in the staging of Antillean exoticism for a European audience. Her presentation of black plantation identity becomes, paradoxically, a kind of masque blanc, a portrayal packaged so as to win the approbation of her metropolitan classmates and teacher. Although she is guilty of presenting an exoticized depiction of her life in Guadeloupe, Maryse is troubled by her insincere behaviour, and this leads her to return to the theme of alienation:

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Alors j’ai compris que le milieu auquel j’appartenais n’avait rien de rien à offrir et j’ai commencé de le prendre en grippe. A cause de lui, j’étais sans saveur ni parfum, un mauvais décalque des petits Français que je côtoyais. J’étais ‘peau noire, masque blanc’ et c’est pour moi que Frantz Fanon allait écrire. (p. 103)

At this point in the text, Condé raises the notion of authenticity, a fraught concept, particularly for postcolonial authors who must often grapple with the expectation of being a porte-parole for the communities they describe. Condé’s differences with the créolistes have led to her being accused of producing a form of writing that fails to connect with the intimate reality of the country, lacking the flavour of its idioms and vocabulary. Le Cœur responds to this and sets out the parameters of Condé’s relationship to Creole culture. Linguistically, the inclusion of snatches of Creole demonstrates that, despite her parents’ best efforts, Creole culture still infiltrates their daughter’s world. When Jeanne sings a Creole berceuse at the beginning of ‘Ma naissance’, it represents a bond with her unborn child, Maryse, as well as providing a rare glimpse of her own Creole origins (discussed further in Chapter 7). Maryse is fully aware of the elements of Creole society that she is not allowed to enjoy, such as gwoka music and carnival, and they continue to be present in her imagination due to their prohibition. Linguistically, Condé’s text asserts her Antillean identity by means of the metonymic gap, interspersing Creole terms into the French prose, a technique which draws attention to the different cultural contexts at play in the text and conveys the alterity of her position in an ‘in-between’ existence which is neither exclusively French nor predominantly Creole. Moreover, the adult narrator’s acknowledgement of the changes which have occurred in Antillean literature since her childhood is significant. ‘Chemin d’école’ sets up a deliberate instance of intertextuality with Chamoiseau. Its title echoes the second volume of Chamoiseau’s récits d’enfance, and the narrator refers to Chamoiseau’s future influence: ‘C’était, rappelons-le, le tout début des années 50. La littérature des Antilles ne fleurissait pas encore. Patrick Chamoiseau dormait informé au fond du ventre de sa maman, et moi-même, je n’avais jamais entendu prononcer le nom d’Aimé Césaire’ (p. 99). The importance that the narrator places on Zobel’s récit d’enfance draws attention to her admiration of the genre, and at this point in Le Cœur there is a parallel between reader and narrator which creates a mise en abîme: just like the reader of her text, the narrator herself is pictured reading

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a récit d’enfance. This conveys her hope that Le Cœur, like La Rue Cases-Nègres, will prove a more effective form of literary communication than what the narrator dismisses as ‘des discours théoriques’ (p. 103), a thinly veiled reference to créolité and the theories of Glissant. In Race and the Unconscious, Celia Britton analyses Francophone Caribbean literary output, including the work of Fanon, in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis. In Fanon’s reworking of European models, Britton argues, he perceives Antilleans as fundamentally marked by behaviour she reads as Freudian Ichspaltung, or the splitting of the ego. This is a consequence of Verleugnung, or disavowal – ‘the ambivalent ego defence in which the subject both recognizes and refuses to recognize an unwelcome perception’33 – in this instance, the perception of one’s own blackness: If my analysis of the ‘white masks’ phenomenon as disavowal is correct, Fanon’s claim that black people do not suffer neurosis is not a claim that they are psychologically healthy, but rather the indirect correlative of an unarticulated perception that their condition borders on the psychotic. 34

The masks Maryse assumes are consciously adopted, meaning that her position is one of knowing pretence. For all the confusion evident in the collection, the narrator is incessantly exploring social façades, artifice and the estrangement they produce. Her parents, however, are more evocative of Britton’s reading of Fanon, as they appear unaware of any discrepancies between their Europeanized behaviour and their Caribbean identity. In contrast, Maryse, representative of the next generation, rebels against the ‘constructed’ realities of which her childhood is composed and recognizes the barriers such elements pose to self-knowledge. While each mask Maryse dons is reminiscent of Fanonian alienation, her progress in Le Cœur towards an acute awareness of the discomfort that this ‘acting’ causes ultimately prevents the onset of disavowal. Maryse displays a heightened sensitivity to the paradoxes and contradictions of Antillean society, which prompts her to constantly question and challenge the perplexing behaviour she encounters. Crucially, in the absence of parental guidance, literature and more specifically the récit d’enfance plays a guiding role; it is only when she reads La Rue Cases-Nègres that Maryse begins to understand these occluded aspects of her heritage as a black Antillean: ‘d’un seul coup tombait sur mes épaules le poids de l’esclavage, de la Traite, de l’oppression coloniale, de l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme, des préjugés de couleur dont personne, à part quelquefois Sandrino, ne me parlait jamais’ (p. 101).

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Conclusion Le Cœur is a Bildungsroman which uncovers the complexities of identity formation. Perception, both of the self and of others, is a major concern, as illustrated by Condé’s use of tableaux and masks. Condé’s literary exploration of these themes models her childhood self into a politicized character whose naivety, although often emphasized as a genuine childhood reaction, does not eclipse the presence of the knowing adult author. In her récit d’enfance, the family context comes under extensive scrutiny, and the key to her parents’ perplexing behaviour lies in the scene of recognition. Condé is demonstrating the urgent need for more open discussion about slavery in the Antilles and in metropolitan France, in order to reconcile nation and race, identity and skin tone. Le Cœur challenges over-prescriptive créoliste theories and embraces difference, defending the validity of an identity which thwarts straightforward definition. This approach has similarities with the author’s comments on memory, made in interview in 1991, which she equates with a new literary direction: It seems to me that I now depart from the stage of writing history and reach the stage of writing memory. You know the difference [sic] that Pierre Nora made between history and memory. He says that in history, you have a rational organization of facts […] On the contrary, memory is something totally disorganized; there’s no rule, there’s no order. It comes from all corners, and builds up, and you have to find meaning in the complexity of things. Also memory is not made only of the things which are supposed to be important. Memory is made of a lot of trivialities … 35

Le Cœur illustrates this attitude, blending trivial and significant details into a moving, remarkable account. Condé delivers her own version of the events which shaped her as a person and writer, and her récit d’enfance becomes a touchstone for the interpretation of themes which recur throughout her œuvre. Memory and the ambiguous, yet accommodating, genre of the conte vrai provide the perfect framework for the exploration of the disjointed, disparate elements of a childhood divided between French and Creole, and France and Guadeloupe.

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chapter five

Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora Daniel Maximin’s Tu, c’est l’enfance and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora

In their récits d’enfance, the Guadeloupean authors Daniel Maximin and Gisèle Pineau explore the child’s connection to the Antillean environment. Their approaches, however, are markedly different and comparison of their texts reveals significant contrasts in the child narrators’ experiences of place and space. While Maximin recalls his childhood in Guadeloupe, Pineau describes a childhood largely spent in metropolitan France. Nonetheless, for both authors the child’s bond with the environment articulates a politics of landscape, through which history, memory, exile and diaspora come to the fore. Maximin’s Tu, c’est l’enfance (2004) is structured around the physical exploration of Guadeloupean space and the environmental phenomena to which this space is subjected: earthquakes, cyclones and volcanic activity. In contrast, Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia (1996) displays a concern with the lost landscapes of Guadeloupe and Africa, which are unfavourably juxtaposed with the lived landscape in France. Of all the texts in this study, Pineau’s narrative presents the most searing articulation of diaspora, and vivid evocations of the lost land of origin prove both painful and essential to her exploration of identity. In evoking the landscape, Maximin and Pineau depict the island’s tropical plenitude but avoid the trap of exoticism. The earliest Antillean literature was marked by the doudouiste tradition perpetuated by béké authors such as Guadeloupean poet Poirié Saint-Aurèle (1795–1855), who celebrated the Antilles as a natural paradise in texts which were

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destined to captivate a metropolitan audience. The islands became an overdetermined, fetishized space, typified by ‘blue seas, golden sands, humming birds, luxuriant vegetation, and the physical grace of the Creole doudou’, as Guadeloupean author Ernest Pépin has commented. The doudou, a stereotypically beautiful, desirable Creole woman, gave her name to a literary tradition, doudouisme, which was prominent in the later colonial era; this literature celebrated the beauty of the Antilles but remained blind to grittier social realities. Pépin provides a perceptive deconstruction of doudouiste literature, explaining that it inscribes the Caribbean in a sort of ideological vacuum, deporting it to an Eden located ‘elsewhere’ and defaced by all the clichés that the colonial gaze has come to expect […] this is a crudely staged sham, its very excess annihilating nature and preventing all possibility of meaning, so that there remains only a hollow, exotic stage-set of fantasy islands caressed by a vanilla-scented breeze. […] In this way, doudouisme conceals reality behind a mask that serves a poetics of deterritorialization.1

Maximin and Pineau write against such a tradition, inviting a re-reading of the landscape which restores integrity and complexity to Caribbean space. For them, the landscape is no exotic stage-set but a lived environment which is to be celebrated and problematized as an integral component of identity. Daniel Maximin: A Geopoetics of Caribbean Childhood Born in 1947 and raised in Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe, Daniel Maximin moved to France with his family when he was 13. In 1989 he relocated to Guadeloupe where he worked as regional director of cultural affairs. He then returned to Paris in 1997 and played a leading role in the organization of national celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998 and the Année des outre-mer in 2011. 2 Maximin has produced poetry and a trilogy of novels: L’isolé soleil (1981), Soufrières (1987) and L’Ile et une nuit (1995). 3 His novels are populated by recurring characters and he composes complex, self-reflexive narratives, weaving wordplay and poetry into his prose. Tu, c’est l’enfance presents Maximin’s childhood in Guadeloupe before the family’s move to Paris. The text received the Grand Prix de l’Académie française Maurice Genevoix and the Prix Tropiques. In Tu, c’est l’enfance, the adult author addresses his child surrogate as ‘tu’, and

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indeed Maximin displays a predilection for the second-person singular throughout his œuvre. H. Adlai Murdoch argues this is a manifestation of the author’s ‘insistence on the ineluctable presence of the Other’.4 In Maximin’s récit d’enfance, however, the use of the second-person pronoun opens up a contemplative space between the adult and child worlds. The same technique is found in Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour and moreover is reminiscent of Saint-John Perse’s Eloges. This ­psychological and temporal distance is set out in Maximin’s epigraph: Tu, c’est l’enfance. Je, c’est depuis … Toi, c’était moi, à l’âge où l’on a plus d’à venir que de sous venir. Sinon l’enfance, qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y a plus … Quel avenir en moi as-tu fait survenir?

The interplay of terms which intermingle the past and the future acknowledges that the narrator is aware of the struggle to recall memories which are now distant. These lines, rich in Maximin’s characteristic wordplay, also include a quotation from Saint-John Perse’s seminal childhood poetry cycle, Eloges, and the white Guadeloupean poet, who sets such store on nature in his own work, proves an important influence throughout the text. Maximin’s text demonstrates an assured connection to the land, and the récit d’enfance is structured into four parts, named after the four elements: ‘Le Feu’, ‘La Terre’, ‘L’Eau’ and ‘L’Air’. Each element signifies formative memories, memories which, according to the narrator’s own idiosyncratic conceptualization, become embedded in the landscape to create a geopoetic synthesis: ‘plus qu’à l’histoire, la mémoire de l’enfance se rattache souvent à une géographie’ (p. 127). Maximin is the only author to take such a direct approach to reading the landscape in his récit d’enfance, and a later theoretical essay, Les Fruits du cyclone: une géopoétique de la Caraïbe (2006), 5 develops the aesthetics of this geopoetic bond. The essay discusses the relationship between Antilleans, history and the bountiful, yet often hostile, Caribbean landscape: ‘Iles pliées sous les ouragans, noyées sous les raz-de-marée, fracturées par les séismes, grillées vives par leurs volcans. Avec une histoire qui s’est acharnée à imiter en tout point ces quatre cataclysmes de la géographie.’6 Nature and natural disasters are recurring topoi of his work, and they also shape his récit d’enfance. Tu, c’est l’enfance opens by considering the most dangerous element: fire. The chapter devoted to ‘Le Feu’ foregrounds the fact that the

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element’s beauty, combined with its destructive potential, makes it tantalizingly attractive to the child. Fire is represented in its most potent form by the Soufrière volcano, which dominates the landscape of Daniel’s childhood in the commune of Saint-Claude. The narrative begins by describing his first hike to the top of the volcano, aged just five, when he bathes in the natural hot spring known as les Bains chauds de Matouba. This is presented by the adult narrator as an involuntary memory akin to Proust’s experience with the madeleine, as, he explains, this formative memory will be reactivated by other bathing experiences: ‘sinon l’enfance, c’est elle [cette sensation] qui m’accompagne quand je règle la douche à la chaleur maximal, ou que mes pieds passent à regret du sable chaud à la fraîcheur de l’entrée dans la mer’ (p. 24). By introducing this comment on his own involuntary memory with ‘sinon l’enfance’, an allusion to Saint-John Perse, the narrator heightens the poetic impulse to rejoice at childhood memories, and further defines his own position as a writer who creates in full awareness of his literary forebears. At the end of the chapter the Soufrière becomes active, prompting a childish argument between Maximin’s siblings about who should be left behind if they were suddenly forced to evacuate; yet this playful ending does not conceal the very real danger the family experienced by living in the volcano’s shadow.7 The Soufrière is also a potent metaphor for the eruption of historical memory. For Daniel, the volcano becomes explicitly connected with the heroic figure of the affranchi (freed slave), Louis Delgrès. The name of Delgrès is a leitmotif throughout the text, and ‘Le Feu’ evokes his incendiary revolutionary spirit through a reminder that Guadeloupe and Haiti were ‘les deux premiers pays d’Amérique à vaincre l’esclavage en 1794’ (p. 47). Delgrès, born in Martinique, became a Guadeloupean anti-slavery hero, who famously took refuge in the village of Matouba, perched high in the hills of the Soufrière. Along with his soldiers, he chose suicide on 28 May 1802, rather than surrendering to the French general Richepanse and accepting Napoleon’s reinstatement of slavery. This historical event may only be truly understood, the narrator suggests, through an enhanced geographic awareness of the volcanic location of Delgrès’ final battle, and thus Matouba becomes ‘l’obscur refuge du feu sauvage de la liberté’ (p. 47). History and geography fuse together, as Maximin praises ‘ce volcan-Soufrière et ce volcan-Delgrès, présence de mémoire vive sans statues ni marbres, feu vif sans limites d’âge ni frontières de foyer, repaires secrets de mes initiations’ (p. 85). Maximin’s geopoetics present nature, and particularly the Soufrière,

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as an active participant in past struggles, and the volcano becomes an immense natural memorial to heroic resistance. Fire is also fundamental to an appreciation of literature, and his early experiences lead Daniel to divide books into two categories: inspirational books, termed ‘livres chauds’, and uninspiring books, dismissed as ‘livres froids’ (p. 30). The narrator relishes literature’s potential to generate its own explosive momentum; this is nowhere more apparent than when he coins the phrase ‘lectures ardentes’ (pp. 33–34). The phrase deliberately associates literature with volcanology, as it is a play on the scientific term nuée ardente (pyroclastic flow), which was first used to describe the devastating 1902 volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique. The narrator’s parents nurture his love of literature and, controversially, one of the texts they read to their children is Lectures antillaises by André Terrisé, a metropolitan school inspector who visited Martinique.8 Struck by the unsuitability of the education system under the mission civilisatrice, Terrisé created an academic textbook adapted for the Antillean context – exactly the kind of publication for which protagonists in other récits d’enfance have yearned. Nonetheless, as Maximin’s narrator points out, his parents used Lectures antillaises ‘contre l’avis de l’administration et même de parents d’élèves, qui craignaient que les créolismes […] ne nuisent au niveau bien français de notre éducation’ (p. 26). Reading a book tailored for an Antillean audience is illicit and transgressional, and takes place outside official schooling. Reading is also equated with illicit pleasure and fire of another kind when Daniel reads Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres. A teacher who is a family friend specifically sends a copy of the book to the Maximin family from Martinique, an act which demonstrates its significance for the Antillean literary canon. Yet to the narrator, La Rue Cases-Nègres is not merely interesting for its discussion of post-slavery plantation life. The teacher has indicated passages which she deems unsuitable for children because of their sexual content, and this act of censorship piques the child’s curiosity, meaning that in an unusually provocative approach to La Rue Cases-Nègres, the narrator harnesses the text to depict sexual curiosity. La Rue Cases-Nègres is obliquely connected with the flame of desire as the printed word awakens the child. The prohibited passages enthral Daniel, who reads them ‘en cachette le soir sous le drap, à la lueur d’une lampe de poche, imaginant le trouble du cousin Carmen devant “les cuisses offertes les yeux fermés” de Madame’ (p. 26). Maximin thus identifies a little-acknowledged erotic charge in

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Zobel’s text, which he compares to the more overt eroticism found in Roumain’s Les Gouverneurs de la rosée and Zobel’s first novel, Diab’-là. Infantile references to sexuality are scattered throughout other récits d’enfance, and generally focus on the child’s awareness of their own body; thus in La Rue Cases-Nègres Tortilla worries about covering her ‘Bon Ange’ (pp. 36–37) and throughout A Bout d’enfance Chamoiseau’s négrillon becomes aware of his ti-bout. In Tu, c’est l’enfance, the narrator goes beyond these physical references and discovers in literature a more emotional sexual awakening. This is not dwelled upon at any great length; as in other récits d’enfance, childhood sexuality is a theme which arises in a brief, discreet moment in the narrative, and is figured as natural inquisitiveness.9 The second chapter, ‘La Terre’, explores the potential of this element to connect and unite. The narrator emphasizes Guadeloupe’s position as part of an island chain, anchored ‘à ses îles sœurs en archipel, peut-être aussi au feu et aux volcans sous-marins’ (p. 65). The Caribbean is imagined as a buttress, a geographically connective force: ‘ma Caraïbe tirait sa force et sa fragilité mêlées d’être l’arc-boutant qui retenait de sa drive [a Creole term signifying ‘wandering’] l’Amérique déracinée d’Afrique et d’Europe, attentive à remmailler les brides des continents’ (p. 85). It is not only suggested that the Caribbean connects, but that the region can also fulfil a restorative, culturally adhesive function through these connections. In contrast, during an earthquake, the earth’s ability to violently trouble its human inhabitants is also demonstrated. Rather than focusing on a geological discussion of seismic activity, the text presents the emotional imprint left on the post-earthquake landscape, as the narrator is struck by the psychological effects of the event on his panicked family: ‘toi, tu avais surtout remarqué les effets du séisme sur les humains’ (p. 86). In Les Fruits du cyclone, Maximin reflects further on the unpredictable seismic activity which constantly threatens the Caribbean, observing that whereas a cyclone’s passage may be predicted and tracked, seismic activity is almost impossible to foresee. For Maximin, an earthquake’s violence confronts ‘l’homme contemporain’ with ‘les traces de l’origine du monde’,10 becoming inescapable evidence of the fragility of the natural environment and man’s transitory existence on earth. The second chapter also generates further literary reflections as the narrator begins to read books that he finds in his father’s library. These include canonical works of négritude, such as Césaire’s Cahier

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d’un retour au pays natal and Damas’s Pigments, both notable for their engagement with childhood (both works are discussed at length in Chapter 1). The young Maximin is particularly interested in the publication details of these texts: ‘tu t’appliquais même à rechercher l’âge auquel l’auteur avait écrit son livre’ (p. 96). This display of literary curiosity is doubtless intended to pique the reader’s own interest in these details, in a development akin to Eloge’s call for an ‘interaction auteurs/ lecteurs’11 with which an Antillean literary canon can be constructed. In his father’s library the child also discovers Saint-John Perse’s Eloges. The narrator is challenged by this ‘récit d’une enfance à la fois familière et étrangère’ (p. 95). The connection with Saint-John Perse is heightened by the two authors’ shared geography, and it is no coincidence that the first protracted discussion of Saint-John Perse occurs in ‘La Terre’, the chapter which emphasizes the earth’s potential to unite. The spatial connection to Saint-John Perse is also intensified by personal mythology. The death of Saint-John Perse’s younger sister forms a brief yet searing fragment of his poetry cycle Pour fêter une enfance,12 and Maximin’s cousin Edwige claims to know exactly where the younger sister is buried in the grounds of the Habitation La Joséphine. By highlighting this shared relationship with the land, Maximin is demonstrating that Eloges will hold a certain appeal to Antillean readers of any colour. He cites Saint-John Perse’s natural references, such as ‘les bains de feuilles vertes’, ‘le sirop-de-batterie noyant son sucre sur le pain blanc’, ‘l’admiration des colibris’, ‘les jeux de cendre et feux sur la couronne du volcan’ (p. 98). Nonetheless, if Maximin finds much common ground with Saint-John Perse’s text, he also expresses revulsion at the colonial system which forms the backdrop to the Nobel prizewinner’s account of his childhood, populated by ‘son décor colonial de maîtres arrogants, de servantes dociles, et d’enfants trop princiers’ (p. 98). In contrast to the colonial past of which Saint-John Perse is a (re-accommodated) reminder, the third chapter, ‘L’Eau’, considers the pre-Columbian past, introducing the Amerindian term for the island, Karukéra. Again, it is Maximin’s parents who educate their son about this part of his heritage. His mother teaches him to remember the name by breaking it down into its composite parts: ‘KA: notre tambour-ka, RU: un vieux mot pour la rivière, KE: l’auxiliaire du futur en créole, et RA: le dieu-soleil égyptien’ (p. 105). Each component represents fragments of Creole, French and African identity. ‘Ru’ also echoes the literal meaning of Karukéra, ‘l’île-aux-belles-eaux’ (p. 105), as the Amerindians celebrated Guadeloupe for its beautiful waters. In a continuation of the aquatic

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theme, the chapter sees Daniel delight in his first anagram, when his mother turns the word EMERAUDE into EAU DE MER (p. 104); such wordplay will come to bear on his adult literary style. The emphasis on the element of water and the sea prompts the first discussion of the Middle Passage, the transatlantic transportation which brought Africans to the Caribbean. The sea functions as a repository for the collective memory of the Middle Passage, and in her reading of Tu, c’est l’enfance, Maeve McCusker comments that ‘the sea (mer/mère) is an ominous amniotic force, which threatens to engulf the individual with the deadly weight of collective memory. The ocean is repeatedly imagined as holding hundreds of dead children, thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.’13 This traumatic, murderous image of ‘l’océan […] complice muet des traites et des négriers’ (pp. 118–19) is strengthened by Daniel’s repeated admissions that he is repelled by the sea and the ocean. On a school trip to South America he almost drowns, and once again equates the Atlantic with transatlantic murder: ‘Tu n’allais pas insulter tes ancêtres en glissant dans cet abîme rassasié depuis trois siècles de milliers d’enfants morts avant d’avoir vécu’ (p. 137). However, the narrator’s aversion to the sea and its tragic historical legacy does not equate to an avoidance of history. On the contrary, the past does not generate the intense discomfort found in other récits d’enfance. In Tu, c’est l’enfance, there is no single pivotal moment at which the child learns about slavery. Instead, the narrator recalls how he has seemingly always had an open awareness of the slave past: ‘grâce aux lectures de ta mère, aux explications de ton père et aux leçons de Paul, ton instituteur’ (p. 46). The adults around him have ensured that this is a part of his education, both in the family context and at school. ‘L’Eau’ includes an episode germane to the scene of recognition, when the infant Daniel goes to visit his ailing great-uncle Valéry. Yet rather than being hindered by taboos and the unsaid, this scene is a model of communication. Valéry explains that he is dying and says he must ‘passer le relais’ (p. 119) to Daniel, who is charged with transmitting an important message to future generations: ‘nous n’avons pas toujours été esclaves, nous descendons aussi d’avant et aussi d’après’ (p. 120). From his earliest years, the child is positioned as a message bearer who will confront questions of how to commemorate and recognize the slave past. There is a before, and there is an after – the message compels Antilleans to see slavery as a stage in history, but not as an all-consuming whole; instead, progress and evolution are emphasized. Valéry’s exhortation is prophetic and loaded with dramatic irony, as the adult Maximin has

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ardently fulfilled this role through his writings and public engagements. This future public role is also foreshadowed when Daniel gives a reading to commemorate Delgrès at a ceremony organized by the mayor of Saint-Claude, Rémy Nainsouta. The narrator proudly explains that at his first public speaking appearance, he read the Larousse entry for Delgrès ‘d’une voix d’avocat passionnée’ (p. 50). Valéry’s words resonate with a well-known phrase which Maximin himself has coined, in which the author frames history in a manner which highlights resilience and resistance: ‘Il apparaît clairement dans ce concentré d’histoires blessées que l’on ne peut les définir que par ce qu’elles ont créé: des sociétés et des cultures issues non directement de l’esclavage, mais essentiellement de la résistance à l’esclavage et des combats pour son abolition.’14 Inspired by Fanon’s declaration at the close of Peau noire, masques blancs, ‘je ne suis pas esclave de l’esclavage qui déshumanisa mes pères’,15 Maximin’s phrase became a central motif of his interventions in public debates on slavery during the 150th anniversary of abolition in 1998. In the final section of Tu, c’est l’enfance, ‘L’Air’, it is now the turn of air and wind to ravage the island in the form of Cyclone Betsy, a violent storm which struck in 1956. The family takes shelter, huddled in the cellar, in a passage which is remarkable for its evocation of the hold (la cale) of the slave ship: dans ce confinement, cette humidité, cette pénombre, je ressentis avec force le bonheur d’accueillir en confiance les refuges bricolés par l’île raccommodée, je compris la ténacité des plages face aux [sic] Atlantique […], la résistance de toutes les caves, de toutes les cales suffisamment lestées d’espoir pour défier l’enchaînement sauvage des éléments. (pp. 172–73)

In a brief but striking allusion, the hold of a slave ship is refigured as a place of survival and resistance, echoing Césaire’s surrealist image of the négrier which will be consumed by ‘la menace de ses grondements intestins’,16 an unmistakable metaphor of resistance. Maximin’s récit d’enfance emphatically does not follow the more frequent model, where repression leads to a cataclysmic, painful confrontation with the past. Slave history is gradually introduced to the child in a frank manner which emphasizes moments of agency, resistance and revolution. Spoken words, messages and literature are vital tools in this process. Thus when Daniel must find a poem to read out in class on 28 May to commemorate the memory of Delgrès, his father suggests a poem by the Martinican surrealist poet, essayist and political

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activist René Ménil. Again, the positive, transformative potential of literature is unmistakably present in the quotation: ‘Nous ramassons des injures pour en faire des diamants…’ (p. 34). Ménil’s poem originally appeared in the review Tropiques,17 and his metaphor characterizes the redemptive, recuperative drive at the core of Maximin’s poetic imaginary. In Tu, c’est l’enfance, an intense appreciation of nature and its awesome energy is foregrounded; an energy, argues Maximin, which has shaped Antillean history and is inseparable from an irrepressible impulse towards strength, regeneration and renewal. Pineau: Exile, Diaspora and the Challenge of Genre Whereas Maximin’s bond with the Antillean landscape is nurtured through active exploration, Pineau’s narrative is structured by a series of lost landscapes. L’Exil selon Julia articulates the anxieties and complexities of living in a situation of diaspora and exile. Pineau’s tale of a peripatetic childhood closely mirrors her own experiences, as the paratext to the Stock edition makes clear in a lengthy biographical note which prefaces the narrative. Born in Paris in 1956 to Guadeloupean parents, Pineau spent several months in Guadeloupe in 1961 before her family returned to metropolitan France. They brought the narrator’s paternal grandmother, Julia, with them to protect her from her violent husband, Asdrubal. In L’Exil, the eponymous Julia is referred to throughout by the creolized form ‘Man Ya’ (her character reappears in the 2007 text Mes quatre femmes, a récit which casts new light on certain episodes in L’Exil and is examined in Chapter 7). The text’s complex structure requires a brief explanation: although the narrative begins with an episode set in Paris, the chapters then go back in time to create a narrative loop which explains how the narrator’s parents met, why the family brought Man Ya with them to France, and how they initially lived in Aubigné-Racan; after this, the focus returns to Paris in ‘le beau milieu des années 60’ (p. 12) when the child narrator is aged 10 or 11. In terms of literary genre, L’Exil poses a challenge. Thematically, the text intersects with the récits d’enfance as it is narrated by a child and discusses schooling, family relationships and slavery’s legacy. Despite these similarities, the narrative style of L’Exil differs greatly from the other texts under consideration, and in this text more than any other the autobiographical bond is not explicit. The narrator is identified by name

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just once as ‘Marie’ (p. 86), in the fourth chapter. This distancing effect contravenes the parameters of autobiography as defined by Lejeune’s pact and goes against the more usual patterns found in récits d’enfance, although Kathleen Gyssels points out that Marie is Pineau’s ‘deuxième prénom’.18 Critics have been sensitive to the narrative distance which defines L’Exil: Ernest Pépin refers to the text as an ‘autofictional work’,19 and Gyssels also suggests reading L’Exil as ‘une autofiction à l’instar de Serge Doubrovsky qui l’entend comme cette zone grise entre le roman et l’autobiographie’. 20 Indeed, L’Exil displays a pronounced preoccupation with psychology, engaging in the excavation of emotion and memory in ways which are reminiscent of Doubrovsky’s desire to intertwine psychoanalysis and fiction. Moreover, Gyssels places the text in a vein of autofiction exemplified by African women writers such as Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Angèle Rawiri and Véronique Tadjo, positing this literature as a gendered way of responding to exclusion from the male-dominated genre of the novel. The text also contains a veiled reference to the surname Pineau, when the narrator explains that Man Ya’s husband, Asdrubal, feels a keen sense of belonging to France because of his surname: ‘lui, il disait descendre d’une famille des Charentes. En France, au cours de ses campagnes militaires, des Blancs lui avaient montré sur une carte l’endroit même d’où son nom était sorti’ (p. 115). To the metropolitan French reader, this conveys the idea of the popular aperitif, ‘Pineau des Charentes’. As a consequence, the reader can deduce that the narrator’s surname is Pineau, despite the fact that the word is never used. Nonetheless, this remains a cryptic reference to paternal lineage in a text which privileges maternal figures. The use of pronouns also contrives to create a certain distance. The first-person plural ‘nous’ opens the narrative, referring to the narrator and her siblings. The first-person singular, ‘je’, does not exclusively correspond to the narrator’s point of view, and the text is characterized by several shifts and distortions of the narrative vantage point. Not only does the reader have access to the narrator’s feelings, but through these switches in the narrative focus they are also privy to the thoughts, reflections and hopes of her mother, grandmother, father and younger brother Elie, in episodes from which the narrator, Marie, is absent. The text derives much of its urgency of perspective and raw emotive appeal from these narrative shifts and multiple narrative voices. In a complete break with other récits d’enfance, in L’Exil the first-person narrator yields to – or rather becomes – an omniscient narrator, relating, or rather imagining and ventriloquizing, other characters’ innermost

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thoughts. This most often occurs with female characters: usually Julia, but also Daisy, the narrator’s mother. On occasion, the manner in which such fragments are interwoven into the narrative approaches style indirect libre. Thus when Man Ya decides to visit Sacré-Cœur with her grandson Elie, and then loses her way, the text juxtaposes Man Ya’s actions with Elie’s anxious interior monologue: ‘Répéter le nom de la cité pour le dire à un policier. Répéter le nom pour retrouver la maison’ (p. 89). The narrator, Marie, is absent from this episode, and no explanation is provided as to how she knows these events took place; yet the implication would seem to be that it is the narrator who is putting herself in Elie’s position and imagining his reaction, a further example of the text’s obsessive preoccupation with breaking down psychological barriers to access interior, hidden thoughts. Another distancing effect is produced by constantly directing the narrative focus at Julia. For Gyssels, using the grandmother as a focal point is further proof of the distinction between author and narrator: ‘Quoiqu’enrichie [sic] par le tableau d’enfance qu’elle nous fournit, Pineau ne se met pas vraiment en scène: la retransposition de son enfance mi-parisienne, mi-antillaise est filtrée par le regard, guidée par la main de quelqu’un d’autre, la grand-mère.’21 As established in the Introduction to this study, a key characteristic of récits d’enfance is their narration of childhood memories from infancy to adolescence from a position of relative transparency, rather than mediating or ventriloquizing such memories through a fictional protagonist. L’Exil sits between the genres of the récit d’enfance and the novel, taking a child as its protagonist but stopping short of the overt identification of author and narrator which characterizes the other texts studied here. Pineau’s measured, brief epigraph reminds the reader that what follows is largely true, but this notion of truth is qualified and tempered by the equally valid interventions of imagination and emotion: Hasards de la mémoire, inventions? Tout est vrai et faux, émotions. Ici, l’essentiel voisine les souvenirs adventices. Il n’y a ni héros ni figurants. Ni bons ni méchants. Seulement l’espérance en de meilleurs demains. (p. 9)

The epigraph inscribes the text under the sign of optimism for a more tolerant future. Strikingly, Pineau chooses a botanical metaphor, ‘souvenirs adventices’, to convey the notion of adventitious fabricated

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memories growing at random in the spaces and cracks between more fundamental episodes. This prefigures her recurring use of botanical and environmental imagery in passages on memory and identity throughout the text. Immigration: la citoyenneté inachevée Pineau is unusual in voicing the immigrant experience, which remains surprisingly under-represented both in récits d’enfance and in Francophone Antillean cultural output more generally. 22 Madeleine Dobie has termed this the ‘cultural effacement’ of Antillean migration, citing statistics which estimate that between 310,000 and 500,000 people of French Antillean descent live in metropolitan France. 23 As Martinique and Guadeloupe have approximately 400,000 inhabitants each, the Antillean population in France constitutes what Alain Anselin has termed ‘la troisième île’. 24 In Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, Maryse Condé begins to explore diasporic identity during her prolonged stays in post-war Paris as a child, but Pineau’s text (published three years earlier) presents the complexities of a more permanent move to metropolitan France in the 1960s. Denied the stability of a childhood spent in one place, and instead knowing a succession of ‘amarrages et démarrages’ (p. 28), the narrator’s formative years are marked by a sense of absence and loss: J’ai longtemps gardé le sentiment d’avoir perdu quelque chose: une formule qui perçait jadis les geôles, un breuvage souverain délivrant la connaissance, une mémoire, des mots, des images. J’ai nourri en moi cette perte, pesante comme un deuil, manque sans définition. (p. 20)

This pronounced concern with mechanisms of loss leads Sam Haigh to read L’Exil as an example of the ‘dépression nationale’ which Julia Kristeva has argued is currently afflicting France. Haigh explores the dynamics of melancholia in Pineau’s text with reference to Freud and focusing on Kristeva’s suggestion that France is in a state of national depression, stemming in part from a lost ideal, ‘somehow, obscurely, linked to France’s colonial past, of which contemporary immigration is the constant reminder, like the residue of a traumatic memory’. 25 It is this problematic confrontation with the legacy of colonialism which Pineau’s narrator attempts to articulate. In L’Exil, the narrator and her grandmother both seek to preserve the link to the beloved country of origin, Guadeloupe, through the repeated

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evocation of lost landscapes, as the psychological relationship to the (lost) country of origin becomes a formative aspect of their identities. By providing two heroines, from two separate generations, Pineau is able to study this attachment from two different perspectives. The grandmother, who has spent her entire life in Guadeloupe, lives through her memories and, as Haigh has argued, her experience of racial melancholia is quite literal […] From the start, she experiences her exile as ‘le manque de pays’ – as a lack, a loss, a wound, and as the prospect of returning to Guadeloupe gradually fades, she sinks into full-blown depression […] suffering from what her family names ‘[la] maladie de l’exil’. 26

In contrast, her granddaughter presents a more complex case, as she has spent just a few months in Guadeloupe, and retains only the vaguest childhood memories of the country of origin. The narrator faces a dilemma common to the children of immigrants, which Dominic Thomas neatly summarizes: ‘How […] can protagonists “return” to a country they never left?’27 Pineau’s text acknowledges the problematic implications of the child’s psychological relationship with Guadeloupe – which manifests itself as a melancholic state of withdrawal – and the rejection of metropolitan French society that it entails. Yet it is apparent that this rejection is not an inward-looking form of communautarisme. Rather, it is a protective measure to shield herself from the everyday aggression she encounters, typified by the racist taunts which open the text and run through it as a leitmotif: ‘Négro/ Négresse à plateau/ Blanche-Neige/ Bamboula/ Charbon/ et compagnie … Ces noms-là nous pistent en tous lieux’ (p. 11). Pineau’s list of insults has the ring of playground abuse, suggested in particular by ‘Bamboula’, an African word which originally referred to a drum but which has become a racially abusive term in France. In the 1990s it was the focus of a campaign led by SOS Racisme. The campaign targeted a biscuit called ‘Bamboula’, marketed predominantly at children and advertised by an African mascot dressed in a leopard skin. 28 Repeatedly taunted for her otherness, and made to feel she is not welcome in metropolitan France, the narrator fosters her attachment to an imagined Guadeloupe as a source of comfort, an attachment nurtured by the tangible link offered by Man Ya. The narrator’s parents form part of the wave of post-Second World War Antillean immigrants. In this period, military service was viewed by French politicians (including some French Caribbean politicians)

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as a conduit for emigration and settlement in mainland France. 29 It is Maréchal’s military career which enables his family to emigrate in the 1950s, as is explained in the opening chapter. Military emigration schemes were not the only opportunity available to immigrants: in 1963 the Bureau pour le développement des migrations intéressant les départements d’outre-mer, known as the BUMIDOM, was created by the French government. The BUMIDOM promoted a scheme of mass emigration to metropolitan France from the DOMs. In 1982 it was replaced by the Agence Nationale pour l’insertion et la promotion des Travailleurs d’outre-mer (ANT), and Antillean immigration to France began to decline. 30 Penser la Créolité, the collection of essays published in response to Eloge which Condé co-edited, draws attention to the conspicuous absence of immigration in créoliste discourse. One of the major criticisms levelled at the créoliste manifesto is its failure to consider immigration as part of the contemporary Creole mosaic. In Penser la Créolité, Condé comments on the créoliste authors’ failure to take account of ‘ces bouleversements, […] ces mutations et […] ces redéfinitions d’identité’. 31 It is precisely these factors which Pineau underscores in her contribution to Penser la Créolité: Contrairement aux écrivains créoles de ma génération, je n’ai pas vécu une enfance antillaise sous les tropiques. J’ai connu la cité, ses alignements d’immeubles gris, la froidure des hivers en France, la neige, les manteaux de laine et l’indicible sentiment d’être exclue, inadaptée, déplacée dans cet environnement blanc-carré-policé. 32

As Renée Larrier has pointed out, the uneasy depiction of immigration in L’Exil resonates with the concept of la citoyenneté inachevée, 33 a concept developed by the Antillean academic Julien Daniel. Daniel’s term articulates the second-class citizenship bind in which island migrants to the metropole find themselves. Technically, they are and always have been French citizens, yet once in the mère patrie their Antillean culture marks them out as ‘other’ while their skin tone makes them the target of racism and discrimination. Similarly, Marjorie Attignol Salvodon argues that immigrants from diverse backgrounds in France are trapped in a double appartenance which exposes the inability of French republican universal principles to accommodate hybridity, difference and multiculturalism, and points to an urgent need to ‘infus[e] the ideal of Republicanism with the real lives of French citizens of all backgrounds’. 34 Both concepts confirm Glissant’s comments in Le

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Discours antillais that ‘l’émigré antillais en France […] mène la vie de l’émigré mais il a un statut de citoyen. […] Il se sent français, mais il subit des formes latentes ou déclarées de racisme […]’. 35 Racism pervades L’Exil, from the opening list of insults to a number of specific, distressing incidents which centre around Marie and Man Ya. Marie is victimized at school by two malicious teachers, one of whom refers to her as ‘La Noire’ and expresses open surprise when she proves herself an able pupil (p. 60). A second teacher, Mme Baron, humiliates Marie, forcing her to spend hours sitting under her desk in an act which the narrator realizes can only be attributed to the teacher’s inured racism: ‘elle n’aime pas voir ma figure de négresse, ma peau noire’ (p. 152). Man Ya’s skin tone and cultural difference also mean that she is set apart from her family and wider society, making for several moments of poignant tragi-comedy which arise because she continues to behave in the same way as in Guadeloupe. Edward Said has argued that exile ‘is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ with the result that people in exile experience ‘an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people’. 36 Yet Man Ya’s exile is quite different: it is a personal, individual exile in which the old lady almost automatically establishes continuities between here and there, now and before, her confidence in her culture of origin remaining completely unshaken throughout her exilic experience. As in Guadeloupe, she decides to dry laundry by hanging it up in trees rather than using a washing-line, but is quickly admonished for such behaviour: ‘et manman a beau répéter qu’ici, en France, on ne procède pas ainsi’ (p. 66). This belittling admonishment from her own daughter-in-law is all the more heartless, as here Man Ya’s behaviour is an expression of creativity, and a turning point out of an initial bout of depression. On another occasion, Man Ya dons her son’s military jacket for the practical reason that she realizes it will make a sturdy raincoat, but the local French community interpret this as an affront and report her to the police for wrongfully wearing a military uniform. In an absurd twist, the old lady is almost arrested. She is only released thanks to Daisy’s ability to speak perfect ‘français de France’ (p. 73). 37 Potentially incendiary Guadeloupean mannerisms must be defused, and translated, to make them acceptable in metropolitan France. Language once again proves a barrier when Man Ya is lost on the way to Sacré-Cœur. A group of nuns scuttle past, ignoring her request for help because it is in Creole; the narrator interjects to inform the reader that they are frightened by ‘cette négresse qui s’exprime dans

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une langue africaine, tout en faisant de grands gestes qui menacent leurs voilures immaculées’ (p. 90). Such racist hypocrisy is particularly poignant given Man Ya’s deep religious devotion. Yet these examples do not represent failure for Man Ya – instead they symbolize her resourcefulness and resilience. The almost silent, ridiculed and subaltern woman is thus subtly transformed into a figure of dignity and resistance, whose idiosyncratic but creative and pragmatic ways of behaving expose metropolitan French society as closed, rigid and racially intolerant. Lost Landscapes The narrator’s determination to feel a connection with Guadeloupe develops through her observation of the deep attachment both her paternal grandmother and her own mother experience for the country. It is also a defence mechanism against metropolitan racism, which creates a protective fantasy landscape for the child, as Beverley Ormerod comments: ‘[Pineau] seeks to show the power of an imagined landscape and society to heal the uncertainties of a child with no previous sense of national or racial belonging’. 38 Man Ya propels the narrative in two directions: she is the palpable link with Guadeloupe and Antillean culture and is simultaneously the culturally dislocated figure whose guileless ingenuity actually enables her to destabilize the supposed superiority of metropolitan France. Pineau is inviting readers to re-evaluate France, and indeed Western society. For her grandchildren, Man Ya comes to represent ‘un pont de corde solide entre Là-Bas et le Pays’ (p. 218), and the old lady’s own sense of cultural security arises largely from her evocations of the Guadeloupean landscape. In her first appearance in L’Exil, she constructs a tableau of her Creole garden back in Routhiers, a utopian, paradisiacal and tangible space which contrasts with the harsh Parisian surroundings of the text’s opening: Elle le dresse pour nous comme un lieu merveilleux où toutes espèces d’arbres, plantes et fleurs se multiplient dans une verdure accablante […] Et puis elle nous hisse dans les branches de ses arbres, juste pour mieux nous montrer l’horizon tout bosselé par les petits [sic] îles qui ploient sous le poids de leurs volcans ventripotents, fumant, crachant. (p. 17)

This Creole garden, moreover, presents an opening to the greater Caribbean archipelago. References to Man Ya’s garden are reinforced

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and embellished by the landscapes of Creole folklore, and her oral accounts are echoed by the printed tales in Thérèse Georgel’s Contes et Légendes des Antilles, which the narrator reads avidly (p. 116). These tales take place in a clearly defined Caribbean setting. In Marie’s imaginary, however, Creole folklore undergoes a transformative process and is now applied to a new set of circumstances. The tales are severed from their original Guadeloupean context and their resistive resonances come to relate to her position as an immigrant. Mythology which originated as a means of overcoming centuries of Caribbean slavery now offers a way of coping with the racial bullying she is enduring at school: ‘Ils ont cinquante vies et quelques, inépuisables […] Là, rien ni personne, pas même le temps, ne meurt jamais tout à fait. Il y a toujours une résurrection possible, un envol probable, un retour pour une échappée belle’ (p. 117). The possibility of reinvention and new beginnings brings hope to a child who is struggling with a claustrophobic contemporary diasporic situation. Man Ya also struggles to adapt to life in France. She was forcibly removed from Guadeloupe by her son and is afflicted by terrible homesickness for Routhiers, even longing to be reunited with her abusive husband, Asdrubal. After a hard first winter living in Aubigné-Racan, she is revived by the spring and the opportunity it affords to tend the garden. Pineau underscores her physical connection with the land: Man Ya déracine, sème, arrose et veille l’ascension des jeunes plantes. Manier la terre, la tourner, la sentir entre ses doigts, l’exalte. […] Elle gagne une autre dimension. L’arbre de vie qui croit au mitan de son estomac pour retenir son Cœur, comme un nid dans ses branches, sourit et fait des fleurs. (pp. 66–67)

The relationship to the earth begins to reconcile her with metropolitan life, in part because it recalls her Creole garden in Guadeloupe. Yet Man Ya is cruelly deprived of this link when the family move from their first home in Aubigné-Racan to Paris. The cover of the livre de poche edition depicts this incongruity, showing a woman in colourful Creole attire set against a rigid, grey cityscape. Trapped in this closed urban environment, Man Ya worries that her grandchildren will grow up in the cité having little contact with the natural world, and that her vast knowledge of plants and natural remedies will die with her (pp. 126–27, 128). As Dawn Fulton has observed, ‘Paris “according to Julia” is a tragic absence of text, compounded by a shameful collective ignorance of the suppressed natural landscape’ [original emphasis]. 39 Sinking further and

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further into depression, Man Ya’s wish to return home is eventually granted, and she leaves with a relative. Once back in Guadeloupe, there is an unexpected positive result of the hardships overcome in France: Man Ya has a newfound sense of liberty and assertiveness. She immediately establishes her autonomy by forbidding Asdrubal ever to lay a finger on her again (p. 215), and he respects this command. Her years of servitude, often figured as slavery in the narrative, are at an end.40 Without her grandmother’s presence, the narrator struggles to keep the link to Guadeloupe alive. Whereas it was quite natural for the old lady to sustain a deep connection to her native island, Marie struggles to recall Guadeloupe and to locate her own identity in a hostile environment. In an attempt to sustain the link to both Man Ya and Guadeloupe, she composes a series of letters which could be read aloud to her illiterate grandmother. This epistolary section draws an implicit parallel between transatlantic slavery and the Holocaust through repeated references to the Diary of Anne Frank, a text which leads Marie to develop a more global awareness of notions of diaspora, suffering, exile and confinement. In their tone and style, the letters are reminiscent of a journal intime, and Marie is adamant that some letters will not be posted. Indeed, in this section Man Ya becomes an imagined construct who provides a psychological space for the narrator to express herself, much like Anne Frank’s imagined correspondent Kitty. The section marks the narrator’s increasing physical and emotional maturity, as well as her entry into writing. With the physical absence of Man Ya, structuring identity becomes a difficult and daunting task until the literary representation of the Holocaust provides ‘a kind of template’ for Marie to express her own overwhelming feelings of physical and mental confinement.41 The letters discuss some of the most pernicious and disturbing examples of everyday racism in the text, and through this stripping of the narrative into short, first-person letters, the reader is left in no doubt as to the traumatic impact of such events. Man Ya now metonymically represents Guadeloupe, as a longing for a little-known place of origin has been superseded by a longing for her. Although she cannot play any active role in the epistolary section, her memory inspires creativity from afar. Celia Britton draws attention to the way that the paradigm of diaspora in Caribbean writing is marked by feelings of incompleteness and inadequacy, finding that this double structure – a longing for a longing – echoes the double structure of diaspora in the Caribbean in which migration to Europe is

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superimposed on the original African diaspora, with the result that the Caribbean home always figures as a less than ideal homeland, and can never wholly fulfil the phantasy of return from exile.42

Marie’s experience of diaspora is shaped by this double structure. Her racial difference serves as a reminder of the African diaspora, as becomes apparent from her memory of old school photos taken in France showing her as ‘la seule négrillonne parmi tous les petits Blancs’ (p. 57). Such realizations led her to figure her identity through natural metaphors: ‘En un petit moment, tu comprends que tu n’as jamais su quelle personne tu étais, ce que tu es venue chercher sur cette terre. Tu suspends ta vie aux grosses lianes que te jettent des arbres’ (p. 58). The perplexed narrator clings to the figurative trees and creepers of identity, in the hope that these will provide her with a sense of selfhood. Her confusion is compounded by racist taunts which order her to ‘retournez dans votre pays, Bamboulas!’ and ‘retournez! chez vous en Afrique’ (p. 139). Of course, Africa is emphatically not the narrator’s homeland. Nonetheless, it forms another lost landscape in L’Exil, and is a more tangible presence than in other récits d’enfance because the family were briefly posted there when Marie was an infant. The narrator retains impressionistic memories of such landscapes, recalling ‘des amandiers immenses, lents à se mouvoir comme des vieux-corps perclus qui ne branlent pas un poil de peur de lever une douleur. Ils jettent des taches d’ambre sur une terrasse que le soleil blanchit’ (p. 19). However, diaspora proves a treacherous concept; this was no return to origins as imagined by the philosophers of négritude, and Africa was ultimately unwelcoming: ‘Manman disait que l’Afrique nous avait pourtant toujours tenus à distance, comme si la couleur de la peau seule ne faisait pas la famille’ (p.  20). Racist admonishments to go back to Africa provoke severe malaise in the narrator about where exactly she should return to: ‘Je veux bientôt retourner dans mon pays. Mais quel pays? Quelle Afrique? L’Afrique du temps d’armée de papa ne revient plus à ma mémoire qu’en déballages irréels’ (pp. 139–40). The double structure is once again at work: white French people repeatedly situate Marie within a black African diasporic framework, yet she herself is aware that the landscape of which she dreams is unmistakably Caribbean. Yet the Caribbean landscape is not solely a source of comfort. Paradoxically, towards the end of the book, as the adolescent narrator physically approaches this landscape during the flight to the Antilles, her latent anxieties about her lack of real knowledge of the Caribbean come to the fore:

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Comment démêler les rêves de la réalité? L’invention du véritable? Le réel du conte? […] Craindre que ces îles modelées au lointain ne soient que construction de carton-pâte, décor de Cinémascope, mornes peints à la gouache pour colorer l’exil. Craindre et imaginer que tout n’ait été inventé par Man Ya. (p. 169)

The return to Guadeloupe is suspended because the family first spend a year in Martinique. They live in a rural area and run a farm, suggesting harmony with the Antillean landscape, but the chapter entitled ‘Les 5 plaies du retour au pays pas natal’ ironically combines the title of Césaire’s poem with five of the ten plagues wrought upon Egypt in the Old Testament. This section of the text sees the natural environment turn against them in a series of natural disasters. Moreover, when the children try to walk through their new landscape to the coast, they lose their way in Fort-de-France, in an episode which is reminiscent of Man Ya’s epic walk to Sacré-Cœur. This exposes the fallacy of lost landscapes; the siblings have no real knowledge of the Caribbean, a problem which is mirrored at school where they do not fit in, their metropolitan French and lack of fluency in Creole language and customs marking them out as négropolitains. Although this term is not used in the text, it aptly characterizes their outsider status as ‘the returning or visiting immigrant who brings back to the Caribbean Parisian attitudes, aspirations, values and lifestyles, who speaks Creole with a Parisian accent or cannot speak Creole at all and who is received by locals with a mixture of envy, amusement and contempt’.43 The children’s return is only complete when they finally move to Guadeloupe and are reunited with Man Ya in her native environment. The scene introduces them to the fabled garden in Routhiers, thus triumphantly concluding her narrative arc; the terrestrial paradise she had evoked to her grandchildren and which marked her first appearance in the text is indeed real. The visit becomes an initiation, as Man Ya guides them around her Creole garden, in which flora, fauna and history again interconnect in the form of ‘des arbres immenses qui avaient vu défiler les nations bien avant l’esclavage’ (p. 216). Significantly, the final image of Julia is that of an active, contented woman, achieving a perfect symbiosis with her landscape: ‘Man Ya à Aubigné-Racan, Man Ya de retour à Sacré-Cœur, Man Ya et les gendarmes. Mais aucun de ces souvenirs ne se superposait avec cette Man Ya qui riait, tout là-haut, dans les branches de son arbre’ (p. 217). The narrative’s ending evades the more fraught question of how the children themselves will adapt to their new Guadeloupean environment,

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and pictures them contentedly, if passively, watching their overjoyed grandmother. A Darker Lost Landscape: The Scene of Recognition L’Exil illustrates a claim made by another Antillean grandmother in Lacrosil’s Sapotille et le serin d’argile, who declares that the transmission of the slave past is a vital component of the child’s development and is the specific responsibility of the grandmother (discussed in Chapter 1). The first explanation of life under slavery is provided by the children’s maternal grandmother Man Baboule (also referred to as Man Boule) during their brief stay in Guadeloupe before moving to France when Marie is aged five. These details are woven into a folkloric account of an apocalyptic natural hazard, a tidal wave which, legend states, will one day obliterate the Antilles, and will in the process uncover ‘les vaisseaux négriers et quantités de vieux os d’esclaves’ (p. 46). These allusions to the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery will be fully developed by their paternal grandmother, Man Ya.44 If in Paris, Man Ya is incongruous to the point that she appears ‘un personnage anachronique’ (p. 84), her unshakable connection with Guadeloupe also renders her a vehicle for the transmission of historical memory. Man Ya’s stories about slavery arise voluntarily and form a bridge with her own childhood through the stories her own mother told her: Et lorsqu’elle nous chuchote les histoires d’esclavage que lui contait sa manman, des frissons se lèvent sur son âme. […] Les longueurs de mer traversées. Le fouet. La misère des champs de cannes. Le poison. Les langues avalées. Le fouet. Le tambour qui bat comme un Cœur dans la nuit. La désespérance. Les chaînes. La peur. La ruse. Le fouet. (p. 84)

The fragmented, anaphoric structure of these descriptions conveys the fragmented discovery of the history of slavery which unlocks the scene of recognition. In this case, rather than signifying awkward embarrassment, heavy punctuation and brief sentences resonate with loaded intensity, creating an impressionistic, atemporal landscape of trauma which switches from images of despair to fleeting darts of resistance. Man Ya’s willingness to disclose the past stands in stark contrast to the narrator’s parents and their friends, who maintain a studied silence. The narrator dwells on the discomfort generated by discussion of slavery:

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L’esclavage! c’est un mot honni des grandes personnes. Le seul fait de le prononcer les précipite dans une baille où blanchissent les os du temps d’avant. […] Interroger, c’est lever un embarras. Se questionner, c’est perdre pied dans les grandes eaux de l’Histoire du monde, tour à tour démontée et faussement ensommeillée. On nous demande seulement de vivre au jour présent, laisser reposer la lie du passé, ne pas découdre ces sacs miteux où l’on a enfermé la honte et l’humiliation d’être descendants d’esclaves nègres africains. (p. 111)

The act of questioning is taboo and loaded with shame and humiliation, a typical characteristic of the scene of recognition. In L’Exil, it is equated with losing one’s foothold and opening shabby sacks of memories. Haigh reads this silence as a generational phenomenon, and, focusing in particular on Maréchal, she suggests that the generation to which the narrator’s parents belong is trapped ‘in the “euphoric” stage of racial melancholia and thus desperate to assimilate and prove themselves to be French’; consequently they ‘find slavery shameful and humiliating and repress the memory of it’.45 Maréchal does indeed belong to a specific post-war generation of Antillean immigrants, but his behaviour is very similar to that of Condé’s parents in Le Cœur, whose age aligns them with Man Ya’s generation. Age and generation are not the only factors at work, and in fact the effects of social class and education would seem to be most significant here. If Maréchal’s idolization of de Gaulle positions him as a convincing example of racial melancholia, the repression of the slave past evident in his generation must also be seen as a symptom of increasingly bourgeois aspirations, as stated in L’Exil: ils ne peuvent pas admettre qu’ils viennent de là aussi et mesurent, en se mirant les uns les autres, le chemin parcouru par le Nègre. Man Ya illustre à elle seule toutes ces pensées d’esclavage qui leur viennent parfois et qu’ils étouffent et refoulent comme le créole dans leur bouche. Ils sont infiniment redevables à la France. (pp. 83–84)

This configuration clearly has parallels with Condé’s parents’ determination to see themselves as accomplished members of the Race de Grands-Nègres. Both sets of parents share unmistakable similarities with Fanon’s évolués. In the face of such repression, Man Ya stands apart for her willingness to accept the past in all its traumatic detail and to ensure that the memory will not be lost: ‘Seule, Man Ya ose nous instruire. Elle excelle en ce domaine’ (p. 111). In L’Exil, there is no single scene of recognition, but rather a series of moments interspersed throughout the narrative in which the

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grandmothers Man Ya and (to a lesser extent) Man Boule discuss slavery. There is no sudden moment when the child asks a difficult question, as both grandmothers impart information gradually and voluntarily. Nonetheless, the narrator comes to realize that there are some questions to which even Man Ya has no answer, as the collective memory she imparts does not go back further than the Middle Passage: Je voyais la cale du bateau, les corps entassés, la traversée, le tangage infernal, la terreur. Lequel de mes ancêtres avait connu ces fers? D’où venait-il exactement? Son nom? Sa langue? Tout était effacé … Interroger Man Ya ne renseignait guère. Même quand les Blancs lui criaient de retourner dans son pays d’Afrique, elle ne remontait pas au-delà de cette traversée-là. (pp. 114–15)46

As Christopher Miller observes when discussing Glissant’s ­representation of the Middle Passage, the style used here sends a message of its own: this experience cannot be represented in transparent language. Normal grammar cannot do it justice […] the barrier – the veil – will remain in place, even as Glissant shows how much can be divined through it, about an experience that was ‘mute’. [original emphasis]47

Miller’s comments also apply to Pineau’s style and language. The Middle Passage acts as a historical rupture, a defining act which also becomes a foundational moment in Man Ya’s Caribbean memory, obliterating all trace of before, testing the boundaries of representation, and marking the beginning of Creole culture.48 Another bold aspect of this Antillean historical landscape is the discussion of the two abolitions of slavery in the French empire. As Guadeloupean authors, it is unsurprising that Maximin and Pineau place emphasis on the Guadeloupean resistance to the 1802 reinstatement of slavery led by the popular hero Delgrès (although, in contrast, their countrywoman Maryse Condé makes only one unglossed reference to a ferry which bears his name).49 L’Exil is the only text to explore the psychological consequences of the 1794 abolition, the 1802 reinstatement and the eventual, definitive 1848 abolition of slavery. In Man Ya’s accounts the specific dates 1794 and 1802 are not provided, but the reintroduction of slavery abruptly deadens all celebration of the original abolition: Las, le temps de compter les bras, on rétablissait déjà l’esclavage. La loi venait de France, c’était écrit, signé, tamponné. On disait que la Martiniquaise Joséphine l’avait, dans sa couche, elle-même dictée à

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Bonaparte. Alors, on eut beau imprimer des mots de papier pour dénoncer la loi, il fallut lever des armées au nom de la liberté, et tomber sous les balles. (p. 113)

This is the only reference in the récits d’enfance to the well-known legend that the Empress Josephine, a béké, coaxed Napoleon to reintroduce slavery because her family’s plantation in Martinique was suffering. The deadening physical description of the law’s promulgation (‘écrit, signé, tamponné’) underscores the swift betrayal of the ideological rhetorical flourishes which had accompanied abolition in 1794. Although Delgrès is not named, the extract subtly alludes to the mass suicide of his army and echoes his mantra of ‘vivre libre ou mourir’. The memory of this betrayal, and its horrific consequences, is embedded in Man Ya’s descriptions of slavery. Despite this open discussion, the negative consequences of slavery continue to make themselves felt. Man Ya submits to Asdrubal’s violence partially as a result of the way she has been conditioned to accept her status as a ‘négresse laide’ (p. 91) who is condemned to the bottom rungs of the ethnoclass hierarchy, a direct consequence of the hierarchies imposed under plantation slavery. Furthermore, even for Man Ya, the very term ‘esclavage’ is taboo: ‘1848. Date de l’abolition. La grandmanman de Man Ya avait eu le temps de connaître l’esclavage. Mais ce mot-là, fallait pas le dire haut et trop souvent. Qui sait s’il ne reviendrait pas’ (p. 111). As McCusker observes, the obsessive repetition of the date 1848 in L’Exil is striking ‘in a text in which specific temporal markers are noticeable by their absence’. 50 Man Ya’s superstitious account of why the word ‘esclavage’ must be avoided is reminiscent of the Creole tales in which uttering a magical term can release evil spirits; yet read against historical archive, this is not the illogical superstition of an old woman but a logical psychological consequence of the first, abortive attempt at abolition and the betrayal of republican principles in 1802. Conclusion Récits d’enfance by Maximin and Pineau invite a comparative reading as both focus on the natural environment of Guadeloupe. In both texts, nature shapes the child’s consciousness and understanding of the world, and is presented as a repository of personal and national history and memory. The personal geographies of each protagonist are very different: while Maximin’s childhood is steeped in his lived experience

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of the Caribbean, in L’Exil, memories of Guadeloupe are associative and incremental, and are significant not only for the topological landscapes they present, but also for the protective function they fulfil. The natural landscape provides a source of hope in the face of suffering, and symbolizes (and even catalyses) the resistance which is central to both authors’ œuvres. In addition, nature plays an educative role and can be deciphered and read in order to gain access to Caribbean history and collective memory. Appropriately, it is this very rootedness of memory within place which closes Tu, c’est l’enfance: La mémoire des événements appartient aux témoins qui les ont vécus, la morale à l’histoire, et l’enfance aux enfants. Les descendants fidèles héritent d’un patrimoine de signes et d’amnésie que le temps enterre pour les enraciner et ne laisser fleurir que les souvenirs vifs. (p. 177)

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chapter six

Thwarted Expectations? Stasis and Change in Haiti in Dany Laferrière’s L’Odeur du café and Le Charme des après-midi sans fin Stasis and Change in Haiti

Close studies of récits d’enfance by authors from Martinique and Guadeloupe have identified similar sites of literary tension: the French–Creole diglossia, the ethnoclass hierarchy with its interrelated socio-economic stratifications, and the negotiation of the colonial past and slave history. Two récits d’enfance by Haitian author Dany Laferrière, L’Odeur du café (1991) and its sequel, Le Charme des après-midi sans fin (1997), display pronounced differences in their approach to childhood. The integration of a Haitian writer into this study requires rigorous contextual analysis, and this chapter will outline important stages in Haitian history as well as considering Laferrière’s position as a diasporic author based in Quebec, before discussing the interplay between memory, history and childhood in his récits d’enfance. To the reader familiar with Graham Greene’s violent account of Haiti in The Comedians,1 set in Port-au-Prince at a time contemporaneous with Laferrière’s childhood recollections (which take place in 1963–64), Laferrière’s récits d’enfance may come as a surprise. The narratives present him as a happy and contented child, growing up in the town of Petit-Goâve under the guidance of his loving grandmother, Da. This chapter’s title alludes to Laferrière’s refusal to base his childhood memoirs on the danger, poverty, violence and political upheaval which have become synonymous with Haiti, a situation that has recently been tragically exacerbated by the devastating earthquake of 12 January 2010.

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In Chapter 1 the relative lack of récits d’enfance and autobiographical literature from Haiti was noted. Laferrière is the first modern Haitian author to turn to this genre, and it is significant that other Haitian authors now based outside Haiti have also written textual accounts which are closely concerned with childhood. Another Haitian émigré to Canada, Emile Ollivier, published a récit d’enfance entitled Mille Eaux (1999) shortly before his death in 2002. Ollivier’s dark, reflective text, published with Gallimard’s influential ‘Haute enfance’ series, explores his traumatic relationship with his mother and the difficult material conditions which led to his truncated childhood: ‘J’ai connu ce genre de souffrance réservée aux adultes et j’ai dû les [sic] affronter sur le même plan qu’eux’. 2 A third Haitian-Quebecois author to draw on childhood is Marie-Célie Agnant. Agnant has not written a récit d’enfance, but in the novel Le Livre d’Emma (2001) she uses a psychoanalytic framework to explore the links between a Haitian mother’s act of infanticide, her childhood and the slave past. 3 The best-known text from the Haitian diaspora to discuss childhood is Jean-Robert Cadet’s autobiography, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American (1998),4 which is written in English, reflecting the fact that the author now lives in the United States. The first half of the narrative discusses his childhood and the traumatic abuse he suffered as a restavec. The term literally translates as ‘stay with’, and refers to poor Haitian children who are taken in and given accommodation by wealthier families, but in return are exploited as domestic slaves. Cadet makes forceful parallels between the lives of restavecs and African slaves, and demonstrates how the ethnoclass hierarchy continues to shape Haitian society. His autobiography broaches more adult material than the récits d’enfance, documenting horrific, sustained sexual and physical abuse. In the text’s foreword, Cadet foregrounds the fact that the restavec phenomenon continues to be a problem, estimating that in 1994 there were over 250,000 restavecs in Haiti. Martin Munro comments that Laferrière ‘belongs to a generation that knew little else of Haiti other than an increasingly impoverished, violent, and (self-) destructive place’. 5 Yet the act of reflecting on his childhood actually offers this author a mode of meditation on a different Haiti. His récits d’enfance operate in a subtly allusive mode, their apparent simplicity nonetheless inviting the reader to learn about Haitian history and culture. Critics have concentrated on Laferrière’s more overtly political or controversial ‘adult’ texts, often approaching them through the lens of transnationalism and diaspora. But in the récits d’enfance,

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Laferrière has yet to leave Haiti, meaning that the texts resist such critical approaches. Instead, these texts introduce Dany Laferrière the boy, who predates the man who would undertake a journey into exile and then rise to fame as a sensationalist, transnational diasporic author. This might explain why the récits d’enfance have received little scholarly attention and are often dealt with in sweeping and dismissive generalizations, as Dennis F. Essar has remarked.6 However, such dismissals are unfounded. Both récits d’enfance are driven by an exploration of the restorative potential of literature, as Laferrière generates a sustained tension between calming images of stasis and distressing hints of change. This tension derives all the more impact from the implicit and unspoken acknowledgement that the reader is aware – as is the adult author – of the irrevocable changes which have ravaged Haitian society since Laferrière’s childhood. Elsewhere in his œuvre, Laferrière makes lengthy allusions to a range of literature, leading Munro to dub him the ‘Master of the New’,7 although Laferrière’s penchant for intertextuality remains conspicuously absent from the récits d’enfance, in a marked difference from texts by the DOM authors. In a further striking contrast, the narrator’s relationship to Haitian history and culture is presented in a straightforward manner, free from the influence of the mission civilisatrice. It is no coincidence that in L’Odeur, his beloved grandmother Da repeatedly requests that Dany recount the ‘leçon d’histoire’ about the battle of Vertières (which took place in November 1803, although this is not mentioned in the text). The battle is explained with characteristic simplicity as ‘la dernière bataille que l’armée indigène livra contre les Français’ (p. 136). Nonetheless, its effect on Dany is evident when he seizes a broom to re-enact the brave Haitian general Capoix-la-mort defeating Rochambeau, a general who was sent by Napoleon to regain control over the territory of Saint-Domingue which was once France’s wealthiest colony. Vertières was a defining and bloody campaign in the Haitian Revolution, and a final step towards Haitian independence, which was declared on 1 January 1804 (again, no dates are given in the text). In Laferrière’s récits d’enfance, characters repeatedly walk up and down the rue Dessalines, named after the revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and schoolchildren sing the Dessalinienne (L’Odeur, p. 198). In Le Charme, Da is compared to a ‘princesse du Xaragua’ (p. 29), an Amerindian princess who fought the Spanish and is revered as a founding figure of Haiti. Access to the Haitian past is unfettered and psychologically positive for the child; France is referenced in ways which

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underscore its defeat at Haitian hands, slavery does not feature in the texts, and there is no scene of recognition. Nonetheless, processes of recognition are at work in the récits d’enfance, operating through a dynamic of stasis and change. There is a narrative tension between the attempted suspension of any acknowledgement of the increasing danger of the Duvalier regime during Dany’s childhood, and the covert recognition of damage wrought by the passage of time upon Haiti. Comment décrire Dany Laferrière sans se fatiguer? Dany Laferrière was born on 13 April 1953 in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and named Windsor Kléber Laferrière.8 His father, Windsor Kléber Laferrière Senior, worked as a journalist in addition to teaching history at the prestigious Lycée Pétion, and was elected mayor of Port-au-Prince in 1957, the year Duvalier came to power. Laferrière Senior then became Haitian Secretary of Commerce and Industry, but was judged to be a dangerous influence and was sent abroad as an ambassador to Italy and Argentina. He never returned to live in Haiti, and settled in New York, where he died. Windsor Kléber Laferrière fils, known as Dany, was raised in Petit-Goâve, then moved to Port-au-Prince as a teenager. He became a journalist, but after his close friend and fellow journalist Gasner Raymond was murdered in 1976 by Baby Doc’s Tontons Macoutes, he fled Haiti, realizing that his intellectual activities had made him a target and his own life was in danger. Laferrière settled in Montreal, a hub of Haitian immigration. His first novel, provocatively entitled Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 9 was published in 1985 in Montreal and became a best-seller, launching Laferrière on to the Quebecois literary scene. It reached Anglophone audiences just two years later as How to Make Love to a Negro.10 The author’s public profile was raised when he became an idiosyncratic weather forecaster on Télévision Quatre Saisons, followed by several other television appearances. Laferrière’s second novel, Eroshima,11 published in 1987, returned to the subject of sexual relationships but was less well received. In 1991 L’Odeur was awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe and confirmed the author as an enduring literary presence. Laferrière’s international path is one of self-imposed exile, similar to the situation of thousands of Haitians since the 1970s, and the author himself wryly comments, ‘Je n’ai pas été exilé. J’ai fui avant d’être tué. C’est différent.’12 The dictatorship of François Duvalier

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(1957–71) saw Haiti descend into horrific violence and poverty, while he and his aides lived in luxury. Duvalier came to power with the promise of overthrowing the repressive ethnoclass hierarchy upheld by the bourgeois mulattos, which replicated colonial power structures by confining the black worker to the bottom rung of society; once in office, however, he executed his own ruthless methods of violent repression. The Duvalier dictatorship exploited a number of childhood terms and family metaphors. Most famously, François Duvalier was known as ‘Papa Doc’. Papa is used in Haitian vodou13 as a way of addressing spirits, and Duvalier himself claimed to be a hougan (Haitian vodou priest), modelling his image on Baron Samedi, one of the loa, the spirits of Haitian vodou who act as intermediaries between Bondye – (good) god – and humans.14 The term ‘Doc’ alluded to his former profession as a medical doctor. The word ‘Papa’ later also came to refer to his status as a father, distinguishing him from his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, who became known as ‘Baby Doc’. François Duvalier’s power was forcefully maintained through a nationwide network of militia, formed in 1959 as the Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité, and known as the Tontons Macoutes. This name also exploited childhood terms: tonton is the word which French children use for ‘uncle’. In Haiti, good children are visited at Christmas by Tonton Noël, while bad children are snatched by Tonton Macoute, who carries them away in a ‘macoute’ (gunnysack), a method favoured by Duvalier’s militia. The Tontons Macoutes relished – and fuelled – the cult of fear around them, dressing as blackshirts or in Nazi attire and claiming to be vodou zombies. Before his death in 1971, Duvalier conferred leadership as ‘President for Life’ on to his son, Jean-Claude, ‘Baby Doc’, who was removed from power in 1986 and went into exile in France. In Laferrière’s writing, this power transition plays a fundamental role in shaping his consciousness and the character of Haiti: ‘Si le père avait institué le régime sévère de la peur, avec le fils, la décadence s’est installée. [Pour le père,] le sexe était le péché absolu. Le meurtre, plutôt encouragé. Le fils, lui, ouvrait les portes de la maison à la musique étrangère […] au cinéma porno, aux films violents …’15 Laferrière was just four when François Duvalier came to power and both his childhood and youth were irrevocably marked by the Duvalier dictatorships, even after he fled Haiti, aged 23. As he has emphasized in an interview: ‘I suffered the Duvaliers for twenty-nine years of my life. That’s an entire life!’16 Laferrière’s geographic trajectory first took him from Haiti to the city of Montreal in Canada, where he settled in 1976. In the early 1990s

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he moved to the United States and spent several years in Miami, before returning to Montreal in 2003. His enduring connection to Canada, the country where he first rose to fame as an author, means he is not only considered as a member of the Haitian diaspora, but is also frequently referred to as a néo-Québécois author. For the Canadian critic Eloise Brière, he belongs to a new group of writers who ‘stretch the boundaries of the Québécois national narrative, prying it away from its essentialist roots’.17 Laferrière maintains a wary – and often characteristically provocative – distance from identity labels. He has rejected the movement of créolité, although his literary success has not come without a certain engagement with francophonie. He is a regular speaker at Salons du Livre in the Francophone world and in metropolitan France, notably at the 2006 Salon du Livre in Paris on the theme of ‘Francofffonies’ [sic], and has been awarded a number of geographically specific French-language literary prizes: the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe and the Prix Carbet des lycéens (Caribbean), the Prix Edgar-Lespérance (Québec),18 the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar (for Francophone authors living in the United States) and the Prix du Livre Réseau France Outremer. Despite this, ‘il se veut strictement international et universel’.19 Laferrière’s work repeatedly strives to demonstrate the obsolete nature of identity labels in a postmodern, globalized society in the throes of a technological revolution, exemplified by Je suis un écrivain japonais20 which refers the reader back to another publication, J’écris comme je vis, where the author makes the oft-cited declaration that ‘quand un Japonais me lit, je deviens un écrivain japonais’. 21 In 1998 Laferrière announced his retrospective intention that a sequence of ten texts, nine of which were already published, would constitute the project Une autobiographie américaine. 22 These works can be divided geographically as shown in Table 1. Through Une autobiographie américaine, Laferrière challenges the term ‘American’ and criticizes its monopolization by the United States. Canada and the Caribbean, he reminds readers, are also part of North America. The project negates the need for the term ‘Antilles’, which the author rejects as a remnant of French imperialism: The Caribbean is a region of America. I detest the word ‘Antilles’, which alludes to France. When I say that I am an American, I do it in order to place myself and to say that I am not Antillean (Antillais) – not a French subject. I belong to this continent that the United States has wanted to keep simply for itself. […] I think I am a better contender with An

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American Autobiography, which takes place in Petit-Goâve, Port-auPrince, Montréal, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, and San Juan (the airport) than many U.S. writers. 23

Table 1: The Ten Novels of Une autobiographie américaine ‘Haitian’ novels 1985

‘North American’ novels Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer

1987

Eroshima (reworked 1997)

1991

L’Odeur du café (Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe)

1992

Le Goût des jeunes filles (Prix Edgar-Lespérance 1993)

1993

Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? (Prix du Livre Réseau France Outremer, 2003)

1994

Chronique de la dérive douce

1996

Pays sans chapeau

1997

La Chair du maître Le Charme des après-midi sans fin

2000

Le Cri des oiseaux fous (Prix Marguerite Yourcenar; Prix Carbet des lycéens)

The texts in the cycle are intended to broadly depict Laferrière’s trajectory. Several works bear the hallmarks of autofiction, particularly those set in North America, which fuse autobiographical events with dark satire and episodes of fiction and fantasy. The author’s tendency to use the present tense, the first-person and situations which evoke his own life’s trajectory in his texts makes the relationship between author and narrator appear immediate, although this can be misleading, as the use of ‘je’ is no guarantee of total synthesis between the narrator and Dany Laferrière the author. The texts which form the Haitian part of the cycle more closely approach autobiography, with the exception of La Chair du maître, a collection of short stories which, after an autobiographical introductory story set in Petit-Goâve, are ‘recounted at a greater degree of narrative remove from Laferrière’s actual experience’. 24

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The act of reading Laferrière’s texts as autobiography is further challenged by their publication sequence, as the publication order of the Haitian texts does not reflect their narrative chronologies. For example, in narrative time L’Odeur is followed by Le Charme, which is followed by Le Goût, but the texts were not published in this order. Mathis-Moser draws attention to autobiographical resonances resulting from an ‘interminable jeu de miroirs’ which runs throughout the autobiographie américaine. 25 One such example is the author’s nickname, Vieux Os, which operates at a narrative level as a device for ‘distancing the author from the referent’.26 In the récits d’enfance, the full significance of the nickname, and its connotations of durability through association with the French phrase ‘faire de vieux os’, is revealed. In L’Odeur, this phrase is used to refer to the childhood treat of staying up late into the night: ‘Je crois bien qu’on fera de vieux os, ce soir. Da me racontera toutes sortes d’histoires de zombies, de loups-garous et de diablesses jusqu’à ce que je m’endorme’ (p. 21); the nickname will also assume extra poignancy towards the close of Le Charme (discussed below). In both narratives, Dany’s nickname of Vieux Os suggests he is older than his years, and underscores the fascination with temporality running through the texts. Un écrivain primitif Prior to the publication of L’Odeur, Laferrière had made his name as an author unabashedly writing about sex and the sexual taboo of mixed-race relationships. His childhood memoirs depict another side to the writer, as he himself has explained: I like abrupt changes in tone, scandals, fame. At the same time, I like the shade, arduous work, and simple happiness. What people have seen is not false, but it has always been only part of Dany Laferrière. I am the person who wrote both Comment faire l’amour and L’Odeur du café (irony and empathy, violence and tenderness). 27

By placing the récits d’enfance firmly within the framework of his autobiographie américaine, the author demands they be read as more gentle fragments of a composite whole. Together, L’Odeur and Le Charme form the most classically autobiographical pair in the autobiographie américaine. Both are intentionally simple in style and form, and offer a window on to Haiti in the 1960s, a society which the majority of Laferrière’s readers will not have experienced.

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The author’s intention to provide a vibrant, realistic depiction of his childhood is evident in his unusual choice of narrative tense. At the opening of L’Odeur, after an initial expository sentence in the perfect tense, he switches to the present. The narrator addresses the reader as though they were a visitor to Petit-Goâve, the town where he spent his childhood: J’ai passé mon enfance à Petit-Goâve, à quelques kilomètres de Port-auPrince. Si vous prenez la nationale Sud, [Petit-Goâve est] un peu après le terrible morne Tapion. Laissez rouler votre camion (on voyage en camion, bien sûr) jusqu’aux casernes (jaune feu), tournez tranquillement à gauche, une légère pente à grimper, et essayez de vous arrêtez au 88 de la rue Lamarre. Il est fort possible que vous voyiez, assis sur la galerie, une vieille dame au visage serein et souriant à côté d’un petit garçon de dix ans. La vieille dame, c’est ma grand-mère. Il faut l’appeler Da. Da tout court. L’enfant, c’est moi. Et c’est l’été 63. (p. 15)

Through this choice of narrative tense, Laferrière succeeds in evoking the child’s curious yet necessarily blinkered perception of time and events. The texts do not represent the vantage point of an adult narrator with an adult level of comprehension; instead, Dany is constantly struggling to grasp the significance of adult conversations, particularly those led by Da, a struggle which is related with characteristic humour: ‘je voudrais avoir des dents dans mes oreilles pour pouvoir mastiquer calmement ce qu’elle dit’ (Le Charme, p. 171). The narrator’s insistence on the vitality of his memories is all the more striking given the rupture between past and present. In electing to use the present tense, Laferrière restores dignity to Haiti; it is no longer the country billed as the poorest in the western hemisphere by the United Nations, but is represented instead through the prosperous and tight-knit community of Petit-Goâve. The 2009 documentary film Dany Laferrière: La dérive douce d’un enfant de Petit-Goâve 28 highlights the town as a symbolic repository of memory for the author, and concludes with a pilgrimage there to visit Da’s grave. All the other locations Laferrière visits in the film are defined by their distance in kilometres from Petit-Goâve, positing the town as a constant which grounds his international journeys. In the documentary, Laferrière comments on the way that the temporal, physical and emotional distance between his childhood and his adult life has shaped his imaginary: ‘La nostalgie, pour moi, c’est mon enfance. Il y a une plus grande distance pour moi entre mon enfance et mon adolescence qu’entre Montréal et Paris.’ The

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récits d’enfance revive these childhood memories. Written as though it is the child himself who is narrating, with a child’s insouciance for the future, they provide a method of bridging this distance. L’Odeur is a collection of vignettes divided into seven named parts, themselves divided into a total of 38 titled sub-sections, a structural technique which recurs throughout Laferrière’s œuvre. These sub-sections are broken down into brief paragraphs, each with its own title. In an interview, Carrol Coates identifies the abstract, aesthetic quality of these titles, associating them with the author’s interest in painting by suggesting they be considered ‘verbal paintings’, and Laferrière’s answer embraces the visual link: L’Odeur du café is a primitive picture (or a series of primitive pictures). […] Of course the image takes precedence. The poetic strength of that book is in its images (or their capacity for evocation). The expression ‘verbal painting’ is a good one since it was the painter who was at work, not a writer. I was a landscape painter in the grand Haitian tradition. I paint the décor with my heart. Let the emotion coincide with the image, without cultural interference. That’s the lesson of the great masters of primitive painting. 29

The opening of L’Odeur makes precisely this connection when describing the landscape: ‘on dirait un dessin de peintre naïf avec, au loin, de grosses montagnes chauves et fumantes’ (p. 16). Haitian ‘art naïf’ originated between 1945 and 1947, and the paintings are typically brightly coloured, harmonious landscapes, often including people, creating a sense of peace and tranquillity. Three years prior to the publication of L’Odeur, the 1988 exhibition ‘Haïti Art Naïf Art Vaudou’, held at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, had provided an important showcase for the movement. Several paintings featured in the Paris exhibition display affinities with the everyday, communal scenes Laferrière describes, such as Wilmino Domond’s Scène de marché, in which Haitians in brightly coloured clothes jostle for space in a bustling marketplace, and Combat de Coqs by Delnatus which depicts the tension of a cock-fight set against an idyllic rural backdrop of tree-covered mornes. 30 These tranquil characteristics have led to criticism of the movement for producing formulaic, apolitical work which fails to tackle the difficult contemporary situation of Haiti and its diaspora. Such criticism might also be levelled at Laferrière’s récits d’enfance, but on closer inspection the tableaux he creates do engage with serious contemporary realities. Laferrière’s pictorial descriptions provide intriguing sketches of idiosyncratic individuals who emerge against the deftly created backdrop

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of the landscape and stand out from the general swarm of inhabitants in Petit-Goâve. In L’Odeur, ‘le notaire Loné’ is introduced in a visually striking image: Un homme marche sous la pluie. C’est le notaire. Il est habillé de blanc, avec canne et chapeau. Autour de lui, les gens courent dans toutes les directions. On dirait des fourmis ailées. Le notaire Lomé [sic], de la rue Desvignes, croit qu’un homme digne de ce nom ne court jamais sous la pluie. (p. 56)

From his first appearance, the notaire is marked out as an intriguing individual, whose calm self-assurance contrasts with the jostling townsfolk. His idiosyncrasies render him all the more fascinating to the child narrator, and in Le Charme Loné will play a decisive role. Laferrière’s predilection for description has the consequence of detaching the narrator from the events he portrays. Instead, a loose narrative arc is created by the interactions of the characters around him. This process is reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood’s narrative technique in Goodbye to Berlin, another account of a society descending into frightening decay: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’31 Laferrière’s narrator is protected by an air of passive innocence, although as the texts unfold this is tempered by moments of dawning insight and maturity. Thwarted Expectations: A Tranquil Haitian Childhood Unusually, and in contrast to the other récits d’enfance examined here, the experience of Laferrière’s child narrator, particularly in L’Odeur, is characterized by stasis. In the first volume of his childhood memoirs, the child narrator is not an active participant in town life but an invalid who is confined to bed. At several points in the text it is believed he might die. His grandmother, Da, and the local doctor fear he has contracted malaria, as Petit-Goâve is ‘une ville entourée de marais’ (p. 104). When Dany is seriously ill, Da keeps vigil at his bedside, and places the ubiquitous cafetière ‘à ses pieds’ (p. 106). Laferrière’s récits d’enfance underscore the importance of observation, an act he explicitly equates with his future vocation as an author. Indulgent Da allows the sickly boy to sit and observe events from the vantage point of the galerie, a wrap-around veranda which is an iconic feature of Caribbean architecture. The veranda is a central space in

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both texts: a locus of family interaction, it is also a hub for wider social interactions. 32 On the veranda, Dany and Da engage in a seemingly endless conversation, as the child develops his powers of observation and communication: ‘je raconte tout cela à Da. Il faut dire que je raconte tout à Da. Da dit que j’ai un œil d’aigle’ (p. 17). Both characters are external to life’s action, the old lady’s physically active days having passed, and the (invalid) child’s time still to come. In this close Haitian community, advanced age confers respect, and neighbours come to the porch to consult with Da, a humble, regal woman who dispenses advice accompanied by cups of coffee. The old lady knows how to select her interlocutors, and is adept at avoiding unwanted solicitations: ‘Da a une technique infallible pour ignorer quelqu’un. Elle fait semblant de remplir sa tasse au moment où vous arrivez à sa hauteur. J’ai remarqué qu’elle fait ça pour certaines personnes dont je ne citerai pas le nom’ (p. 63). Her daily observations also encompass more sinister aspects of everyday life: from the veranda, she could set her watch (were she to possess one) by the passing of a black car (pp. 52–53), an ominous symbol of the Tontons Macoutes in Laferrière’s work. 33 On the porch, the illusion of stability is created through Da’s comforting, slow-moving, coffee-associated rituals: coffee is measured out, received from merchants, shared with friends, inhaled and, finally, poured and drunk. It is no coincidence that the only time when Da’s coffee burns is in Le Charme, on the morning when the men of Petit-Goâve have been arrested (p. 173). In L’Odeur, the impression of stasis emerges from descriptions of Petit-Goâve and its inhabitants. The town, despite its name, is one of the largest and oldest in Haiti. From Da’s veranda, the townsfolk are a swarm of ants, milling about endlessly to fulfil their domestic tasks: ‘le samedi, c’est jour de marché. Une vraie fourmilière. Les gens viennent des douze sections rurales environnantes’ (p. 20). This is echoed by Dany’s observation of the ants on the veranda: ‘Da boit son café. J’observe les fourmis. Le temps n’existe pas’ (p. 26). The two comforting actions, conveyed in two short sentences of identical grammatical composition, combine to reinforce the meaning of the third sentence: these patterns of behaviour are so deeply entrenched that any sense of the passing of time is suspended. Like the ants on the porch, the town-dwellers, engaged in the problems of daily survival, have no sense of the wider context and the latent dangers of their situation; they will be powerless, the reader knows, against the machinations of Duvalier. These and other ostensibly reassuring repeated images of stasis mask the underground rumblings of social change. These changes are at their

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most apparent in the second récit d’enfance, and its full title, Le Charme des après-midi sans fin, is a poignant indicator of the author’s desire to hold back time. Scattered comments emerge from the margins of the text, reflecting the deteriorating political situation in Haiti. It cannot be a coincidence that Le Charme is set in 1964, the year François Duvalier established himself as President for Life in a fraudulent referendum;34 this event is never mentioned, but its political consequences reach Petit-Goâve. In a political turn early in the text, while the lower-class workers play dominoes in the local bar, the town’s elite congregate at the chess tournament in Saint-Vil Mayard’s barber shop. Here, an ideological struggle is being played out between the commissaire du gouvernement and Montal, the town’s préfet (prefect of police). If the commissaire is praised as ‘un homme tout en nuances’, Montal is characterized by ‘une grande habitude de la conquête’ (p. 58). These presentations prove prophetic, as in ‘Les journées turbulentes’, the second and most politically charged part of Le Charme, Montal will be revealed as a major agent of the escalating turmoil. Acting as a counterbalance to the increasing disarray is the character of Loné, the local lawyer. Although his professional status grants him access to elite society, Loné wants nothing to do with local tittle-tattle or political disputes. In L’Odeur, he has already been set apart by his pragmatic, educated and sceptical approach to the superstitions rife in Haitian society. The petty-mindedness of his compatriots leaves him exasperated: ‘Da, ça fait longtemps que je regarde cette société et qu’est-ce que je vois: la même chose. Du vent. Rien n’a changé et rien ne changera jamais’ (p. 73). This attitude earns him the suspicion of the townsfolk, a suspicion Loné deliberately fuels through his eccentric behaviour. The only man in Petit-Goâve to walk in the rain without an umbrella provokes malicious suggestions that he is a supernatural being. Towards the end of L’Odeur, Loné takes to entering his house through a window rather than the door, exuberantly indulging his own eccentricity (p. 219). In Le Charme, it emerges that Loné is an avid collector whose home is crammed with his treasures. Although he once planned to sell them, he was unable to part with his collection: ‘la veille de l’ouverture, il n’a pas pu fermer l’œil, se demandant pourquoi il vendrait à des inconnus ce qu’il a accumulé avec tant de passion’ (p. 40). His attachment to these objects mirrors his tragic inability to move away from the infuriating town that he nonetheless holds dear. In Le Charme, Loné also fulfils a parental role. He was a former suitor of Da’s, and Dany considers him as the ‘frère jumeau’ (p. 39) of his beloved grandmother.

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Their moral fortitude becomes apparent when Da and Loné are the only two characters in the community who dare to speak their own mind amid increasing paranoia and violence. Da bravely confronts a violent, drunken mob, who are carrying a body in a sack: Soudain la porte s’ouvre. Da sort sur la galerie. Les deux mains sur les hanches. – Bande d’assassins! Vous n’avez pas le droit de traiter un être humain ainsi. Vous ne respectez rien. Charognards! Da crache par terre. La lune blafarde. Les visages étonnés du petit groupe de tueurs. – Si ce n’était pas vous, Da, lance quelqu’un dont le visage est caché sous une cagoule. – Vous ne me faites pas peur, bande de lâches. Qu’est-ce que vous voulez encore à ce malheureux? – Vous le voulez, Da? dit un grand type, en lançant le sac sur notre galerie. Et ils continuent leur chemin en gueulant des chants obscènes. (p. 202)

In this terse scene, minimal description gives way to dialogue and action. Da’s bravery throws her position in society into sharp relief: the men’s faces are concealed, so their identities remain unknown, but they immediately recognize her. It is only their acknowledgement of her local prestige which prevents further violence. Although the term Tontons Macoutes is not used, the victim placed in a sack unmistakably indicates their modus operandi. The scene is sinister in its implication that these Tontons Macoutes who uphold Duvalier’s power are local men who are known to Da. The threat to Petit-Goâvian society comes from within, from people who have grown up in the society they are now destroying. Da’s actions save the life of an unknown man, revealed to be an innocent victim whose name is, tellingly, Prophète: he symbolizes what is to come. Da’s courage here echoes an episode in L’Odeur, where she intervenes to save Innocent the tailor from being arrested, appealing to fraternal, communal ties: ‘Bazile, tu as été à l’école avec Innocent; je me souviens de vous avoir vus passer devant ma galerie, la main dans la main, alors que vous n’aviez même dix ans … Comment peux-tu traiter ainsi un ami d’enfance?’ (p. 91). The disintegration of the once tight-knit community tragically shapes the later stages of Le Charme. Mirroring Da’s courage, until his own arrest Loné speaks out publicly in Le Charme about the deteriorating political climate and Montal’s

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corruption. He receives three warnings in the text not to be so outspoken. Cayemitte implores him to be more careful: – Ah non, tu ne vas pas me faire ça, Loné! Tu ne vas pas te mettre à insulter le préfet dans un établissement public! Ce n’est pas sérieux, Loné … – Si on ne peut pas dire librement ce que l’on pense d’un serviteur de l’Etat, alors … (p. 132)

Similar warnings are received from the witch doctor, Nèg-Feuilles, and the mysterious and threatening Ismael. Just hours later, Loné and other prominent men are rounded up and arrested by a violent gang in a surprise nocturnal raid, and the town is placed under curfew. A family friend, Fatal, ensures that Dany understands the significance of this event, allowing him to be present during adult discussions and imploring him to ‘Ouvre bien tes yeux et tes oreilles pour regarder passer l’Histoire sur son char de feu’ (p. 176). How does this breakdown and reorganization of power manifest itself in Le Charme? The power of the masses has been a popular and evocative motif in Haitian history and literature since the country overthrew French colonial rule and declared independence in 1804. But mass power in Laferrière’s récits d’enfance turns out to be mob rule, and is unmistakably repressive and sinister. It is François Duvalier, the dominant power, who operates through the mob, manipulating it through secret political networks. There is no place for loyalty as the formerly peaceful community descends into fear and violence. It emerges that the ruthless Montal was born and raised in Petit-Goâve, leaving le commissaire du gouvernement at a loss to understand ‘comment on peut jeter ainsi en prison des gens de votre race, de votre ville natale, des gens avec qui on a été à l’école …’ (p. 247), in an echo of Da’s words to Bazile in L’Odeur. The rise of gangs of armed thugs is accompanied by an increased military presence. The casernes, which have always been innocuously visible from Da’s veranda, and which had been casually mentioned at the very opening of L’Odeur, are suddenly activated. It is significant that the initial description marks them out as ‘jaune feu’ (p. 15), since Laferrière associates the colour yellow with important people, objects and events throughout his œuvre. In Le Charme, the barracks transform into a menacing space, serving as a prison for the arrested men, and for the first time they are given their official title, the casernes Faustin Soulouque. Although this name goes unexplained in the text, it is

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another reminder of Haitian history: Soulouque was a former president and emperor of Haiti who died in Petit-Goâve. Suddenly, military decrees are being issued from the Faustin Soulouque barracks by the captain, Max Célestin, and read to the people by the puppet spokesman Djo. Despite his reprehensible role, Laferrière’s attention to detail makes Djo a comic and all-too-human figure, as his bobbing Adam’s apple betrays his nervousness. The first decree, imposing a daytime curfew, is read aloud by Djo in French, and contains ironic reminders that Haiti’s independence was gained during a historical period marked by the French Revolution: each decree begins ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, République d’Haïti’. The gravity of the situation is undermined, because the crowd refuses to follow Djo’s order to disperse. This is partly because they want to know why the men were arrested, but also because they have not understood the grandiloquent French used in the decree, which has to be translated ‘en langue vernaculaire’ (p. 181) before they will move on, a rare instance of French–Creole tension in Laferrière’s récits d’enfance. Duvalier himself remains conspicuously absent from the récits d’enfance. None of the characters utters his name, but in Le Charme he is present through metonymy. Firstly, the unscrupulous Montal is exposed as having links with him: ‘C’est Port-au-Prince, Loné, qui l’a nommé préfet’ (p. 147). Montal was not elected by the community he is meant to serve, but was directly appointed by Port-au-Prince, a sign that this society is sliding into dictatorship. Furthermore, the danger of hidden power networks is reinforced when Loné explains the workings of the town to Dany. Loné undertakes to tell him ‘pourquoi cet oiseau, qu’on entend sans le voir, pourrait-il être plus important que le préfet Montal’ (p. 159), a veiled reference to Duvalier. The scene’s tension is heightened when Dany senses that they are being watched. In a similar manner, Da intuits the origins of the escalating violence in Petit-Goâve, attributing it to ‘Port-au-Prince’ (p. 199); as an adult, she may also be able to infer that the local events are connected with Duvalier’s recent ‘election’ as President for Life. Towards the end of the text, the commissaire du gouvernement pays Da a visit and explains that the arrests are part of a power tussle between Montal and Max Célestin. Célestin is another major instigator of the violence in Petit-Goâve, but he also remains absent from the text beyond references to his name. Invisible, insidious power networks are forming. According to the commissaire, the two men are vying to win the president’s favour by identifying any men in the town who have

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links to a group of anti-Duvalier rebels, because one of this group is said to come from Petit-Goâve (pp. 245–46). Troublingly, much of the information catalysing the arrests is evidently hearsay, extracted from ‘un paysan’ (p. 246). The situation is deliberately being exacerbated, as the commissaire explains: ‘c’est le président qui jette de l’huile sur le feu, Da’ (p. 245). Under the leadership of their newly elected President for Life, Haitian politics is descending into paranoia and violence. The Tension between Stasis and Change: the ritournelle Laferrière’s strategy of reconstructing childhood from a multitude of rhythmically repetitive, tessellating and overlapping vignettes is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks in Mille Plateaux on the soothing virtue of the ritournelle, the round or nursery rhyme. In the eleventh Plateau, Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this with the example of the scared child who sings in the dark to retain his composure: Un enfant dans le noir, saisi par la peur, se rassure en chantonnant. Il marche, s’arrête au gré de sa chanson. Perdu, il s’abrite comme il peut, ou s’oriente tant bien que mal avec sa petite chanson. Celle-ci est comme l’esquisse d’un centre stable et calme, stabilisant et calmant, au sein du chaos […] elle saute du chaos à un début d’ordre dans le chaos, elle risque aussi de se disloquer à chaque instant. 35

The ritournelle exemplifies the cyclical patterns of delimitation and territorialization called upon by the human mind in order to keep the forces of chaos at bay, patterns which might at any time slip and tip the fragile balance into chaos. Laferrière’s strategy of focusing in detail on the reassuring tropes of territorialization – coffee, the ants, the repetitive rhythms of life in Petit-Goâve – despite Haiti’s simultaneous descent into disorder resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s child who sings to himself in the dark, trying to ward off his fear. It is as though these familiar icons of normality can stave off the onset of terror under the Duvalier reign, and indeed, for the most part, the narrator is ‘un enfant heureux’ in the récits d’enfance. 36 Yet fear is present at the margins of the text in Le Charme, albeit in peripheral, fleeting moments. In a brief, apocalyptic daydream, Dany imagines that he is alone: Ce silence. Da est sur la galerie, sa place pour l’éternité. Tous les autres sont morts. Sauf Da et moi. J’ai mal au ventre. […] Où sont les autres? Pourquoi leur disparition me fait-elle si mal? Un nœud dans la poitrine.

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On dirait une ville fantôme. Il n’y a plus personne. Ils sont tous morts ou partis sans rien nous dire. (p. 37)

This moment prefigures the future deaths or secret departures from Haiti of the townsfolk. For an instant, the fine film separating the adult author from his child-surrogate is punctured as knowledge of the present – his narrative’s future – troubles the retrieval of the past. A similar tension is foregrounded in Laferrière’s autobiographical contribution to the literary manifesto Pour une littérature-monde. Laferrière states that his fascination with literature began in Petit-Goâve, the place where he observed ‘[s]on premier lecteur’: Il semblait décidé à lire ainsi jusqu’à la fin des temps. […] Je revois encore aujourd’hui cet homme dont les livres semblaient monter la garde autour de lui, comme pour le protéger d’un danger imminent. Mais la dictature, ce fleuve impétueux de boue et de sang, allait l’emporter comme un fétu de paille. 37

This man’s behavioural patterns seemed so fixed and firm that Laferrière struggles to believe that they would ever end; and yet end they did, swept away by political change. In Laferrière’s récits d’enfance, Creole serves a protective purpose, again evoking the ritournelle. Laferrière’s manner of including Creole in his texts is highly selective, and no glossary is provided. The unexplained meaning of the words enhances their incantatory resonances, and in both récits d’enfance Creole is actually sung, not spoken. Laferrière’s unabashed use of French rather than Creole would seem to indicate that the author does not share the linguistic complexes of the DOM authors, although it must be assumed that the majority of the dialogues recounted in French actually took place in Creole. In the section of L’Odeur entitled ‘Agoué’, Dany sees a boat leave the docks on its way to Gonave, an island off the coast of Petit-Goâve. The workers sing ‘Sou lanmè mouin rélé Agoué/ Nan Zilé mal rélé Agoué’ (p. 151). Neither the Creole nor the significance of the substantive Agoué is explained, but the song is in fact a vodou prayer to Agoué/Agwè, the sea god, to protect them and ensure their safe return, which translates as ‘Sur la mer j’appelle Agoué/ Dans les îles je vais appeler Agoué.’ Similarly, at the close of Le Charme, as Da bids Dany farewell on his journey for Port-auPrince, she turns to song for consolation: Da se met brusquement à fredonner ce vieux refrain qu’elle chante toujours quand elle souffre. Trois feuilles

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One year before the publication of Le Charme, Laferrière used the same quotation as the epigraph to Pays sans chapeau, providing a translation: ‘Trois feuilles/ trois racines oh/ celui qui jette, oublie/ celui qui ramasse, se rappelle.’ The song is a device to ward off sadness and melancholy. At this point in Le Charme, the lines signify the acute sadness against which the old lady must struggle as she says goodbye to her beloved grandson. The lyrics use the motifs of leaves and roots to assert former ties and suggest the metaphorical possibility of gathering the remnants of the past in order to remember, a metaphor equally applicable to Laferrière’s undertaking in his récits d’enfance. Creole, although scarce in the texts, becomes another territorializing source of courage and a method of reconnecting with a lost time and place. For authors in exile, enforced distance, both spatial and temporal, influences interpretations of the homeland. The multiplicity of settings and references to foreign travel in the texts of une autobiographie américaine reflects Laferrière’s insistence that travelling can occur through the pages of a text. 38 He alerts us to this in the dedication to Le Charme: ‘A Melissa:/ un monde qu’elle ignore/ totalement/ et qui est pourtant/ celui de son père./ C’est ça aussi, le voyage.’ Laferrière, Jana Evans Braziel judges, is ‘deracinated (déraciné), drifting (dérivant), deterritorializing (déterritorialisant)’. 39 His récits d’enfance, however, are consciously set in an era which predates his physical nomadism, and his depictions of Petit-Goâve convey a sedentary existence in a town structured by reassuring communal rhythms, again evoking the ritournelle; yet this town will be violently torn apart under the dictatorship. Nonetheless, although the récits d’enfance are set long before he left Haiti and display unity of time and space (the events take place over two consecutive summers in Petit-Goâve), Laferrière does depict his child self as tellingly receptive to the wider world. In L’Odeur, a tractor brochure prompts him to reflect on the family’s lost wealth, which itself becomes a comment on the impact of global economics: Du temps de la grande richesse, il [Dany’s grandfather] avait commandé un tracteur à Chicago. Le temps que la commande arrive, le prix du café avait chuté au plus bas sur le cours mondial. Mon grand-père et Petit-Goâve avaient fait faillite, avaient tout perdu. Par bonheur, les gens de Chicago ont continué à lui envoyer leur catalogue mensuel. (p. 42)

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The child’s innocent joy at receiving the catalogue contrasts with the pain his grandfather must have experienced through these monthly reminders of past prosperity; the term ‘par bonheur’ is freighted with irony.40 The catalogue is immediately discarded, but its envelope is recycled: ‘nos sacs de pain venaient de Chicago, Illinois!’ (p. 43). In Le Charme, a photo (quite possibly from the same catalogue) once again inspires meditations on globalization: Je ne sais plus quand j’ai entendu ce nom (Chicago) pour la première fois. Lui, le petit garçon de Chicago, peut-être mourra-t-il sans jamais avoir entendu parler de Petit-Goâve. Je me sens tout triste d’y penser […] Je remarque, pour la première fois, dans le coin gauche de la photo (en bas) cette inscription: Chicago, US, 1950. Même cette photo est plus vieille que moi. Ce genre de chose peut vous foutre un tel cafard. (p. 268)

This comment occurs just as Dany has been told he must leave Petit-Goâve, and reflects his gratitude at having experienced life there. In his mind, Dany effortlessly entwines his lived experience of Petit-Goâve and his imagined experience of Chicago, forging a mental bond between the two vastly different places and between himself and the boy in the photograph. This is destroyed, however, by the realization that his daydreams have neglected to consider the passing of time. Although Dany identifies with the photo, envisaging the little blond boy as his counterpart in Chicago, time causes a rupture in these fantasies: the two boys are not contemporaries and one will now be an adult. Any attempt at identification with the photographic other is thwarted by the painful, but irrevocable, intervention of time. Despite such undertones, the texts are characterized by affection and happiness. L’Odeur closes on an optimistic note, entitled ‘Le Livre (trente ans plus tard)’, stressing that the text was written out of filial affection for Da and a desire to prevent these episodes from being lost from memory. Although the texts take place in the time and space of childhood, from which the adult author remains absent, the postscripts reintroduce his adult presence. The conclusion of Le Charme also revisits the motif of filial affection, as the adult narrator makes his only appearance to explain: ‘j’ai écrit ce livre pour une seule raison: revoir Da’ (p. 295). Literature’s potential to create a certain continuity is celebrated in this postscript, as Laferrière tells us that he has recently returned to Haiti on 11 August 1997, ‘juste avant d’envoyer ce livre à mon éditeur’. During the visit, he claims to have seen (revu) the people he has just celebrated in his text. Both récits d’enfance have discussed the poignant

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theme of infant mortality through the deaths of Sylphise and ‘le fils d’Izma’ (whose name is unknown). In the postscript to Le Charme, which places such emphasis on the power of being able to revoir, the narrator remarks that he has seen his childhood friends again. This phrase is chillingly qualified when he adds parenthetically ‘(la plupart reposent dans le cimetière fleuri de Petit-Goâve, emportés par l’épidémie de malaria qui a fait rage en 1964, l’année suivant le cyclone Flora)’ (p. 296). Whereas the main narratives do not acknowledge the distance between adult and child, the postscripts throw this distance into sharp relief. This sentiment is also present in the epigraph to L’Odeur by Haitian poet Jean-Fernand Brierre (1909–92), which immediately introduces the theme of time’s uncontrollability: Grands faucons, noirs compagnons de mes songes qu’avez-vous fait du paysage? qu’avez-vous fait de mon enfance?

Brierre’s own childhood was marked by the American occupation of Haiti during 1915–34 (suggested by the ‘faucons’). His connection of paysage and enfance evokes both the ravaged Haitian landscape under the American occupation and the inevitable disappearance of childhood through the passing of time. In contrast, in Laferrière, the passage suggests the sinister influence of the Duvalier dictatorships. Although the quotation’s interrogative mode is not obviously in evidence in the main body of Laferrière’s narrative, it is indicative of the tension between stasis and change which drives both récits d’enfance, and the underlying question implied by both texts: how do such changes come to pass? Conclusion The autobiographie américaine asserts Laferrière’s distance from the DOM authors, and calls for a reconsideration of the term ‘American’. When Laferrière moves towards framing his identity, it is couched within an exploration of a broader understanding of the multiple meanings of an American identity. Rather than exile, language, identity or history underpinning his récits d’enfance, it is Laferrière’s relationship to time which shapes his texts. There is a perpetual tension between Dany the child in Haiti, Laferrière the author, and his readers, the latter being invited to suspend their knowledge that in the intervening years the world of Laferrière’s childhood has been destroyed by violence and

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corruption, and to experience it instead through the eyes of the child. In Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre, est-elle une arme ou un fruit? the narrator meets one of his literary idols, James Baldwin, and asks how to become ‘un bon écrivain’, tellingly qualifying ‘bon’ as ‘un écrivain de son temps’,41 once more underscoring the author’s own fascination with time. In Le Charme, the nickname Vieux Os is explicitly connected with time and its passage. This emerges through Nèg-Feuilles’ (characteristically hyperbolic) reaction to Dany’s nickname: ‘Vieux Os! s’exclame Nèg-Feuilles, c’est un nom très puissant. Vieux Os veut dire que tu ne crains pas le temps. Vieux n’a pas peur du temps. Le temps court dans le même sens que Vieux Os. Tu es le fils bien-aimé de la mémoire’ (pp. 127–28). These comments sum up the narrator’s role in the two récits d’enfance, highlighting the texts’ sustained exploration of time, spaces and memories. The immediacy of these distant memories is counteracted by occasional acknowledgements that the world of Dany’s childhood is no more, as illustrated by the intervention of the adult narrator at the conclusion of Le Charme: ‘J’ai pris tant de plaisir à être à Petit-Goâve que je n’ai pas vu le temps passer’ (p. 296). At the climax of Le Charme, order is only maintained through violence and curfews are imposed on the town. Although Da tries to rationalize the situation and gain a sense of historical perspective by recounting the tale of her own mother’s accidental involvement in the siege of Miragoâne, she is aware that what has happened is very different to anything earlier generations experienced. More alarmingly, the townspeople do not appear unduly concerned, prompting Fatal to denounce their acceptance: ‘Ils s’habituent déjà au couvre-feu. Prêts à en faire un mode de vie. Il n’y a rien, Da, qui puisse faire sortir ce peuple de lui-même. Rien pour l’exciter réellement, le mettre en mouvement’ (p. 224). The narrative becomes more disjointed at this point, as the focus switches from Thérèse’s impending marriage, to the vaccinations administered to the children by Americans, to the tragic description of Loné refusing to open his doors to anyone and occasionally heard laughing, alone, locked inside his house (p. 276). A kind of new normality appears to have taken hold, which has adapted to the chaos and curfews. Da, however, does realize the full gravity of events (perhaps aware that Duvalier’s new position, President for Life, is likely to bring further political upheaval), and takes the painful decision to send Dany to his mother in Port-au-Prince. In his closing words, the child-narrator experiences this departure as a death, simply proclaiming

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‘Je suis mort’ (p. 291) as he undergoes an irrevocable severance from the world of his infancy. Despite their repeated emphasis on images of stasis, routine and the mundane, L’Odeur and Le Charme still succeed in drawing attention to the terrible, unbridgeable chasm between the Haiti of Laferrière’s childhood and the Haiti of the time of writing. Laferrière returned to his childhood in comments made after the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010. As an organizer and invited speaker at the Etonnants voyageurs literary festival in Saint-Malo (22–24 May 2010), he participated in a round table entitled ‘Dix utopies pour Haiti’ with fellow Haitian authors Lyonel Trouillot, Emmelie Prophète and Louis-Philippe Dalembert. Laferrière argued that the artist’s role, as opposed to the role of a journalist or historian, is to reconstruct memory in the manner of their choosing. He argued that the author of a literary text is allowed a rare freedom to engage with the memory of 12 January as overtly – or as subtly – as befits their artistic project. In this context, he draws an important parallel with his récits d’enfance, stating: Le travail de l’art, c’est de restituer ce qui a été brouillé, de remonter petit à petit, de replacer les choses dans leur lumière et de faire face à l’événement. […] Nous sommes libres d’effacer la réalité, et l’on attend ça de nous. Tous ceux qui sont envahis par l’événement, tous ceux dont la mémoire était incendiée, ils attendent une restitution du souvenir. L’exemple le plus frappant que j’aie, c’est que j’ai écrit à propos de mon enfance, sous la dictature, et j’ai décrit une enfance heureuse. J’ai effacé Duvalier de mon enfance. Ce qui ne veut pas dire […] que si on lit attentivement on ne le verra pas, mais je peux le faire. Mais en tant qu’historien ou journaliste, c’est impossible.42

The role of the author, and perhaps particularly of the Haitian author, is to find ways to express unpalatable truths. Laferrière’s récits d’enfance oscillate between the repression and the latent recognition of knowledge of the events which separate his childhood from his adult life. They thus create a literary space for accounts which might at first glance appear innocuous in their joyous celebration of a happy tropical childhood, but which also, on closer examination, provide an unmistakably astute exploration of a society descending into violence and destruction.

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chapter seven

Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes

The child’s world view is shaped by their relationship with their parents or guardians. The roles played by mothers, grandmothers and fathers in the scene of recognition have already come under scrutiny, and this chapter now revisits those scenes, paying greater attention to gender. To do so requires a discussion of gender stereotypes which are prevalent throughout the Caribbean, such as the absent father and the practice of ‘othermothering’, and of stereotypes which have developed in a specifically Francophone Caribbean context, such as the femme matador and poteau-mitan. By focusing on parents and guardians, it is possible to observe how gender stereotypes are reaffirmed – or challenged – across the récits d’enfance. In this chapter, the focus extends beyond the corpus examined thus far to demonstrate how specific links with other texts open up new meanings. Such links build a more nuanced portrait of parental roles and gender stereotypes, which allows another facet of the récits d’enfance, the role of self-censorship, to come to light. The femme matador and the poteau-mitan In 1939 the African American sociologist Edward Franklin Frazier published a study of the legacy of slavery on family structures, The Negro Family in the United States.1 Frazier presented the plantation as a site of emasculation and discussed the evolution of a family structure held together by females, which he termed the ‘matriarchate’. 2 On the plantations, he argued, a system of selective reproduction was enforced in order to supply new slaves, and men were instructed to procreate without having any subsequent responsibility for the women

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they impregnated or their children. Male slaves were stripped of power and compelled to defer to the overseers and slave drivers, who upheld a system in which the plantation owner and master was the ultimate patriarch, having the power to decide the fate of slave men, women and children. A similar structure is identified by Glissant in Le Discours antillais, where he observes that ‘la “famille” en Martinique a d’abord été une “anti-famille”. Accouplement d’une femme et d’un homme pour le profit d’un maître.’3 Glissant draws attention to the important role played by women who resisted this ‘accouplement’ by inducing abortions and refusing to bring children, and hence future slaves, into the world. In the present era, Glissant recognizes that women are central to the Caribbean family, as is evident from both the structure of ‘la famille étendue (sœurs aînées, tantes, marraines, grand-mères)’ and ‘le rôle actif de la femme dans le monde du travail’.4 The créoliste authors Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant repeatedly depict Antillean women who hold their family, and the wider community, together. These formidable matriarchs are often stereotyped as the femme matador and the poteau-mitan. Bonnie Thomas describes the femme matador as an ‘all-powerful’ woman who ‘courageously resists life’s trials’. 5 The femme matador tends to be childless and undergoes a series of trials which develop her social and political agency. Marie-Sophie Laborieux in Chamoiseau’s Texaco is a prime example of the femme matador: as her name suggests, her life is a succession of hardships, yet despite this she successfully founds, and protects, the community of Texaco. In contrast, the stereotype of the poteau-mitan (or, in its creolized form, poto-mitan) borrows from a domestic image, the middle support pole of a house, and the poteaumitan is a woman almost exclusively defined by motherhood.6 In a discussion of these two contrasting stereotypes of female behaviour, Chamoiseau comments that in the Francophone Caribbean imaginary, ‘the figure of the matadora looms large. There’s also the image of the maternal woman; she loves her children, she is deeply attached to her family, she will do absolutely anything for her sons.’ 7 The récits d’enfance by the créoliste authors certainly depict sons who have almost unfettered access to their mothers or grandmothers, women who are formidable matriarchs. The point is aptly demonstrated by the cover of Chamoiseau’s A Bout d’enfance. Whereas the removable dust jacket emphasizes the eruption of girls into the protagonist’s world, the actual front cover is illustrated by a black-and-white photo of a formidable Caribbean mother. Dressed in her best outfit, she stares at the camera

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in a no-nonsense manner. The image is obviously meant to represent the author’s mother, Man Ninotte. The portrayal of Man Ninotte conforms to the poteau-mitan stereotype, although Chamoiseau does not use the actual term in the trilogy. Antan d’enfance establishes his mother at the centre of family life, a courageous woman who struggles against adversity to achieve the impossible for her children. ‘Cette négresse guerrière’ (p. 38) is likened to a force of nature: ‘Man Ninotte, dont la volonté relevait du cyclone’ (p. 54). Her skilful manipulation of the market vendors is inserted into Antan as a theatrical script (pp. 141–43), as she progressively gains the upper hand until ‘la marchande lui faisait un prix si bas que Man Ninotte du coup raflait plus d’une dachine’ (p. 144). The French feminist critic Luce Irigaray has argued that, in Western society, the masculine appropriation of genealogy has excluded women from discourse, predetermining their identity, as men bestow their name and property upon women.8 In the context of the Francophone Caribbean, however, power configurations between the sexes are markedly different from Western models. In Antan d’enfance, Man Ninotte is one of a horde of women who dominate la vieille maison. In a reversal of Western family practices, each woman lends her name to her family unit – ‘famille Man Romulus, famille Man Ninotte, famille Man La Sirène, famille Man Irénée’ (p. 26) – positioning the woman at the head of her family line. In an interview, Chamoiseau comments to Thomas that ‘the French Caribbean mother is a kind of omnipotent and omnipresent mother’.9 In Antan, Chamoiseau appears intent on perpetuating the poteaumitan cliché. He depicts women who combine astounding forcefulness with activities which are traditionally female: ‘Man Romulus derrière sa Singer à coudre, Man Irénée dans sa cuisine où elle salait ses frites, Man la Sirène à hauteur de son chapelet, ou Man Ninotte dans le combat de ses casseroles’ (p. 43). The image of the mother seated at her sewing machine can be traced to Césaire’s Cahier, and has become emblematic of a specific kind of female resistance to adversity in Francophone Caribbean literature. Yet for all her tenacity and abundant affection, at the end of the first two récits d’enfance the reader has gained little sense of Man Ninotte as anything other than the idealized mother and poteaumitan. The mythologized representation of female behaviour overrules any sustained psychological character development. Furthermore, Man Ninotte is Creolophone and uneducated, whereas her husband is able to speak French and recite La Fontaine. Chamoiseau here reinforces the

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identification of female and male spaces (the home and the school) in a manner which echoes the Lacanian Symbolic through the implication that the pre-verbal and Creole space is female, while the entry into the French language is equated with entry into a male domain. A récit d’enfance by another male author, Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres, presents an important contrast with Chamoiseau. The novel begins with two versions of how the day might end when José’s guardian, his grandmother M’man Tine, comes home after labouring in the canefields. In many respects, M’man Tine can be aligned with the poteau-mitan model, and the device of the dual opening allows a particularly nuanced psychological portrait of the old lady to emerge. The first account emphasizes M’man Tine’s generosity and boundless affection as she returns with food – ‘elle ne pouvait porter quoi que ce soit à sa bouche qu’elle ne m’eût réservé une part’ (pp. 9–10) – before setting about her evening chores. However, this tranquil and soothing vision of life in the rue cases-nègres is quickly qualified by the narrator as a rare occurrence: ‘mais, le plus souvent, la journée se terminait mal’ (p. 17). The alternative version of how the days end emphasizes M’man Tine’s physical exhaustion. She does not spare José any detail of her difficult life: ‘comme si j’en avais pas assez de mes coups de soleil, des averses, des coups de tonnerre, et de la houe avec laquelle il me faut gratter la terre coriace du béké’ (p. 44). When she returns home to discover that, in her absence, her grandson has misbehaved, it is almost too much for her to take: ‘au lieu de te bien comporter pour ménager mes forces, pour que je puisse durer, afin de te mettre à l’abri, comme j’ai fait de ta maman, tu me pousses à l’envie de te ficher dans les petites-bandes, comme font tous les nègres’ (p. 44). For all her affection, José also associates his grandmother with repeated beatings and admonishments. Yet M’man Tine’s strict discipline is clearly linked to her life’s goal: to enable her descendants to escape abject poverty through self-sacrifice. She would rather spend her own life labouring than follow the common path of sending her family to work in the petites-bandes, and here, as elsewhere, her use of the term nègres is laden with disdain. Although the narrator’s recollections of M’man Tine are steeped in filial gratitude, he does not neglect to depict his grandmother’s anger at the social injustices around her. It is M’man Tine’s astute perception which encourages José to think beyond the realms of the plantation, and fight for a life that will offer more than automatic consignment to the petites-bandes. Her simple, intelligent observations open José’s eyes to social injustice and catalyse the Bildungsroman. In contrast, at no point

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does Chamoiseau’s Man Ninotte pause to reflect on why her life is a struggle. Denied moments of both weakness and insight, Man Ninotte remains an ideal fiction, solely motivated by devotion to her children. This also goes some way to explaining the lack of a scene of recognition in Chamoiseau’s trilogy. In Antan, the narrator sums up Man Ninotte’s general attitude to her son’s questions: Il [le négrillon] avait dix mille questions. Man Ninotte se fatiguait vite d’y répondre. La vie, grognait-elle, est déjà assez déchirée pour ne pas encore la déchirer avec des questions déchirées. Sans savoir lesquelles, le négrillon percevait bien qu’elle fonctionnait avec quelques certitudes, quatre, cinq ou six, dont l’une était l’exigence de réussite de ses enfants. Elle avait résolu de ne pas en dévier et de ne plus les questionner. (pp. 84–85)

Although she is aligned with M’man Tine in terms of maternal self-sacrifice, Man Ninotte lives by actions rather than questions. The reduction of her world to a limited number of ‘certitudes’ almost suggests that she is an automaton, although the narrator interprets this as a marker of her devotion to her large family rather than any intellectual shortcoming. Here, the mother’s role is to nurture, while it falls to the father to pass ironic comment on society. In the final volume of the trilogy, A Bout d’enfance, Man Ninotte is finally granted greater psychological depth. She is still praised as the narrator’s ‘base arrière. Son assise invariable. Son petit conte sans fin où la merveille filtrait les ombres et les lumières. La racine-casse à partir de laquelle il pouvait s’élancer […] et revenir sans avoir perdu pied’ (p. 46).10 The interventions of the adult author in A Bout d’enfance, however, develop a separate narrative, and are indicated typographically in italics. This narrative strand recounts Man Ninotte’s decline into forgetfulness, symptomatic of Alzheimer’s disease, and her eventual death. Only then does the adult narrator realize the extent of his mother’s sacrifice, in a passage which concludes the penultimate section of the text: Elle, ô puissante, dévouée à ses enfants, sa vie offerte à leur seule réussite, elle qui avait tant abandonné d’elle-même, refoulé tant de rêves, éteint tant de possibilités, noyé tellement de perspectives intimes, et qui – lorsqu’ils furent tous placés – dut vivre sans doute plus que la solitude: le sentiment de l’inutilité … … Mémoire, qui pourrait résister au sentiment d’être inutile? … il y aurait donc un risque à ne pas vivre-pour-soi, à tout verser dans le donner-à-vivre? (p. 265)

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The narrator now becomes aware of the drawbacks, and limited temporality, of the poteau-mitan model, which leaves the mother with no clear identity or role to play once her children are grown up. Blind to these realities when viewing his mother through child’s eyes in the first two volumes of Une Enfance créole, it takes the intervention of the adult author to raise these negative consequences of maternal sacrifice in A Bout d’enfance. The inclusion of these comments towards the end of the narrative means that they remain a strand which the author appears unwilling to develop, preferring to channel his infant adoration of Man Ninotte, unlike Zobel’s narrator who, from the beginning of La Rue Cases-Nègres, creates a more complex but no less tender view of his grandmother. Maternal Relationships and the Scene of Recognition In the scene of recognition, the child most often approaches their mother in order to ask difficult questions about the slave past, as is the case in récits d’enfance by Ega, Confiant, Condé and Pépin. These scenes prove to be decisive moments for the mother–child relationship. In many respects, Ega’s mother, a widow with six children, follows the poteau-mitan stereotype. Even though she is presented with the opportunity to marry again, she rejects an eligible suitor, putting her family’s needs first. In La Parole des femmes, Condé criticizes this depiction of maternal behaviour, arguing that the portrait of Ega’s young mother voluntarily abandoning her own sexuality to devote herself to her children is unrealistic.11 However, in Le Temps des madras, the narrator presents this decision as an astute choice, as her mother believes another marriage would compromise her own family. Her suitor had ten children himself, and remarrying would, as her friend Elisa points out, only create ‘seize petits malheureux’ (p. 114). Moreover, the récit d’enfance is characterized by its avoidance of any detailed discussion of sexuality, and it is unsurprising – and in keeping with the tone of childhood innocence – that Ega’s narrative does not reflect on her mother’s possible sexual desires. In Le Temps des madras, Françoise receives a partial explanation of the slave past from her paternal aunt Acé and the mysterious Père Azou, whose name is symbolic rather than indicating a relation to the family. He cuts a kindly but intimidating figure: ‘jamais je n’aurais osé interroger ce géant’ (p. 53). Acé has already recounted the tale of her own

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grandmother, a house slave, who died as a result of her mistress’s vindictiveness; this domestic cruelty echoes the American feminist critic bell hooks’ observation that ‘house slaves were less subjected to the physical hardships that beset field workers, but they were more likely to suffer endless cruelty and torture because they were constantly in the presence of demanding mistresses and masters’.12 Confused at Acé’s revelation that her ancestors were ‘esclaves’, a term the narrator does not understand (p. 51), and equally baffled by Père Azou’s explanation that they came from a place called Guinée, Françoise tackles her mother, asking: ‘Est-ce que tu es de Guinée?’ (p. 55). Her mother evades the potential explanation of the Middle Passage and slavery invited by the question, and instead focuses on her Amerindian heritage: ‘ma grand-mère était Caraïbe’ (p. 55). She rebukes Acé for having told her daughter about her slave ancestry, and advocates looking ‘en avant’ (p. 56) rather than dwelling on the past. Nonetheless, the mother’s physical reaction to her daughter’s questions betrays an underlying psychological malaise: when her daughter puts her on the spot, she is ‘ahurie’ and ‘suffoquée’ (p. 55). The emotional charge of this scene demonstrates that the questions it raises about race, slavery and history cannot be overcome by simply looking to the future. The scene points to a need for a more balanced and informative debate on the slave history, which will combine her mother’s fortitude with clear, factual explanations. In Ega’s text, the mother’s approach is too vague, whereas Acé and Père Azou are too reliant on specific, but isolated, details. Historical contextualization, however painful, is required to place events in a more coherent order. In Ega, who provides the first scene of recognition in any récit d’enfance, the trauma of slavery is compounded by the inability to explain the slave history to the child, whose own feelings of angst are heightened by the unspeakable unknown. This will prove to be a defining feature of all subsequent scenes of recognition. In Ravines du devant-jour, Raphaël also turns to his mother for enlightenment in the scene of recognition. Here, the scene is prompted by métissage through his observation that he and his siblings each have a different skin tone. His mother’s explanation is problematic on several levels. In drawing attention to the concepts of ‘éclaircir la race’ and ‘sauver la peau’ (p. 245), she suggests that the black woman consciously seeks out white lovers, in terms which are reminiscent of Fanon’s acerbic attack on Mayotte Capécia. While Raphaël’s mother appears concerned with giving her child an appropriately sanitized version of history, her words troublingly marginalize the role of rape. When interviewed,

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Confiant has expressed views similar to those in Ravines, commenting that under slavery ‘it was the men who worked in the cane fields and the women who always had the chance of escaping by having a mixed-blood child with a white man […] It must be said that black women had a slightly better status than black men during slavery.’13 Sweeping generalizations of this nature have led to the original triumvirate of créolistes being criticized for sexism. In contrast, women writers such as Condé and Pineau and feminist critics including hooks focus on cycles of sexual violence directed at black women. They draw attention to the gendered traumas of rape, abortion and infanticide which underscored black women’s specific vulnerability under slavery. Thomas has highlighted the fact that ‘the depiction of gender identity in the works of créoliste writers is somewhat problematic given the tendency of these writers to privilege the male voice and to portray their characters through stereotypes’.14 Unsurprisingly, it is women writers who argue most vociferously against these gender stereotypes. Maryse Condé has commented: I think there is a rather mythical image which intellectuals have spread … woman as a sort of central support [poteau-mitan] of everything in life. I think that’s a little exaggerated. If you read a sociologist like Fritz Gracchus, he has another much more complex picture of the woman in society. He thinks that very often the French Caribbean woman is a ‘carrier’ for alienation, for admiration and for a certain type of Westernization.15

Condé’s criticism of the poteau-mitan stereotype is supported by her reference to the Martinican theorist Fritz Gracchus. The text to which she refers, Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétés afro-américaines, was Gracchus’s doctoral thesis, published posthumously in 1980.16 This socioliterary examination of Caribbean parental roles, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis (in particular Totem and Taboo), blames females in general, and the mother in particular, for perpetuating male disempowerment. Gracchus argues that matriarchies are the result of necessity and hardship, rather than an indicator of innate female strength, and claims that ‘un pouvoir maternel’ arises ‘à cause d’une vacance – le Père aurait abdiqué, non démissionné – non prise du pouvoir par la mère, mais pouvoir assumé par nécessité et dévouement’.17 hooks has also argued for a more nuanced assessment of the interrelation of race and gender, urging scholars to ‘examine the dynamics of sexist and racist oppression during slavery in light of the m ­ asculinization

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of the black female and not the de-masculinization of the black male’.18 She points out that under slavery, the black woman was subject to multiple forms of exploitation. Physically exploited in the fields or domestic household, the black woman also endured the threat of sexual exploitation: ‘the female slave lived in constant awareness of her sexual vulnerability and in perpetual fear that the male, white or black, might single her out to assault and victimize’.19 It is to such concerns that Condé draws attention, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of female strength than that allowed by créoliste stereotypes. Condé and Pineau caution against the créoliste tendency to elevate clichéd, two-dimensional depictions of women to a quasi-mythical status, in favour of texturing more complex portraits of individual Caribbean women. These women writers demonstrate that female vulnerability engenders strength, while also discussing the difficult psychological consequences of this kind of strength. In Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, Maryse’s relationship with her mother is fraught, in marked contrast to the works of the créoliste authors. The girl struggles to understand her mother’s rigid, formal behaviour, which on more than one occasion appears coldly cruel, particularly when Jeanne fires a trusted servant, symbolically named Madonne, because she once fails to come to work – an absence caused by her own daughter’s terminal illness. Ann R. Morris and Margaret M. Dunn suggest that ‘for the Caribbean woman, the notion of a motherland is especially complex, encompassing in its connotations her island home and its unique culture as well as the body of tropes, talismans and female bonding that is a woman’s heritage through her own and other mothers’. 20 This duality linking mother and place is also evident in Le Cœur, in which the child’s relationship to space is complicated by social class and diaspora, and the bond with the mother is also continually thwarted or denied. One of the most powerful scenes in the collection occurs in ‘A nous la liberté’, a conte which connects Maryse’s increasing freedom to explore her island space (thanks to the bicycle she has received for her 16th birthday) with a brief but intense tender encounter between mother and daughter. During a violent argument, Jeanne criticizes Maryse for spending too long outdoors on her bicycle, causing her skin to darken: ‘Est-ce que je n’étais pas assez laide et assez noire comme cela? Je ressemblais à une Kongo’ (p. 118). Kongo is a pejorative term used to refer to someone with very dark skin (the name suggests that a person is as dark as a newly arrived African slave). In this manner, her mother suggests that Maryse is unattractive and equates her with the lower rungs of the ethnoclass

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hierarchy. After this outpouring of vitriol, at the conte’s climax Maryse silently approaches her mother and climbs into her bed, clasping her in a tight embrace, and the two women simultaneously begin to sob, a singular and powerful moment of mother–daughter emotional, and physical, unity. 21 Although Jeanne is a distant figure, the narrator is evidently fascinated with her mother: many of the contes are driven by her mother’s actions, decisions and silences. Maryse looks to her for an explanation of why the béké girl Anne-Marie de Surville has told her that black people must be beaten, but yet again mother–daughter proximity is thwarted when Jeanne displays a complete inability to help her daughter. Like Ega’s mother, Jeanne displays a shocked physical reaction, ‘estomaquée’ (p. 43) at her daughter’s question. Her response refuses to discuss the past by emphasizing the present: ‘Est-ce que tu vois quelqu’un donner des coups à ton papa ou à moi?’ (p. 43). Jeanne is positioned against a tradition of poteau-mitan mothers who display boundless affection and represent a bond with Creole culture, and her own identity is far more complex, formed both from motherhood and from her career as a teacher. Indeed, Jeanne’s inability to discuss the slave past can be attributed to her hard-won position as a member of the Race de Grands-Nègres. Whereas the years after 1848 brought little material change, the second generation of nouveaux citoyens (the term applied to newly freed slaves) benefited from increased access to schooling and qualified in professions such as teaching. By the time of Maryse’s birth in 1934, there had been an increase in the numbers of bourgeois Antillean families. This began to change women’s roles and altered the ways in which they defined their identity: Dans notre milieu, toutes les mères travaillaient, et c’était leur grande fierté. Elles étaient pour la plupart institutrices et ressentaient le plus vif mépris pour les tâches manuelles qui avaient tellement défait leurs mères. Pour nous, pas de manmans restant à la maison en golle défraîchie, nous accueillant avec de gros baisers sur le pas de la porte, après leur journée à laver et repasser le linge avec des carreaux brûlants ou à faire bouillir des racines, et, le soir, nous racontant les contes créoles de Zamba ou de Lapin. A cinq ans, nous savions tout des malheurs de Peau d’Ane. A sept, de ceux de Sophie. (p. 29)

Condé highlights the shift towards European patterns of behaviour and literary models. In this passage, she makes no concessions to the non-Antillean reader. Lapin is recognizable as Compère Lapin, but the name Zamba is less well known. The term is African, and it survived

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the dislocation of slavery to give rise to compère Zamba the elephant. 22 Typically, Lapin is wily and quick-witted, while Zamba symbolizes the passive slave working in the fields. Their tales commemorate an African heritage and offer an allegorical introduction to the slave past, educating children about oppression and resistance. Yet as Condé shows, social advancement means that these Creole traditions are cast aside in favour of classic metropolitan French stories such as the Comtesse de Ségur’s Les malheurs de Sophie (1864) and the pan-European fable Peau d’Ane. 23 Condé describes a generation of bourgeois Antillean children who are acquiring quintessentially French cultural references, as European tales about privilege and princesses supplant those of Lapin and Zamba. As a consequence, the child is denied access to educational references about the African diaspora and slavery, and is instead brought up to identify with European tales, a process of alienation from their immediate culture which begins in the home. Seven years after Le Cœur was published, Condé undertakes a more detailed study of her mother’s alienation in Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (2006). There are several instances of overlap and intertextuality between the récit d’enfance and Victoire, a text labelled as a récit. Rachel Douglas has identified rewriting as a particularly pronounced practice in Caribbean literature. 24 Following the work of French critic Gérard Genette, she demonstrates that the terms ‘hypotext’ (original version) and ‘hypertext’ (a later, modified version) are useful tools which allow the critic to distinguish the kinds of intertextuality and rewriting at work in an author’s œuvre. The ‘hypertext’ is ‘a later version that rewrites the earlier one by transforming it’. 25 Victoire can be considered as a hypertext which casts new light on Le Cœur. The author herself is fully aware of this process, as illustrated in Victoire when Condé refers back to the scene of recognition in Le Cœur, creating a bridge between the two texts: J’ai dit dans Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: Contes vrais de mon enfance comment personne dans ma famille ne m’instruisit ni de la Traite, de ces voyages initiatiques qui fondèrent notre destinée d’Antillais, ni de l’esclavage. (p. 116)

Victoire documents the origins of the alienation which leads to the intergenerational silence in Le Cœur. The hypertext further explores Condé’s mother’s proud, difficult and stubborn character by focusing on Jeanne’s relationship with her own mother, Victoire. In Le Cœur, the narrator explains that she never knew her maternal grandmother, as she died before her birth. This grandmother is referred

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to as Elodie, not Victoire, another instance of the interplay between truth and fiction in the récit d’enfance. Maryse is aware that Jeanne was ashamed of her mother: Les gens de La Pointe racontaient qu’elle [Jeanne] était une sans-sentiment qui avait brisé le cœur d’Elodie. Qu’elle ne la laissait pas plus toucher à ses enfants qu’une pestiférée. Qu’ayant honte de son mouchoir, elle l’avait forcée à prendre chapeau et à dénuder ses tempes dégarnies; de son parler créole, elle l’avait forcée au silence; de toute son attitude de subalterne, elle la cachait à chaque fois qu’elle recevait son monde. (p. 69)

The grandmother is depicted using typical Creole iconography, wearing a mouchoir to cover her balding forehead. In addition, the narrator emphasizes that she is Creolophone and subaltern, a term which creates an unmistakable echo with the work of postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’: here, the Elodie/Victoire is being written out of her own daughter’s life. 26 In Victoire, Condé gradually traces the history of her matrilinear family tree with greater sensitivity. The text depicts Victoire as one in a long line of black Caribbean women in Condé’s family who were seduced, or raped, by unknown men. This underscores the fact that the kind of female strength being described is, paradoxically, inextricably linked to the black woman’s greater vulnerability. Painfully aware of her own lack of education and limited life choices, Victoire is determined to send her daughter to school, and Jeanne becomes the first woman in her family to break the cycle of sexual exploitation and poverty. This goes some way to explaining why Jeanne embraces a patrilinear structure of bourgeois respectability through marriage to a wealthy older man, Maryse’s father Auguste Boucolon. This union has perplexed the narrator in Le Cœur, who remarks that ‘rien ne m’ôtera de l’idée que mon père ne méritait pas ma mère’ (p. 68), but in Victoire it is shown as a consequence of her mother’s desire for social mobility. However, the marriage which seals her new place in the bourgeoisie generates an unresolved tension between Victoire and Jeanne, and Condé focuses on the negative consequences of rapid class change for individual family relationships. Jeanne belongs to a generation for whom education was offering new opportunities, and whose achievements were heralded as evidence of the advent of the Race de Grands-Nègres. In Victoire, when she is awarded her brevet supérieur, Jeanne features in the local press under the headline ‘Négresse en avant! En avant toute!’ (p. 154), which echoes the

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slogan ‘le nègre en avant’ associated with Hégésippe Légitimus, who was elected as the first black Guadeloupean député in 1898. Yet the burden of expectation weighs heavily on Jeanne and provokes her disdain towards Creole society. This drives a wedge between her and her mother: [Victoire] était consciente que cette réussite avait été payée cher, trop cher. Acquise au prix de trop d’humiliations. Elle lui rendait son enfant inaccessible, enfermée dans une prison où l’air était raréfié. Ma mère était de cet avis. Je n’ai pas cessé de l’entendre s’exclamer d’un ton dont je saisissais l’ambiguïté ‘Ma mère ne savait ni lire ni écrire, mais sans elle, je ne serais pas là où je suis aujourd’hui.’ Où était-elle? Ceux qui avaient des yeux pour la regarder ­comprenaient bien qu’elle ne se voyait pas au paradis. (pp. 155–56)

Revelations in the hypertext, Victoire, cast new light on Jeanne’s stilted behaviour in Le Cœur. In the scene of recognition, it is this very repression of the Creole origins she has worked so hard to escape which lies at the heart of her inability to discuss the slave past. She belongs to a generation inculcated with the belief that progress can only come through adherence to the values of the mission civilisatrice. This leaves no place for the Creole vestiges of plantation servitude, and renders a frank discussion of slave origins impossible. In contrast to the repression evident in Le Cœur, Ernest Pépin uses the political background of an election as the introduction to his scene of recognition in Coulée d’or. The young Ernest is confused by posters declaring ‘OUI’ or ‘NON’ which are plastered on the walls of his neighbourhood, and receives the alarming explanation from his grandmother that ‘Sé moun la vlé woumet nou an esklavaj!’, which is translated in a footnote as: ‘Ils veulent nous remettre en esclavage’ (p.  128). In this case, a grandmother serves to compound the child’s confusion through heartfelt but troubling suggestions. The child’s reaction to this news is emotional and instinctive: ‘Mon univers s’écroulait. Personne ne m’avait réellement parlé de l’esclavage mais une mémoire confuse me soufflait que cette horreur concernait les Nègres et le fouet […] Je devins tout frette, tout silencieux, tout chimérique’ (p. 128). Ernest struggles with these concepts in silence, until he blurts out to his mother: ‘Je ne veux pas retourner en esclavage’ (p. 129). At this, his mother ‘demeura longtemps silencieuse’ before ‘elle poussa un long soupir et elle entreprit de m’expliquer’ (p. 129). Her explanation describes Schœlcher, abolition, 1848 and departmentalization, and she shows herself willing to take further questions from Ernest on this subject (p. 130). Whereas in

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other scenes of recognition, maternal responses chastise the child for their curiosity, Pépin’s mother finds the courage to provide a balanced, historically detailed account which assuages the child’s anxiety. This sets her apart from the other mothers in this study, as such frankness is otherwise only associated with grandmothers, and the figure of the grandmother will now be analysed in more depth. Othermothering In récits d’enfance by Confiant, Zobel and Pineau, grandmothers occupy a major role in raising the child protagonist. Confiant and Zobel, although in loving relationships with their mothers, are predominantly raised by their grandmothers until puberty. Analysis of similar patterns of child-rearing in Anglophone Caribbean and African American societies has given rise to the term ‘othermothering’. The othermother ‘is the substitute mother who takes on and takes over the nurturing role from the biological in times of need or crisis’, 27 and is most often a grandmother, aunt or family friend. There is no established equivalent French term for othermothering, but the situation is clearly described by M’man Tine in La Rue Cases-Nègres: ‘tout ce que je sais, y avait pas trois mois que ta mère t’avait déposé là dans ma chambre, minch! elle est partie pour Fort-de-France pour se placer’ (p. 44). 28 In Confiant, othermothering is also evidently for financial advantage, permitting both the narrator’s mother and father to work. In contrast, in Le Cœur, Maryse’s bourgeois parents employ a mabo (nurse) rather than relying on the extended family network. In La Rue Cases-Nègres, the significance of M’man Tine’s reflective and astute character for José’s subsequent development is indisputable. While there is no scene of recognition per se in Zobel, it is M’man Tine who exposes economic exploitation in the Caribbean. Without ever directly referring to slavery, her accounts of plantation life provide echoes of the slave past, particularly regarding the sexual vulnerability of women. She reveals that she is the granddaughter of a béké, and this suggests that her own grandmother was a slave who was seduced or raped (p. 43). M’man Tine herself fell victim to a similar fate when she was raped at a young age on a plantation, an event she relates in a matter-of-fact tone which demonstrates how normalized such violent assaults were: ‘j’étais toujours baissée du matin au soir dans un sillon, ma tête plus bas que mon derrière, jusqu’à ce que le Commandeur,

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M. Valbrun, ayant vu comment j’étais faite, m’a tenue, m’a roulée à terre et m’a enfoncé une enfant dans le ventre’ (p. 43). However, notwithstanding these instances of her offering a broader perspective, M’man Tine is more preoccupied with child-rearing and material struggles of an immediate nature in the present or near future, roles which are commonly ascribed to females. In La Rue Cases-Nègres it falls to José’s male role model, M. Médouze, to tell more abstract stories, including the history of the Middle Passage and abolition. His decision to speak to José about this past is distinctly linked to his personal experiences rather than being presented as a gendered decision; both slavery and abolition were directly experienced by the old man’s father (pp. 57–58). Michèle Lacrosil’s Sapotille et le serin d’argile is significant as the first Antillean text to suggest that the grandmother should embrace the role of actively passing on the knowledge of the slave past. The text is a novel, written in the form of diary entries made during a transatlantic crossing, but despite the fact that it is not a récit d’enfance, it displays several similarities with the genre. Sapotille’s grandmother appears only once, in the longest diary entry, written during a violent storm. Pathetic fallacy ushers in Sapotille’s memories of her grandmother’s explanation of her origins: ‘Tes aïeux, Sapotille … […] C’étaient des esclaves. Il est temps que tu saches! C’est à moi de te dire, comme fit pour moi ma grand-mère Elodie. A ton tour, tu renseigneras, quand tu seras vieille, ton petit-fils’ (p. 113). Her grandmother stresses that the slave past is part of her identity and that this same past offers proof of her ancestors’ tenacity. Her account inspires Sapotille to undertake a personal journey of exploration, and she traces the history of her slave ancestor Mentor in archival material in an empowering act of intergenerational connection, which renders him ‘une présence invincible’ (p. 120) for the narrator. The desire to supplement personal stories with historical corroboration is also evident in the work of Pineau. In L’Exil selon Julia, the discussion of the slave past arises through two grandmothers, Man Boule and Man Ya. The narrator’s bond with Man Ya renders the discovery that ‘la grand-manman de Man Ya avait eu le temps de connaître l’esclavage’ (p. 111) all the more poignant, as slavery becomes less abstract, more tangible. Man Ya’s explanations enlighten the protagonist, Marie, but their fragmented nature also leaves her confused and perplexed. Just as Condé traces her maternal ancestry in Victoire, another text by Pineau, Mes quatre femmes (2007), which is also labelled as a récit, sits in a hypertextual relationship with L’Exil. In the text,

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Pineau undertakes to document the women in her family, including further analysis of Man Ya/Julia, ending with the account of Pineau’s slave great-great-grandmother, Angélique, whose name the narrator has discovered in archival documents. The use of archival research is one method of confronting the taboos and unknowns imposed by slavery, by drawing attention to factual information and stressing the positive consequences for the person who undertakes research. In this respect, Pineau’s text creates a parallel with Lacrosil’s novel. However, gender inflects these archival discoveries. The written trace of Sapotille’s ancestor, Mentor, exists because he resisted slavery and his subsequent punishments were recorded. In contrast, Angélique’s name is printed in the Gazette officielle de la Guadeloupe on the occasion of her marriage to le sieur Pineau (p. 175). Their children’s ages are also given, allowing the narrator to deduce that Angélique was just fourteen when she bore his first child in 1807, in another unequivocal demonstration of the black woman’s vulnerability under slavery. Through the contrasting figures of the mother and grandmother, authors illustrate how an increased distance from Creole culture can lead to the onset of cultural amnesia. This is a consequence of education and social success: the évoluée mother does not wish to look back at the society which she has worked so hard to escape. Pépin provides the only example of a frank and ongoing discussion between mother and child in a scene of recognition: his mother’s words are not reported verbatim, but the narrator explains that she covered several crucial topics. Here, education appears significant: his mother is distinguished from the other mothers by the fact that she has not received a high degree of education. In contrast, mothers (and fathers) who have received a French assimilationist education tend to avoid and repress any explanation of the slave past, neglecting that formative aspect of Creole education. When grandmothers figure in the scene of recognition, they are more likely to broach the subject of the slave history themselves. The grandmothers described by Confiant, Zobel, Pineau, Lacrosil and Condé are all characterized by their connection with Creole culture. They were denied access to education, have not become members of the bourgeoisie and as a result have not fallen prey to the mission civilisatrice. For this reason, the grandmother often offers a more frank historical account of the slave past than the mother. Despite the alienation which French education can cause in parents, and in mothers in particular, one example stands apart, in Tu, c’est l’enfance by Maximin. Maximin’s parents are both educated and,

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uniquely, they work together as a parental unit to enlighten their child about the slave history. They share works of fiction with him such as La Rue Cases-Nègres, and reference books such as André Terrissé’s Lectures antillaises, a textbook which counteracts the potentially alienating effect of a metropolitan French syllabus: ‘avant même notre entrée à l’école, nous connaissions déjà très bien la vie quotidienne de nos ancêtres les Caraïbes, les Congos, les Coolies et les Gaulois’ (p. 26), a pointed modification of the French colonial educational mantra ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’. Moreover, when Daniel is introduced to the past by his parents, the potential burden of slavery is counteracted by the discovery of the active role played by heroes such as Delgrès. The past is demystified, and by focusing on stories which provide a positive influence, the child experiences a real enjoyment when daydreaming about the past: ‘les imaginations d’enfant comblent les oublis de l’histoire’ (p. 48). A lack of historical information becomes transformed from a negative, traumatic loss into a space which can be filled through creativity. This parental paradigm is unquestionably the most successful in all the récits d’enfance, and his parents’ proactive determination to provide their son with an education tailored to his Caribbean heritage means that Daniel is spared the confusion and hurt experienced by other child protagonists. Such parental openness explains the absence of a scene of recognition in Tu, c’est l’enfance, and the text is remarkable for the way in which it contextualizes slavery as just one stage in Antillean history, rather than a stage which overwhelms all others. The child’s awareness of slavery is an organic process rather than an abrupt revelation, which spares him the feelings of confusion experienced by the other narrators of récits d’enfance. The Absent Father Thus far, the Caribbean stereotype of the ‘absent father’ has itself remained conspicuously absent from this study. In A Bout d’enfance, Chamoiseau includes the ironic acknowledgement from his own father that ‘le père, dans le meilleur des cas, n’est qu’une vague hypothèse’ (p. 170). Yet in récits d’enfance by Chamoiseau, Confiant, Condé, Pineau and Maximin, fathers are not physically absent. They are married men and family breadwinners who seemingly uphold the Westernized notion of a family unit. Nonetheless, in all cases except Maximin, they occupy a distant role in the narratives.

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Condé’s text is characterized by a paternal void which she attributes to her father Auguste’s advanced age. She explains to Vèvè Clark that for the collection Voies des pères, voix des filles (1988) she submitted a fictional account, ‘La châtaigne et le fruit à pain’ (all other contributions were autobiographical), because ‘je n’avais rien à dire sur mon père’.29 In Le Cœur, Condé’s first extended reference to her father exemplifies the gap between father and daughter: C’est vrai, j’étais à l’agonie quand mon père émaillait sa conversation de phrases en latin, qu’on pouvait trouver, j’en fis la découverte plus tard, dans le Petit Larousse illustré. Verba volent. Scripta manent. Carpe Diem. Pater familias. Deus ex machina. (p. 15)

Auguste’s sources are revealed as commonplace, exposing paternal wisdom as a fallacy. The use of these phrases offers an extended metaphor for his behaviour as he apes the conventions of Western society in a bid for bourgeois respectability. Auguste kowtows to his wife, and the narrator expresses surprise on the rare occasions when he asserts himself: ‘exceptionnellement, mon père eut le dernier mot’ (p. 28). After Maryse has approached her mother for an explanation of Anne-Marie de Surville’s cruel treatment, and has not received the answers she sought, she then turns to her father. It is he who gestures towards the importance of history in understanding the encounter with Anne-Marie when he pronounces the cryptic phrase ‘on nous donnait des coups dans le temps’ (p. 44). The comment is not developed in any meaningful way as he immediately sends her straight back to her mother, who has already shown that she will not engage with Maryse’s questions. The parental couple unite in silencing the child’s curiosity. Towards the end of Le Cœur, Auguste becomes a figure of pity as he loses his sight and retreats to their country house at Sarcelles (p. 113). Victoire further develops sympathy towards his character, albeit tardily, and in the closing lines, Condé explains that her father’s mother died in a fire when he was playing football, leading her to reconsider the impact of this childhood emotional trauma: ‘Je crois que je suis injuste avec mon père. Trop de souffrances vécues dans l’adolescence lui avaient raréfié les sentiments’ (p. 254). This poignant comment remains a brief acknowledgement of unexplored paternal psychology at the end of a narrative which has exclusively privileged maternal exploration. In Chamoiseau, despite le Papa’s peripheral status, it is he who holds forth on political matters. In Chemin-d’école, he passes ironic comment on the school system, where ‘on entrait mouton pour en sortir cabri’

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(p. 45), and airs political views, countering the family’s surprise at his refusal to accept a promotion and relocate to metropolitan France with the observation that ‘ces pays d’Europe avaient engendré les guerres apocalyptiques, les tranchées, les gaz, Hitler, Mussolini, les camps de concentration, les massacres coloniaux […] ces lieux n’étaient de toute évidence pas complètement civilisés’ (p. 69). 30 Although the family is a matriarchy, paternal wisdom has the last word. This is replicated in Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour: his father is barely present in the narrative, but he makes one significant appearance in order to rescue Raphaël from the riots in Fort-de-France during December 1959. Moreover, it is Raphaël’s father who provides the final word in the text on métissage and the one-drop rule. Nonetheless, at the end of Ravines, Raphaël becomes increasingly distant from his father. This paternal distance is conveyed in a phrase which finally explains the title of Confiant’s text: ‘Tu te réfugies déjà dans la ravine du devant-jour, insensible à ses appels’ (p. 250). With the onset of puberty Raphaël distances himself from his father, in contrast to Chamoiseau, who only becomes interested in his father as he enters adolescence. In Chamoiseau’s A Bout d’enfance, le Papa is at last granted a substantial role. As the text appeared several years after the earlier volumes in the trilogy, it sits in something of a hypertextual relationship to them, revisiting similar territory while broaching more adult subject material than in the first texts. The father is now often given the nickname le colonel, a marker of increased reverence which coincides with the onset of puberty in Chamoiseau. The intense focus on Man Ninotte which shaped the first two volumes subsides as the négrillon enters adolescence. However, his father captures the négrillon’s attention by dint of his inactivity, which is implicitly contrasted with Man Ninotte’s frenetic unceasing activity: ‘le Papa était soudain devenu fascinant […] Il ne s’occupait d’aucune tâche domestique, n’ordonnait rien, ne contrôlait rien, partait au travail beau comme un colonel à l’amorce d’une campagne’ (p. 48). A Bout d’enfance also includes suggestions that there was a time when he conformed to the Caribbean stereotype of the promiscuous male; his unguarded comments that La Baronne might have a half-sister elsewhere on the island traumatize his eldest daughter (p. 64). Despite his role as the breadwinner in a stable marriage, in the hypertext the father is characterized by a certain domestic absence which upholds traditional patriarchal structures. At the beginning of Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia, gender roles are similarly confirmed. At a gathering of friends in Paris, the men sit together

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and exchange stories of military exploits. Strikingly, the recollection of their military careers is developed using a number of natural metaphors: A secouer ainsi la poussière du quotidien, ils échappent à l’engourdi des hivers. Ils font des tresses de l’oubli qui allonge ses racines dans le semblant du bien-être et dresse ses feuilles au carnaval du savoir-vivre. Et puis, ils couchent à plat le doute qui se relève toujours en eux, pareil aux mauvaises herbes d’un chemin déserté. (p. 12)

In contrast, however, ‘les femmes écoutent, la tête renversée dans une main. Elles acquiescent machinalement, lissent leurs cheveux, bâillent dans la serviette’ (p. 13), in between carrying out domestic chores. These women have followed their husbands around the world in a succession of military postings, but they exude disappointment: ‘Hélas, les soupirs qu’elles poussent à présent dénoncent tous leurs rêves’ (p. 15). In L’Exil, the narrator’s father, Maréchal, is a remote figure and is cryptically introduced as ‘notre Pater’ (p. 12). Pineau returns to this name in the hypertext Mes quatre femmes, explaining that ‘Pater’ was their nickname for her stern and distant father, and that ‘on rigole tant et plus lorsqu’il n’est pas dans les parages … […] on attend son départ pour le bout du monde’ (p. 139). Mes quatre femmes casts Maréchal in a new light, likening his behaviour to that of his violent father Asdrubal as he turns from the would-be liberator of his mother into a morally ambiguous, domineering patriarch. In her study of rewriting, Douglas has pointed out that ‘the overall effects of the changes made also tend to vary in accordance with the context in which a particular text is rewritten’, 31 and in this instance, context certainly emerges as significant. Mes quatre femmes broaches the subject of marital infidelity, which requires a more adult narrative stance than that permitted by L’Exil’s focus on childhood. An important example of this is the revelation that Maréchal once brought his Indochinese mistress and their two children back to France (p. 106). Such information renders his claim in L’Exil that he adopted the family’s eldest child Paul in Africa more ambiguous. These significant new details on family life which are provided by the hypertext expose the self-censorship at work in the original version of events in L’Exil, which presents a more sanitized childhood account. Finally, the Haitian context requires its own specific discourse on paternal structures. Laferrière’s father is completely absent from his récits d’enfance. Windsor Kléber Laferrière Senior was a political refugee who eventually settled, alone, in New York, 32 meaning that his son Dany was predominantly raised by his maternal grandmother, Da,

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in a further instance of othermothering. In Le Charme des après-midi sans fin, as Duvalier’s henchmen round up the men of Petit-Goâve, they put in place a violent and prohibitive patriarchy, governed by Montal and the captain Max Célestin and controlled from afar by the (unnamed) symbolic father, Duvalier, whose very nickname, Papa Doc, reinforced these power structures. In order to maintain power, Duvalier’s adversaries had to be removed, and this posed a direct threat to the male line of any dissenters. A later text, Je suis fatigué (published after the completion of Une autobiographie américaine), explains why Dany was sent to live with Da. Laferrière’s father’s anti-Duvalier politics had grave repercussions for his son: ‘pour Duvalier, le fils […] est identique au père. Il est appelé à jouer plus tard le même rôle que le père.’33 Laferrière was named after his father, and in this climate of violence towards the male line, the patronymic became dangerous. As a result, the author was given the nickname of Dany to avoid connection with his father. Once ‘renamed’ and sequestered with his maternal grandmother, all traces of the male line were obscured to ensure the child’s safety. Conclusion Gender stereotypes are either reinforced or challenged by different authors across the récits d’enfance, and the scene of recognition proves pivotal to the understanding of parental paradigms. Women play a key role in the transmission of the slave past, but this process can become troubled, as in the new bourgeoisie, educated women draw definition from both their professional activities and their roles as mothers, and are less willing to discuss the slave history with their children. In contrast, even when they are physically present, fathers play a more peripheral role in the texts, a depiction which has echoes of the absent father stereotype. In an attempt to move away from the painful history of slavery, mothers often promote the values of the mission civilisatrice in the belief that this will enable their own children to succeed, a process which is particularly evident in texts by Condé and Pineau. Consequently, Creole heritage is discarded in favour of French culture, but the unforeseen drawback of such behaviour is that children are denied an important tool for decoding the past. For in spite of the sustained parental silence, the past still permeates the child’s world, as they notice incongruities between what they are taught and what they actually experience. The intergenerational discomfort between parent and child, which most

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often occurs between mother and child, is countered by a grandmother’s willingness to broach the subject of slavery. The Creole grandmother, who appears anachronistic in modern society, is a figure who cautions against adopting one culture over another in the name of education and social advancement. True learning experiences often take place outside the classroom and arise through unpredictable events and encounters. By repeatedly drawing attention to the discomfort and stigma attached to the slave past when it is not sufficiently addressed, the texts highlight an urgent concern with the residual trauma attached to slavery in Caribbean society. Although characterized by awkward silences, ellipses and even physical revulsion, it is the scene of recognition, in which mothers and grandmothers play central if markedly different roles, which ultimately gives voice to this trauma.

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Afterword Afterword

Childhood is a time of beginnings and discoveries, and accordingly récits d’enfance play a foundational and initiatory role in Francophone Caribbean literature. Close focus on a series of texts has revealed the dynamics at play in each narrative, and identified how every author’s distinct style emerges, as well as uncovering thematic connections which illustrate the significance of the récits d’enfance for an individual author’s wider œuvre. These authors were writing at different times, under different conditions, and originate from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti and French Guiana. They also represent the experience of diaspora and Antillean immigration to France and North America. Analysis of the récits d’enfance offers a means of comparing and contrasting a wide range of themes which come to prominence in discussions of childhood by these diverse authors. The récit d’enfance is also a self-conscious and self-reflexive genre, with which authors seek to establish the parameters of Antillean literature. The narratives demand to be read interactively, aiming to stimulate the reader’s curiosity in the episodes they recount. In doing so, they gesture to a rich Antillean literary heritage as well as confronting the legacy of colonialism, and in every text considered, literary analysis has gone hand in hand with rigorous historical contextualization. Due to the semi-autobiographical nature of the texts, biographical details have been incorporated into each chapter. Attention has been paid to the interplay of fact and fiction within the récits d’enfance, but this is not an attempt to ‘expose’ falsehoods; rather, it develops a more sophisticated understanding of the récit d’enfance as a genre. This study cautions against critical approaches which describe the texts as ‘autobiographies’ and which read them as faithful mimetic presentations of childhood. For as it has emerged, in the récits d’enfance childhood operates in a ludic mode. Like the period of childhood itself, the texts are rich in invention, artifice and imagination.

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Récits d’enfance occupy a particular place in any author’s œuvre. They are marketable and relatively accessible in terms of literary style, particularly when compared with many novels by the same authors. Chris Bongie has recently drawn attention to the fact that the popularity of certain Francophone authors is often ignored by academic critics.1 The récits d’enfance are undoubtedly relevant to debates on the popularity of specific postcolonial authors: the genre is regarded as commercially viable, and is actively promoted through collections such as ‘Haute enfance’. In addition, the récits d’enfance can reinforce the ‘celebrity status’ of each author by granting access to autobiographical details which endorse the cult of the individual. Yet the texts are also unquestionably innovative, repeatedly playing with content, style and form. Although steeped in nostalgia, they are poignant, not saccharine. The thought-provoking style and explanatory mode in which the texts are written represent a conscious effort to engage the reader. The récits d’enfance stimulate the reader’s curiosity about history, literature and the Caribbean, and as such, the narratives offer an excellent introduction to Francophone Caribbean literature and culture, as well as an accessible entry point into each author’s wider works. The texts form a bridge between adult and children’s literature: while some make an appropriate literary introduction to non-metropolitan contexts for French and Francophone children of collège or lycée age, the récits d’enfance do not belong to children’s literature per se. This distinction becomes all the more clear as five of the authors examined here have also written texts specifically for children. 2 The récit d’enfance offers a unique, initiatory genre which is particularly appropriate to the postcolonial context. Although packaged in a form ostensibly more accessible than the ‘adult’ works, the genre surpasses the majority of children’s literature through its complexity – narrative, thematic or linguistic – and through the presence of an adult narrator, prone to wry comment, literary allusion and ellipsis. In the récits d’enfance, childhood innocence is at its most potent when juxtaposed with a spontaneous curiosity about the slave past. The concept of the scene of recognition provides a methodological framework for comparison between the texts, and reveals strikingly similar details. In the work of the DOM authors, these scenes draw together strands woven throughout the texts when the child has instinctively sensed some kind of repression concerning Creole language, education, skin colour or the ethnoclass hierarchy. In Dany Laferrière’s récits d’enfance, recognitional mechanisms are also at work. Here,

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they rely on a tension between knowledge and repression regarding the contemporary situation in Haiti, rather than on the tension between the knowledge and repression of slavery brought to the fore in texts by DOM authors. Furthermore, the scene of recognition is a model which underscores the pedagogic concerns of the récits d’enfance. Such concerns are, of course, particularly appropriate to literature which is itself providing a critical appraisal of education systems. The scene of recognition demonstrates that attempts to avoid a frank and informative discussion of the slave past only cause confusion and distress in the child. In every case considered, the children assume an unmistakably collective dimension when their naive questions elicit a reaction which demonstrates the psychological damage perpetuated by embarrassed silences and incomplete discussions. In her work for the project La Route de l’esclave, a cultural initiative organized by UNESCO, Dany Bébel-Gisler illustrated the acute malaise caused by the scene’s dynamics when she asked ‘Comment répondre à ces pourquoi d’enfants?’ (Grand-mère, ça commence où la Route de l’Esclave?, quatrième de couverture). Poignant silences and ellipses only serve to highlight the need to speak openly about the slave past. And indeed, in the corpus of texts considered here, amid the hesitations and choked silences, the voices of grandmothers and mothers, and occasionally of fathers, uncles and aunts, do begin to provide the guidance which is so evidently required. Yet the scene of recognition’s plea for a more open transmission of the past need not be restricted by race, or even age. In a recent publication, Edouard Glissant further interrogates recognition. Mémoires des esclavages (2007) is an extended essay which bears the subtitle La fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. 3 The text has unmistakably political objectives, as is underscored in the foreword by the former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. De Villepin highlights the concept of recognition, a lack of which, he argues, sustained slavery itself: ‘A l’origine de l’esclavage, il y a le refus de reconnaître en l’autre le même, notre frère, notre égal’.4 In Mémoires des esclavages, Glissant includes a scene which shares a number of similarities with the scene of recognition, and to an extent inverts the model by significantly altering setting, age and race. The scene in question takes place in Bordeaux between Glissant and a white woman of advanced years, and unfolds as follows: Une charmante dame d’un très digne âge, distinguée et à l’évidence cultivée, de savoir et de ton et de manières, accompagnée de sa petite-

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fille étudiante, vint me trouver après un exposé que j’avais prononcé à Bordeaux sur ce sujet de la traite, elle s’était émue de mes propos, et, comme eût dit notre professeur de français en classe de sixième du lycée Schœlcher à Fort-de-France dans la Martinique d’avant-guerre, me tint à peu près ce langage: – En êtes-vous sûr, monsieur Glissant? Cela me trouble d’avoir jusqu’ici vécu dans l’ignorance de cette réalité. Je ne vois aucune trace de ce que vous dites autour de moi, et je n’imagine pas Bordeaux organisant un tel commerce. Du moins sans que je puisse aujourd’hui m’en apercevoir un peu. [original emphasis]5

This personal example (with a nod to La Fontaine’s ‘Le Corbeau et le renard’) is inserted into the lengthy socio-political essay in order to draw attention to the contemporary need for educational discourse and open discussion about the slave past. Here, as in the récits d’enfance, the device of the ingénue who poses a confused question might appear too convenient, and the cynical reader might dismiss it as a literary conceit. But just as the scene of recognition raises more questions than it answers in the récits d’enfance, for Glissant it becomes a powerful method of unravelling the global economic reach of slavery: Je lui cite les très compétents professeurs d’économie qui recensaient à l’intention de leurs étudiants les magnifiques bâtiments, hôtels particuliers et sièges de compagnies, fruit du commerce de traite, au long des quais de la ville, et les considérations que ces professeurs développaient sur l’accumulation de capital qui s’est effectué à partir d’un tel commerce et sur sa conséquence, l’amorce et l’entreprise de l’industrialisation générale du pays.6

Significantly, the old lady is accompanied by her granddaughter, who is a student. Her youth symbolizes the author’s hope that future generations of metropolitan French citizens will better understand the slave history. Glissant’s scene draws attention to the role of slavery in the construction of empire in both the colonies and the métropole, and its ongoing significance for the shaping of contemporary France. Conclusion The récit d’enfance in the Francophone Caribbean is a major literary development, which has implications for the aesthetic retrieval of memory in Caribbean literature in particular, and for the study of Francophone and postcolonial literatures in general. An enhanced

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critical awareness of the genre opens the way for new comparative, transnational studies and offers important critical intersections. These provide new insights into other Francophone literary output in which childhood is central, such as Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir.7 In addition, several recent anthologies such as Une enfance outremer, edited by Leïla Sebbar, Enfances, edited by Alain Mabanckou, and Enfants de la balle: nouvelles d’Afrique, nouvelles de foot, edited by Abdourahman A. Waberi, focus on non-metropolitan experiences of childhood and include short stories which approach, and differ from, récits d’enfance.8 The analysis of such central themes as race, history, language and gender in the récits d’enfance has established paradigms whose applicability and relevance is not restricted by language and geography. These insights also provide a framework for future comparative studies of texts from the wider Caribbean, Latin America and even North America; texts such as In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming, Smile, Please by Jean Rhys,9 Child of the Tropics: Victorian Memoirs by Yseult Bridges,10 Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood by Pablo Medina,11 Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez,12 Half-breed by Maria Campbell13 and The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging by Kym Ragusa.14 In the Caribbean space in particular, such comparative methods are urgently required, given what Glissant refers to in Le Discours antillais as the ‘balkanisation’ of this area: ‘la colonisation a divisé en terres anglaises, françaises, hollandaises, espagnoles une région peuplée en majorité d’Africains: constituant en étrangers des gens qui ne le sont pas’.15 Closer attention to the récit d’enfance and the way childhood is constructed by different authors will provide an opportunity to both bridge and transcend the Caribbean space, bringing Francophone Caribbean texts into a constructive dialogue with other texts and contexts, ranging from the Caribbean to the wider Francophone world and beyond.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007 [1937]); George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Longman, 2000 [1953]); Derek Walcott, Another Life (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009 [1973]). 2 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993 [1940]) and I Wonder as I Wander (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993 [1956]); Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Youth and Childhood (London: Random House, 2000 [1945]); Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (London: Random House, 2002 [1969]). 3 Patrick Chamoiseau, Antan d’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 1993 [1990]), Chemin-d’école (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), A Bout d’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 4 Raphaël Confiant, Ravines du devant-jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), Le Cahier de romances (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 5 Gisèle Pineau, L’Exil selon Julia (Paris: Stock, 1996). 6 Maryse Condé, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (Paris: Laffont, 1999). 7 Daniel Maximin, Tu, c’est l’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 8 Dany Laferrière, L’Odeur du café (Paris: Serpent à Plumes, 2001 [Montréal: VLB, 1991]), Le Charme des après-midi sans fin (Paris: Serpent à Plumes, 1999 [Outremont, Montreal: Lanctôt, 1997]). 9 Marie-Célie Agnant, Le Livre d’Emma (Montreal: Remue-ménage, 2001), La Dot de Sara (Montreal: Remue-ménage, 2010); Dany Bébel-Gisler, Grand-mère, ça commence où la Route de l’Esclave? (Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe: Jasor, 1998); Emile Ollivier, Mille eaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); Ernest Pépin, Coulée d’or (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 10 Maryse Condé, ‘Parce que tu es une négresse’, L’Humanité, 10 May 2006. See http://www.humanite.fr/node/98926 (accessed 9 January 2013). 11 Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 2.

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12 See http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexteArticle.do;jsessionid=2D E01648F25D3B9EFD145B6631D1AD01.tpdjo09v_1?idArticle=LEGIARTI00 0006238939&cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000444898&categorieLien=id&dat eTexte=20120318 (accessed 2 March 2012). 13 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Des coches’, in Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), pp. 908–09. 14 The enkyklios paideia turned Greekness from an ethnic marker into an acquirable commodity, ‘providing for the admission of non-Greeks or non-Romans into the Greek and Roman cultural groups’. See Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 74. 15 Patrick Chamoiseau, Au Temps de l’Antan (Paris: Hatier, 1988), p. 10. 16 Maeve McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli…”: Memory and Forgetting in French Caribbean Autobiography of the 1990s’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.4 (2004), pp. 438–50 (p. 438). 17 Sidonie Smith, ‘Memory, Narrative and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven’, in Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernst Ruhe (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 37–60 (p. 40). 18 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 19 Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: the Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 89. 20 Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 4. 21 Serge Doubrovsky, Autobiographiques: de Corneille à Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1988), p. 77. 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 2005 [1964]); Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975); Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 2005 [1983]). 23 Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. xi. 24 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dreams in a Time of War (London: Harvill Secker, 2010). 25 Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’Enfant de sable (Paris: Seuil, 1985). 26 Ferdinand Oyono, Une Vie de boy (Paris: R. Juillard, 1956). 27 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, p. 14. 28 Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 247. 29 Chantal Maignan-Claverie, Le métissage dans la littérature des Antilles françaises: le complexe d’Ariel (Paris: Karthala, 1999), p. 7. 30 Jacques Lecarme, ‘La légitimation du genre’, in Le récit d’enfance en

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question, ed. Philippe Lejeune, Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle 12 (Paris: Université de Paris X, 1988), pp. 21–37. 31 Dennis F. Essar, ‘Time and Space in Dany Laferrière’s Autobiographical Haitian Novels’, Callaloo 22.4 (1999), pp. 930–46 (p. 932). 32 Chris Bongie, ‘Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature’, Postmodern Culture 14.1 (2003). See http://pmc.iath. virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1bongie.html#ref2 (accessed 12 August 2010). 33 The growing collection comprises over 70 titles with at least seven texts by Francophone Caribbean authors. Many other authors hail from other Francophone regions or are translated from languages including English, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. For a list of the collection, see http://www. librairie-gallimard.com/listeliv.php?COLL=Haute+Enfance&RECHERCHE =appro (accessed 9 January 2013). 34 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. viii. 35 See Louise Hardwick, ‘“J’ai toujours été une personne un peu à part”: Questions à Maryse Condé’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 9.1 (2006), pp. 111–24 (pp. 113–14). 36 Régis Antoine, Rayonnants écrivains de la Caraïbe (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 1998), p. 108. See in particular Chapter 4, ‘Récits d’enfance créoles’, pp. 108–20. 37 Denise Escarpit, ‘Le récit d’enfance: un classique de la littérature de jeunesse’, in Le Récit d’enfance: enfance et écriture, ed. Denise Escarpit and Bernadette Poulou (Paris: Editions du Sorbier, 1993), pp. 23–39 (p. 36). 38 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, trans. Mohammed B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1993 [1989]). 39 Louise Hardwick in conversation with Chamoiseau during a seminar at the Maison Française d’Oxford, 2005. 40 Louise Hardwick, ‘Du français-banane au créole-dragon: entretien avec Raphaël Confiant’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 9.2 (2006), pp. 257–77 (p. 265). 41 Derek Walcott, ‘A Letter to Chamoiseau’, New York Review of Books 14 August 1997, pp. 45–48 (47). 42 Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 43 For a close reading of the epigraph and Glissant’s discussion of Segalen, see Étienne Germe, ‘Segalen en épigraphe: la créolité’, in Métissages littéraires, ed. Yves Clavaron and Bernard Dieterlé (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, CELEC/CEP, 2005), pp. 251–59. 44 Edouard Glissant, Malemort (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 231. 45 Joseph Zobel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1974 [1950]). 46 Dominique Gallet and Mona Makki, Joseph Zobel: Le soleil d’ébène (‘tv-francophonie’ production, 2002).

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47 Zobel, La Rue Cases-Nègres, pp. 269–70. 48 Mireille Rosello, ‘“Votre plus émouvant souvenir d’enfance”: Autobiographie et Fascination’, in Postcolonialisme et Autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 225–38. 49 In April 1902 the Lycée de Saint-Pierre was renamed the Lycée Victor Schœlcher, but just one month later the eruption of Mount Pelée in May destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre. The Lycée Schœlcher was eventually rebuilt in its current location in Fort-de-France, on a historically charged site where the Governor’s house once stood, and work was completed in 1936. The original distinctive winged buildings suffered considerable neglect and were scheduled for demolition in the late 2000s. See the school’s official website: http://www. lgt-schoelcher.com/ (accessed 9 January 2013). 50 Confiant, Le Cahier de romances, p. 80. 51 Christian Beringuier, ‘L’Espace régional martiniquais’, CERAG 3 (Fort-de-France: Centre Etudes Régionales Antilles Guyane, 1969 [1966]), pp. 11–12. 52 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 441. 53 Terence Cave, Recognitions. A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 1. 54 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 67. 55 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 237–60. 56 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). 57 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995 [1939]). 58 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 224. 59 Françoise Vergès, ‘L’oubli et le déni. Histoires et mémoires de l’esclavage dans l’outre-mer français’, Cultures Sud 165 (2007), pp. 65–69 (p. 67). 60 See http://portal.unesco.org/culture/fr/ev.php-URL_ID=25659&URL_ DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed 12 August 2009). 61 Christiane Taubira, L’esclavage raconté à ma fille (Paris: BibliophaneDaniel Radford, 2002). 62 Régis Dubray, La République expliquée à ma fille (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 63 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 6. 64 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 26. 65 Maryse Condé, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (Paris: Mercure de France, 2006). 66 Gisèle Pineau, Mes quatre femmes (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2007).

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Notes to pages 24–32 Chapter One

1 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 439. 2 Michèle Lacrosil, Sapotille et le serin d’argile (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). 3 Françoise Ega, Le Temps des madras (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989 [1966]). 4 Maurice Virassamy, Le Petit Coolie noir (Paris: Gedalge, 1972). 5 Mayotte Capécia, Je suis Martiniquaise (Paris: Corrêa, 1948). 6 Lucien Montas, quatrième de couverture, Autobiographie des écrivains d’Haïti, ed. Christophe Philippe-Charles (Port-au-Prince: Editions Christophe, 1994). 7 Philippe-Charles (ed.), Autobiographie des écrivains d’Haïti, p. 11. 8 Saint-John Perse, Eloges (Paris: Gallimard, 1960 [1911]). 9 Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité, p. 29. 10 Unpublished essay by Merle Hodge, quoted in Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: Francophone Writers at the Ends of the French Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), p. 146. 11 Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962 [1937]). 12 Ellen Conroy Kennedy (ed. and trans.), The Negritude Poets: an Anthology of Translations from the French (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989 [1975]), p. 42. 13 See Rachel Douglas, Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), pp. 12–14. See also A. James Arnold, ‘Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Historically’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies 44.3 (2008), pp. 258–75. 14 Chamoiseau will in turn gesture to Césaire in naming his own protagonist le négrillon, as discussed in Chapter 2. 15 Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles. Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane: 1635–1975 (Paris: Hatier, 1991), p. 158. 16 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, dir. Philippe Bérenger (Pois Chiche Films/RFO/Comédie Noire/BCI/Odysseus, 2008). 17 Clément Richer, Ti-Coyo et son requin (Lausanne: La thune du Guay, 1958 [1941]). 18 Ibid., p. 11. 19 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), pp. 86–87. 20 Guy Tirolien, Balles d’or (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1961). 21 Maryse Condé, La vie sans fards (Paris: JC Lattès, 2012), p. 84 and p. 149. There is also, as Condé explains in the text, a personal connection: Tirolien was Condé’s brother-in-law until he divorced her older sister, Ena Boucoulon.

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22 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59. 23 No specific films are named, but the comments suggest The Thief of Baghdad, directed by Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan (London Film Productions, 1940), in which the black Mississippi-born actor Rex Ingram plays a malevolent genie. 24 Edouard Glissant, La Lézarde (Paris: Seuil, 1958). 25 In Le Cahier de romances, Confiant describes the novel’s rapturous reception and the difficulty of purchasing a copy in Martinique. He also recalls his decision not to read the text as an adolescent, for fear its influence would be artistically stifling (pp. 206–09). 26 Elinor S. Miller, ‘The Identity of the Narrator in Edouard Glissant’s La Lézarde’, South Atlantic Bulletin 43.2 (1978), pp. 17–26 (p. 26 n. 3). 27 Anonymous, ‘Chronique du Prix des lecteurs’, La Gazette des lettres, 118, 8 July 1950, p. 1. 28 Rue cases-nègres, dir. Euzhan Palcy (Nouvelles Editions de Films (NEF) 1983). 29 Jenny Zobel and Emily Marshall Zobel, ‘“Lorsque je vais dans mon village” (When I return to my village): Joseph Zobel’s Visions of Home and Exile’, Wasafiri 26.3 (2011), pp. 1–8 (p. 8). 30 Joseph Zobel, Diab’-là (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1946). 31 Joseph Zobel, Laghia de la mort (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1978 [1946]). 32 Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 149. 33 Gallagher, Soundings, p. 184. 34 Roger Toumson, La Transgression des couleurs: littérature et langage des Antilles, XVIIIe, XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Editions caribéennes, 1989), II, p. 326. 35 Randolph Hezekiah, ‘Joseph Zobel: the Mechanics of Liberation’, Black Images 4.3–4 (1975), pp. 44–55. 36 Joseph Zobel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (Paris: Editions Jean Froissart, 1950), p. vii. 37 Suzanne Crosta, ‘L’enfance sous la rhétorique de l’édification culturelle: La poétique régénératrice chez Joseph Zobel’, in Récits d’enfance antillaise (Sainte Foy, Quebec: GRELCA, 1998). See http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile. en.ile/docs/crosta/zobel.html (accessed 1 October 2010). 38 Private correspondence with Jenny Zobel, December 2011. 39 Zobel and Zobel, ‘“Lorsque je vais dans mon village”’, p. 5. 40 Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (New York: Harper, 1929). 41 Joseph Zobel, La fête à Paris (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1953); republished as Quand la neige aura fondu (Paris: Editions caribéennes, 1979).

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Notes to pages 43–57

42 A connection I have discussed in a separate article. See Louise Hardwick, ‘Dancing the Unspeakable: Rhythms of Communication in “Laghia de la mort” by Joseph Zobel’, in Rhythms, ed. Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 119–31. 43 Condé, Le Cœur, p. 103. 44 Madeline Cottenet-Hage and Kevin Meehan, ‘“Our Ancestors the Gauls…”: Schools and Schooling in Two Caribbean Novels’, Callaloo 15.1 (1992), pp. 75–89 (p. 78). 45 Her mother also offers a response to the children’s questions about why there are no black angels or figures in their local church (p. 152). The scene can be directly compared with a similar episode in Confiant, and is discussed in Chapter 3. 46 Alain Garnier (ed.), MADRAS. Dictionnaire encyclopédique et pratique de la Martinique (Martinique: Editions Exbrayat, 1996), p. 790. 47 Christiane Makward, Mayotte Capécia ou l’aliénation selon Fanon (Paris: Karthala, 1999), p. 158. 48 A. James Arnold, ‘Frantz Fanon, Lafcadio Hearn et la supercherie de Mayotte Capécia’, Revue de littérature comparée 76.2 (2002), pp. 148–66 (p. 150). 49 Arnold, ‘Frantz Fanon’, p. 153. 50 Maryse Condé, La Parole des femmes: essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979), p. 37. Chapter Two 1 A Bout d’enfance, p. 56. 2 Chemin-d’école, p. 91. 3 V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002 [1967]). 4 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 447. 5 Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean-Luc de Laguarigue, Tracées de Mélancolies: Habitation Saint-Etienne (Habitation Saint-Etienne: Editions Traces, 1999). 6 Lorna Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau: Espaces d’une écriture antillaise (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 32. 7 Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronique des sept misères (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). 8 McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau, p. 22. 9 Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo magnifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). 10 Maeve McCusker, ‘Intersections of gender, space and language in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Antan d’enfance and Chemin-d’école’, ASCALF Bulletin (Autumn/Winter 1997), pp. 3–15 (p. 3). 11 Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

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12 For example, Chamoiseau directs the reader to Ecrire in a footnote in A Bout d’enfance (p. 32, n. 1). 13 Lucien Taylor, ‘Créolité Bites’, Transition 74 (1997), pp. 124–61 (p. 148). 14 Antan d’enfance, p. 39. 15 Chamoiseau provides this definition in a footnote (Antan d’enfance, p. 54, n. 1), although Confiant’s Creole dictionary defines Gros Kato as Venus. 16 Janice Morgan, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, The French Review 80.1 (2006), pp. 186–98 (p. 187). 17 Here it would appear that Chamoiseau misuses the American football term ‘fullback’; the intended meaning is probably more akin to the expression ‘full to the brim’. 18 Reminiscent of the division of Sartre’s autobiography Les Mots into the sections ‘Lire’ and ‘Ecrire’, as Gallagher suggests in Soundings, p. 103. 19 For a discussion of ‘le “O” phatique’ elsewhere in Chamoiseau’s work, see Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau, pp. 173–74. 20 Lacrosil’s anti-heroine Sapotille, on the other hand, must endure countless hours in her school’s cachot (discussed in Chapter 1). The cachot recurs throughout Chamoiseau’s œuvre, and its function in slave society as an underground prison for slaves is discussed in Un Dimanche au cachot (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 21 Jean-Claude Lebrun, ‘Chamoiseau: La venue de l’écrivain à la “totalitémonde”’, L’Humanité, 10 February 2005. See http://www.humanite.fr/ node/298463 (accessed 9 January 2013). 22 Private conversation with Louise Hardwick at the Maison Française d’Oxford, 2 May 2005. 23 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 24 McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau, p. 65. 25 Patrick Crowley, ‘The état civil: Post/Colonial Identities and Genre’, The French Forum 29.3 (2004), pp. 79–94 (p. 87). 26 Lecarme, ‘La légitimation du genre’, p. 34. 27 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 778. 28 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (Oxford: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2007), pp. 122–23. 29 Saint-John Perse, Eloges, p. 29. 30 Sharon L. Shelly, ‘Addressing Linguistic and Cultural Diversity with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école’, The French Review 75.1 (2001), pp. 112–26 (p. 118). 31 Morgan, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 192. 32 Gallagher, Soundings, p. 55. 33 Maeve McCusker, ‘“This Creole Culture, miraculously forged”: the contradictions of Créolité’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies. A Critical Introduction, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 112–21 (p. 120).

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Notes to pages 67–77

34 Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de réel’, Communications 11 (1968), pp. 84–89. 35 Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres créoles, pp. 19–20. Petroglyphs are found throughout the Caribbean. In Martinique, the only known collection is near the southern town of Sainte-Luce in the forêt de Montravail (engravings similar to those found in Trois-Rivières in Guadeloupe). 36 Morgan, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, pp. 188–89. 37 Lorna Milne, ‘Sex, Gender and the Right to Write: Patrick Chamoiseau and the Erotics of Colonialism’, Paragraph 24.3 (2001), pp. 59–75 (p. 69). 38 Two further publications by Chamoiseau emphasize the word tracée: ‘Que faire de la parole? Dans la tracée mystérieuse de l’oral à l’écrit’, in Ecrire la parole de nuit: la nouvelle littérature antillaise, ed. Ralph Ludwig (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) and Chamoiseau and Confiant, Lettres créoles. 39 Richard Burton, ‘Debrouya Pa Peche, ou Il y a Toujours Moyen de Moyenner: Patterns of Opposition in the Fiction of Patrick Chamoiseau’, Callaloo 16.2 (1993), pp. 466–81 (p. 481 n. 35). 40 Fanon, Peau noire, p. 16. 41 Ibid., p. 7. 42 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi K. Bhabha’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), p. 211. 43 Fanon, Peau noire, p. 175. 44 In her discussion of Chamoiseau’s sarcastic presentation of the Eurocentric syllabus in Chemin-d’école, Milne suggests that ‘c’est sans doute le fait d’avoir subi cette stigmatisation infligée aux plus jeunes enfants qui inspire les premiers écrits de Chamoiseau que l’on pourrait classer comme rectificatifs et alternatives historiques et culturels’. Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau, p. 62. 45 Chamoiseau has also criticized Condé for using the French term ‘village’ instead of the Antillean term ‘bourg’; see Chamoiseau and Kathleen Baluntansky (trans.), ‘Reflections on Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove’, Callaloo 14.2 (1991), pp. 389–95 (p. 394). 46 Naipaul, Mimic Men, p. 231. 47 Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 122–23. 48 Ibid., p. 124. 49 Ibid., p. 122. 50 Ibid., p. 126. 51 Naipaul, Mimic Men, p. 97. 52 V.S. Naipaul, ‘Two Worlds’, The Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2001. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture. html (accessed 1 March 2011). 53 Chamoiseau emphasizes that the Maître is an Antillean native who occasionally lapses into Creole. The fact that he ‘forgets’ that ananas becomes zananas echoes Fanon’s observations about the Martinican who returns from

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France ‘ne réponde qu’en français et souvent ne comprend pas le créole’ (Peau noire, p. 18), discussed in Chapter 1. 54 Crowley, ‘The état civil’, p. 89. 55 McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau, p. 74. 56 Morgan, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 194. 57 Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 27. 58 See the preface to Antan d’enfance. Old wooden houses in the Terre-Sainville district of Fort-de-France are increasingly rare due to fires. 59 In Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia, the narrator comments: ‘Le nom seul fait déjà suer, mabouya’ (p. 199). 60 Emphasized in Texaco in a section entitled ‘Nèg sans souliers’: ‘Sans l’interdiction de porter des chaussures, plus d’un esclave en goguette de dimanche eût pu être pris pour un nègre libre’ (pp. 104–05). 61 Morgan, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 195. 62 Ibid., p. 195. Chapter Three 1 Jacques Bouton, Relation de l’establissement des François depuis l’an 1635 en l’isle de la Martinique, l’une des Antilles de l’Amérique: Des mœurs des sauvages, de la situation, et d’autres singularitez de l’isle (Paris: Cramoisy, 1640), p. 138. Pilote is commemorated in the place names Rivière-Pilote and Case-Pilote. 2 See the map ‘L’Isle de la Martinique’, in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris: Thomas Lolly et al., 1667). 3 See the museum’s official website: http://www2.cg972.fr/mdap/default. htm (accessed 24 July 2010). 4 Chamoiseau, Ecrire, p. 126. 5 Raphaël Confiant, Le Nègre et l’Amiral (Paris: Grasset, 1988). 6 Raphaël Confiant, Eau de café (Paris: Grasset, 1991). 7 Taylor, ‘Créolité Bites’, p. 126. 8 Hardwick, ‘Du français-banane au créole-dragon’, p. 265. 9 Ibid., p. 265. 10 Ibid., pp. 261–62. 11 Ibid., p. 262. 12 Ibid., p. 264. 13 Roy Chandler Caldwell, Jr, ‘Créolité and Postcoloniality in Raphaël Confiant’s L’Allées [sic] des Soupirs’, The French Review 73.2 (1999), pp. 301–11 (p. 303). 14 By 2004 these intertextual relationships are further expanded, as Corbin takes Saint-John Perse’s quotation as the title of his own récit d’enfance. See

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Henri Corbin, Sinon l’enfance (Matoury, Guyane Française: Ibis Rouge, 2004), which was awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe in 2005. 15 Maryse also struggles to find an Antillean text which adequately describes her own experience in Condé’s Le Cœur (discussed in Chapter 4). 16 Jefferson M. Fish, ‘The Myth of Race’, in Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, ed. Jefferson M. Fish (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), pp. 113–44 (p. 129). 17 Michel Leiris, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (Paris: UNESCO/Gallimard, 1987 [1955]). 18 Ibid., p. 161 19 Ibid., p. 161. Robert Rose-Rosette (1905–96) was a Martinican vet and local historian who restored the La Pagerie sugar plantation, the birthplace of Joséphine de la Pagerie. 20 Maignan-Claverie, Le métissage, p. 66. 21 Confiant humorously referred to his ethnic identity at the launch of his Dictionnaire Creole martiniquais-français in 2007. Questioned about the dedication required to produce the dictionary (the project took fifteen years) he replied: ‘Man sé an chaben, pa janmen bliyé sa!’ (Je suis un chabin, ne l’oubliez jamais!) See http://www.potomitan.info/dictionnaire/dictionnaire1. php (accessed 5 December 2007). 22 In Ega’s Le Temps des madras, the narrator confronts her mother, asking ‘pourquoi les anges du catéchisme étaient tous blancs’ (p. 151). In Condé’s Le Cœur, Maryse makes a similar observation but does not voice it: ‘je ne pouvais m’empêcher de remarquer combien elles étaient rares, les figures noires ou simplement colorées dans la nef centrale de la cathédrale’ (p. 75). 23 Raphaël moves towards a conclusion which echoes the pioneering work of Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop asserted that there were links between Africa and Egyptian civilization, opposing the claims about primitive African cultures which had been propounded under colonialism. His doctoral thesis, rejected by the Sorbonne, was published in 1954 as Nations nègres et culture: de l’antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique Noire d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1954). 24 For detailed analysis of the origins of these terms, see Maignan-Claverie, Le métissage, pp. 42–63. 25 Doris Garraway, ‘Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description… de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2 (2005), pp. 227–46 (p. 227). 26 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique, et historique de la partie française de Saint-Domingue: Nouvelle édition entièrement revue et complétée sur le manuscrit suivie d’un index des noms de personnes, ed. Blanche Maure and Etienne Taillemite (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1958 [3 vols., 1797]), p. 89. 27 Raphaël Confiant’s La Panse du chacal (Paris: Mercure de France,

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2004) also explores coolie identity. Its publication coincided with celebrations marking 150 years of Indian immigration to Martinique and Guadeloupe. 28 See Juliette Sméralda-Amon, ‘Interview’ http://www.indereunion.net/ actu/amon/interamon.htm (accessed 20 July 2010). 29 Maurice Virassamy, Ne crachez pas sur Sangaré ou la Genèse de la République universienne (Paris: La Pensée Universelle, 1983). 30 Pépin, Coulée d’or, p. 171. 31 Ibid., p. 170. 32 ‘La barque de mon père, studieuse, amenait de grandes figures blanches: peut-être bien, en somme, des Anges dépeignés; ou bien des hommes sains, vêtus de belle toile et casqués de sureau (comme mon père, qui fut noble et décent).’ Saint-John Perse, Eloges, p. 38. 33 André Cochut, ‘De la société coloniale: abolition de l’esclavage’, Revue des Deux Mondes (1843), vol. III, July–September, pp. 177–228. 34 Raphaël Confiant, Commandeur du Sucre (Paris: Ecriture, 1994). Other recurring characters are Fils de Diable, a formidable major and Hortense’s lover, and ‘townie corner-boy’ Rigobert, as Mary Gallagher points out. See Soundings, p. 134. 35 Chamoiseau also makes a passing reference to the riots, but characteristically le négrillon is unaware of exactly what is happening, as Man Ninotte keeps him indoors; all he observes is his mother shouting her support for the rioters through an upstairs window (Antan, p. 77). 36 Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993). 37 Ibid., p. 194. 38 Raphaël Confiant, L’Allée des soupirs (Paris: Grasset, 1994). 39 Chandler Caldwell, ‘Créolité and Postcoloniality’, p. 303. Chapter Four 1 Maryse Condé, Hérémakhonon (Paris: Union Générale, 1976). 2 The existing studies of Condé’s work which focus on autobiography predate the publication of Le Cœur. See Françoise Lionnet, ‘Happiness Deferred: Maryse Condé’s Hérémakhonon and the Failure of Enunciation’, in Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig and Maryse Condé (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 [1990]). 3 Françoise Pfaff, Entretiens avec Maryse Condé (Paris: Karthala, 1993), p. 9. 4 Leah D. Hewitt, ‘Vérités des fictions autobiographiques’, in Maryse Condé: une nomade inconvenante, ed. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Lydie Moudileno (Matoury, Guyane Française: Ibis Rouge, 2002), pp. 163–68 (p. 164).

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5 Condé’s year of birth is often incorrectly stated to be 1937, but she was born in 1934. 6 The later edition of the text published by Laffont in the Pocket series changes the front cover subtitle to ‘Souvenirs de mon enfance’, although the original subtitle, ‘contes vrais de mon enfance’, appears inside on the title page. 7 Hardwick, ‘“J’ai toujours été une personne un peu à part”’, pp. 113–14. 8 Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), p. 26. Barthes also identifies the bourgeois flavour of the tense, which upholds the class distinctions so central to Le Cœur. 9 Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1987 [1954]). 10 Vèvè A. Clark, ‘“Je me suis réconciliée avec mon île”: Une interview de Maryse Condé’, Callaloo 12.1 (1989), pp. 86–133. 11 Clark, ‘“Je me suis réconciliée avec mon île”’ p. 90. 12 Hardwick, ‘“J’ai toujours été une personne un peu à part ”’, p. 114. 13 Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (eds), Penser la Créolité (Paris: Karthala, 1995). 14 Maryse Condé, ‘Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer’, Yale French Studies 97 (2000), pp. 151–65 (p. 160). 15 Erica L. Johnson, ‘Departures and Arrivals: Home in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer’, in Gender and Displacement: “Home” in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography, ed. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 15–33 (p. 22). 16 Langston Hughes, ‘Ebony’s Nativity’, Ebony (November 1965), pp. 40–46 (p. 41). 17 Fanon, Peau noire, p. 123. 18 Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, IX (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 235–41. 19 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 132. 20 I have focused elsewhere on shades of the spectral in ‘Leçon d’histoire’. See Louise Hardwick, ‘Confronting the Ghosts of the Past: Spectres and Stereotypes in the Work of Maryse Condé, with Particular Reference to Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem and “Leçon d’histoire”’, Essays in French Literature 43 (2006), pp. 65–78. 21 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 41. 22 Condé, ‘Parce que tu es une négresse’. 23 Derek O’Regan, Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations: The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Condé (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 48, n. 56. 24 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970). 25 For a discussion of the tragic-comic tone of the conte, see Mireille

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Rosello, ‘Le petit cornac des mots d’amour: Tragi-comédie en un adjectif’, in Cottenet-Hage and Moudileno (eds), Une nomade inconvenante, pp. 169–74. 26 See Nick F. Nesbitt, ‘Le sujet de l’histoire: Mémoires troublées dans Traversée de la mangrove et Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer’, in Cottenet-Hage and Moudileno (eds), Une nomade inconvenante, pp. 113–19, esp. p. 118, and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 196–99. 27 Hewitt points out intertextuality between these contes and Condé’s wider corpus, suggesting that Gilbert makes an anonymous appearance as a mulatto boyfriend in Hérémakhonon. Linsseuil is the name Condé uses in La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Laffont, 1995), her Caribbean rewriting of Wuthering Heights. See Hewitt, ‘Vérités des fictions autobiographiques’, p. 165, n. 1. 28 Claire Etcherelli, Elise ou la vraie vie (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1967). 29 The unusual name Olnel occurs elsewhere in Condé’s work, again connected with sexuality. In Une Saison à Rihata (Paris: Laffont, 1981), Marie-Hélène’s affair with brother-in-law Olnel is one of the reasons for her sister’s suicide. 30 Jonathan Demme, The Agronomist (Clinica Estetico, HBO/Cinemax Documentary, 2003). 31 Prestes was a Brazilian revolutionary who led a failed effort to spark a rebellion in the countryside against the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in the 1920s. He went on to lead the Brazilian Communist Party. 32 Fanon, Peau noire, p. 90. 33 Celia Britton, Race and the Unconscious (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), p. 40. 34 Ibid., p. 43. 35 Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar, ‘An Interview With Maryse Condé and Rita Dove’, Callaloo 14.2 (1991), pp. 347–66 (p. 357). Chapter Five 1 Ernest Pépin, ‘The Place of Space in Novels of the Créolité Movement’, in Ici-là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, ed. Mary Gallagher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 1–23 (p. 2). 2 Maximin was a Commissaire for the outre-mer events in 2011; see http://2011-annee-des-outre-mer.gouv.fr/ (accessed 28 March 2011). 3 Daniel Maximin, L’isolé soleil (Paris: Seuil, 1981), Soufrières (Paris: Seuil, 1987), L’Ile et une nuit (Paris: Seuil, 1995). 4 H. Adlai Murdoch, ‘(Dis)Placing Marginality: Cultural Identity and Creole Resistance in Glissant and Maximin’, Research in African Literatures 25.2 (1994), pp. 81–101 (p. 89).

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5 Daniel Maximin, Les Fruits du cyclone: une géopoétique de la Caraïbe (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 Similarly, in Soufrières, the threatened eruption of the Soufrière volcano in 1976 forms the backdrop to a family drama (Maximin’s title plays on the terms ‘sœurs’ and ‘frères’). 8 Leiris, Contacts de civilisations, pp. 83–84. 9 Sinon l’enfance by Henri Corbin is the only récit d’enfance to present a darker side to childhood sexuality, as Corbin relates how he narrowly escaped being sexually abused by a local man (pp. 17–18). 10 Maximin, Les Fruits du cyclone, p. 103. 11 Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité, p. 14. 12 The sister’s death is discussed in Chapter 1. 13 Maeve McCusker, ‘Small Worlds: Constructions of Childhood in Contemporary Postcolonial Autobiography in French’, Romance Studies 24.3 (2006), pp. 203–14 (p. 210). 14 Maximin, Les Fruits du cyclone, p. 15. 15 Fanon, Peau noire, p. 186. 16 Césaire, Cahier, p. 128. 17 René Ménil, ‘Poème’, in Tropiques (issues 6–14), ed. Aimé Césaire and René Ménil (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1943), p. 36. The original quotation is as follows: ‘Nous ramassions des injures pour en faire des diamants’. 18 Kathleen Gyssels, ‘L’Exil selon Pineau, récit de vie et autobiographie’, in Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles: exil, errance, enracinement, ed. Suzanne Crosta (Sainte-Foy: GRELCA, 1998), pp. 169–87 (p. 175). 19 Pépin, ‘The Place of Space’, p. 2. 20 Gyssels, ‘L’Exil selon Pineau’, p. 170. 21 Ibid., p. 171. 22 One recent film engaging with this phenomenon, Antilles sur Seine, dir. Pascal Légitimus (C.P.Z. Productions/Marie Galante Productions/TF1 Vidéo, 2001), takes a comedic yet problematic approach to immigration, relying largely on stereotyped, clichéd depictions of Antilleans. 23 Madeleine Dobie, ‘Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration’, Diaspora 13.2–3 (2004), pp. 149–83 (p. 151). 24 Alain Anselin, L’Emigration antillaise en France: la troisième île (Paris: Karthala, 1990). 25 Sam Haigh, ‘Migration and Melancholia: From Kristeva’s “Dépression nationale” to Pineau’s “maladie de l’exil”’, French Studies 60.2 (2006), pp. 232–50 (p. 237). 26 Ibid., p. 244. 27 Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 4.

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28 The biscuit was subsequently renamed as the neutral ‘Sablé de Retz au chocolat’ and continues to be produced by St Michel. 29 Margaret Byron and Stéphanie Condon, Migration in Comparative Perspective: Caribbean Communities in Britain and France (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 53. 30 Michel Giraud, ‘Les migrations guadeloupéenne et martiniquaise en France métropolitaine’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 22.4 (1999), pp. 435–48 (p. 435). 31 Maryse Condé, ‘Chercher nos vérités’, in Condé and Cottenet-Hage (eds), Penser la Créolité, pp. 305–11 (p. 308). 32 Gisèle Pineau, ‘Ecrire en tant que Noire’, in Condé and Cottenet-Hage (eds), Penser la Créolité, pp. 289–95 (p. 289). 33 Renée Larrier, ‘“Sont-ils encore gens de la Guadeloupe?” Departmentalization, migration, and family dynamics’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 11.1–2 (2008), pp. 171–87 (p. 175). 34 Marjorie Attignol Salvodon, Fictions of Childhood: the Roots of Identity in Contemporary French Narratives (Boulder, CO: Lexington, 2008), p. 9. 35 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 127. 36 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 173–86 (p. 177). 37 Dawn Fulton has pointed to the unmistakable echo of Léon-Gontran Damas’s poem ‘Hoquet’ in this wry phrase. See Fulton, ‘The Disengaged Immigrant: Mapping the Francophone Caribbean Metropolis’, French Forum 32.1–2 (2007), pp. 245–62 (p. 255). 38 Beverley Ormerod, ‘Displacement and Self-Disclosure in Some Works by Gisèle Pineau’, in Gallagher (ed.), Ici-là, pp. 211–26 (p. 216). 39 Fulton, ‘The Disengaged Immigrant’, p. 250. 40 Elsewhere in her œuvre, Pineau draws similar parallels between slavery and the situation of contemporary Antillean women. See Gisèle Pineau and Marie Abraham, Femmes des Antilles: Traces et voix (Paris: Stock, 1998). 41 Celia Britton, ‘Exile, Incarceration and the Homeland: Jewish References in French Caribbean Novels’, in Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas, ed. Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Proctor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 149–67 (p. 155). 42 Ibid., p. 165. 43 Richard D.E. Burton, ‘The French West Indies à l’heure de l’Europe’, in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D.E. Burton and Fred Reno (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 1–19 (p. 12). 44 Pineau’s text for young adults, Un papillon dans la cité (Paris: Sépia, 1992), intersects with L’Exil. It is set in both Sarthe and a Parisian cité, and the grandmother is called Julia/Man Ya. After being raised in Guadeloupe by Man Ya, ten-year old heroine Félicie is taken to France to live with her

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mother, who emigrated there shortly after her birth. Man Ya has instilled such a love for Guadeloupe in the child that this physical separation, although painful, does not shake the child’s sense of self: she is uninterested in the blonde Barbie doll her mother buys for her, and proudly describes her fearless Guadeloupean ancestors: ‘C’était pendant l’esclavage. Ils se révoltaient. Ils brisaient leurs chaînes […] Ceux qui s’en sortaient vivaient dans les bois. La nuit, ils attaquaient les plantations pour libérer leurs frères. Ils ont gagné leur liberté…’ (p. 61). In L’Exil the situation is more complex, as Marie latches on to Man Ya’s memories to construct an imaginary Guadeloupe, a psychological sanctuary from metropolitan racism. 45 Haigh, ‘Migration and Melancholia’, p. 246. 46 Pineau returns to the question of her slave ancestry in Mes quatre femmes (see Chapter 7). 47 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 348. 48 As Miller observes, in Le Passage du milieu, a 1999 film collaboration between Patrick Chamoiseau and Guy Deslauriers (who are both from Martinique), as well as in other filmic output depicting the Middle Passage, ‘a certain silence has lingered […] the full measure of the captives’ experience can of course not be represented; what is interesting is how each director has built that impossibility into the structure of his work’ (The French Atlantic Triangle, p. 384). 49 Condé, Le Cœur, p. 83. 50 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’ p. 443. Chapter Six 1 Graham Greene, The Comedians (London: Bodley Head, 1966). 2 Ollivier, Mille Eaux, p. 50. 3 Another novel by Agnant, La Dot de Sara (1995), explores the intergenerational transmission of cultural memory in a diasporic situation, from grandmother to granddaughter. 4 Jean-Robert Cadet, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 5 Martin Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 179. 6 As discussed in the Introduction. See Essar, ‘Time and Space’, p. 932. 7 Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, p. 178. 8 For a comprehensive discussion of Laferrière’s biography, see Ursula Mathis-Moser, Dany Laferrière, La Dérive américaine (Montreal: VLB, 2003), pp. 13–38.

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9 Dany Laferrière, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (Paris: Serpent à Plumes, 2003 [1985]). 10 Dany Laferrière, How to Make Love to a Negro, trans. David Homel (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987). 11 Dany Laferrière, Eroshima (Montreal: VLB, 1987). 12 Dany Laferrière, Chronique de la dérive douce (Montreal: VLB, 1994), p. 27. 13 This study follows the convention of using the Creole spelling ‘vodou’ in order to distinguish scholarly research from the sensational associations of the term ‘voodoo’. See Alasdair Pettinger, ‘From Vaudoux to Voodoo’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies 40 (2004), pp. 215–24. 14 Baron Samedi is the loa associated with the dead, and is portrayed wearing a white top hat, a black tuxedo, black glasses and cotton plugs in his nose (to resemble a corpse prepared for burial). 15 Dany Laferrière, La Chair du maître (Montreal: Lanctôt, 1997), p. 13. 16 Carrol F. Coates, ‘An Interview with Dany Laferrière’, Callaloo 22.4 (1999), pp. 910–21 (p. 918). 17 Eloise A. Brière, ‘Quebec and France: La Francophonie in a Comparative Postcolonial Frame’, in Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, ed. H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), pp. 151–74 (p. 164). 18 Le Prix Edgar-Lespérance was created in 1991 by the Sogides group of Quebec publishing houses to honour the memory of Edgar Lespérance, the founder of Sogides. 19 Mathis-Moser, Dany Laferrière, p. 45. 20 Dany Laferrière, Je suis un écrivain japonais (Paris: Grasset, 2008). 21 Dany Laferrière, J’écris comme je vis (Montreal: Lanctôt, 2000), p. 9. 22 The first published reference to this project occurs in an interview with Francine Bordeleau in 1998. Quoted in Coates, ‘An Interview with Dany Laferrière’, p. 915. 23 Coates, ‘An Interview with Dany Laferrière’, p. 916. 24 Essar, ‘Time and Space’, p. 930. 25 Mathis-Moser, Dany Laferrière, p. 10. 26 Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, p. 184. 27 Coates, ‘An Interview with Dany Laferrière’, p. 921. 28 Dany Laferrière: La dérive douce d’un enfant de Petit-Goâve, dir. Pedro Ruiz (Canada, Films du Paradoxe, 2009). 29 Coates, ‘An Interview with Dany Laferrière’, p. 917. 30 Jean-Marie Drot, Haïti: art naïf, art vaudou. Catalogue d’exposition (Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1988). 31 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), p. 13. 32 Laferrière’s text is the only récit d’enfance to emphasize this space. For

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Chamoiseau, living in a crowded, multiple-occupancy house in Fort-de-France, there is no porch, although the courtyard occupies an important role, albeit as a private rather than a public space of interaction. Confiant’s rural upbringing focuses on the countryside, whereas Condé’s bourgeois parents prefer to be seen engaging in walks in fashionable areas of Pointe-à-Pitre or to receive friends in the privacy of their home. 33 See, for example, the use of the black car in ‘La Maîtresse du Colonel’ in La Chair du maître and the related film Vers le sud, dir. Laurent Cantet (Haut et Court, Les Films Séville, France 3 Cinéma, Studiocanal, 2005). 34 James Ferguson, ‘The Duvalier Dictatorship and Its Legacy of Crisis in Haiti’, in Modern Caribbean Politics, ed. Anthony Payne and Paul Sutton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 73–97 (p. 73). 35 Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 382. 36 As Laferrière comments in interview; see Dominique Demers, ‘Un Haïtien errant’, L’Actualité 16.13 (1991), pp. 44–51 (p. 51). 37 Dany Laferrière, ‘Je voyage en français’, in Pour une littérature-monde, ed. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 87–101 (p. 88). 38 This conviction is echoed in his contribution to the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde, which sees the author travel from Petit-Goâve to eleven other locations across the world and humorously ends with another journey via the pages of Chamfort’s Maximes, pensées, caractères et anecdotes: ‘Je suis en ce moment au XVIIIe siècle, et ça m’a coûté 10 dollars car j’ai voyagé en poche’ (p. 101). 39 Jana Evans Braziel, ‘From Port-au-Prince to Montréal to Miami: Trans-American Nomads in Dany Laferrière’s Migratory Texts’, Callaloo 26.1 (2003), pp. 235–51 (p. 235). 40 This reference to economic decline in the Caribbean is reminiscent of Confiant’s recollections of his grandfather’s once-prosperous rum distillery in Martinique in Ravines du devant-jour (pp. 73–74). 41 Dany Laferrière, Cette grenade dans la main du jeune nègre, est-elle une arme ou un fruit? (Montreal: VLB, 1993), p. 171. 42 Comments made by Laferrière during the session ‘Dix utopies pour Haïti’ at the ‘Festival des Etonnants Voyageurs’, Saint-Malo, 22 May 2010 (my transcript). Chapter Seven 1 Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001 [1939]). 2 Ibid., p. 125. 3 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 166.

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4 Ibid., p. 166. 5 Bonnie Thomas, Breadfruit or Chestnut? Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel (Madison, WI: Lexington, 2006), pp. 7, 15. 6 In Haitian vodou, the term poteau-mitan refers to the pole placed at the centre of vodou temples through which spirits enter and depart. This Haitian nuance does not appear to be connected with the créolistes’ use of the term. 7 Taylor, ‘Créolité Bites’, p. 154. 8 Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1989). 9 Thomas, Breadfruit or Chestnut?, pp. 162–63. 10 This ambiguous image may be the result of a typographical error: ‘racine-case’ may be the intended term, and the images of ‘s’élancer’ and ‘revenir’ would support this. 11 Condé, La Parole des femmes, p. 42. 12 bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 23–24. 13 Thomas, Breadfruit or Chestnut?, p. 177. 14 Ibid., p. 15. 15 Ibid., p. 169. 16 Fritz Gracchus, Les Lieux de la mère dans les sociétés afro-américaines (Paris: Editions caribéennes, 1980). 17 Ibid., p. 26. 18 hooks, Ain’t I A Woman?, p. 22. 19 Ibid., p. 24. 20 Ann R.  Morris and Margaret M.  Dunn, ‘“The Bloodstream of Our Inheritance”: Female Identity and the Caribbean Mothers’-Land’, in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), pp. 219–37 (p. 219). 21 Le Cœur was adapted for the theatre by the Guadeloupean actor Martine Maximin (sister of Daniel). She was the play’s sole actor, with musical accompaniment provided by a clarinetist. The play was staged in Guadeloupe, New York (on the occasion of Condé’s retirement from Columbia University) and Paris. Significantly, Martine Maximin identified this maternal embrace as one of the most emotive scenes in the production: ‘Quand j’ai joué la scène avec la mère dans “A nous, la liberté?”, j’ai choisi de jouer sans micro pour garder la proximité avec les gens […] il y avait une telle puissance … c’était un réel moment d’émotion.’ Unpublished interview with Louise Hardwick, Paris, October 2006. 22 See Guillaume Durand, ‘The Survival of Names of African Origin in Martinique after Emancipation’, Dialectical Anthropology 26 (2001), pp. 193–233 (p. 193).

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Notes to pages 191–206

23 The tradition exists across Europe. See Henry Charles Coote, ‘Catskin; The English and Irish Peau d’Ane’, The Folk-Lore Record 3.1 (1880), pp. 1–25. 24 Douglas, Frankétienne and Rewriting. 25 Ibid., p. 5. 26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 66–111. 27 Simone A. James Alexander, Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 7. 28 The focus on relationships between women, and particularly girls and their grandmothers, is also central to a classic work of Guadeloupean fiction, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (Paris: Seuil, 1972), a novel shaped by othermothering and the bond between Reine Sans Nom and her granddaughter, Télumée. Here, however, othermothering occurs because Télumée’s mother wishes to enjoy greater sexual freedom than her role as a mother would allow. 29 Clark, ‘“Je me suis réconciliée avec mon île”’, p. 108. 30 This phrase is reminiscent of Césaire’s ‘Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé/ pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré/ pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté’; Cahier, p. 114. 31 Douglas, Frankétienne and Rewriting, p. 13. 32 A later text considers the author’s relationship with his father, and the geographical distances which shaped it, in greater detail. See Dany Laferrière, L’Enigme du retour (Paris: Grasset, 2009). 33 Dany Laferrière, Je suis fatigué (Montreal: Lanctôt, 2001), p. 18. Afterword 1 Bongie, ‘Exiles on Main Stream’, n.p. 2 See Patrick Chamoiseau, Emerveilles (Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse, 1999) and Au Temps de l’Antan; James Berry, Un voleur dans le village, trans. Raphaël Confiant (Paris: Gallimard Jeunesse, 2000); Maryse Condé, Victor et les barricades (Paris: Bayard, 1989), Haïti chérie (Paris: Bayard, 1991), Hugo le terrible (Paris: Sépia, 1991), La planète Orbis (Guadeloupe: Jasor, 2002) and A la Courbe du Joliba (Paris: Grasset Jeunesse, 2006); Pineau, Un papillon dans la cité; Dany Laferrière, Je suis fou de Vava (Outremont, Quebec: De la Bagnole, 2006). 3 Edouard Glissant, Mémoires des esclavages: La fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 4 Ibid., p. 10. 5 Ibid., p. 73.

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Notes to pages 206–07

229

6 Ibid., pp. 74–75. 7 Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953). 8 Leïla Sebbar (ed.), Une enfance outremer (Paris: Seuil, Points virgule, 2001); Alain Mabanckou (ed.), Enfances (Paris: Pocket, 2008); Abdourahman A. Waberi (ed.), Enfants de la balle: nouvelles d’Afrique, nouvelles de foot (Paris: JC Lattès, 2010). 9 Jean Rhys, Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Penguin, 1991 [1979]). 10 Yseult Bridges, Child of the Tropics: Victorian Memoirs (London: Collins & Harvill, 1980). 11 Pablo Medina, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 12 Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (London: Penguin, 2005 [2003]). 13 Maria Campbell, Half-breed (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Goodread Biographies, 1983 [1973]). 14 Kym Ragusa, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (New York, W.W. Norton, 2006). 15 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 22.

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Index abolition, 3, 10, 19, 20, 36, 41, 46, 50, 60, 63, 104, 133, 140, 155, 156, 193, 195, 205 Abraham, Marie, 223, n. 40 absent father, 181, 197–201 See also ‘father’ Africa, 2, 5, 10, 13, 25, 27, 28, 32, 40, 41, 42, 48, 49, 52, 63, 70, 73, 90, 99, 101, 112, 116, 121, 124, 128, 132, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145, 148, 151, 154, 155, 159, 181, 189, 190–91, 194, 200, 207, 218, n. 23 African American, 2, 121, 181, 194 Agnant, Marie-Célie, 2, 159, 224, n. 3 alienation, 1, 12, 14, 18–19, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 50, 53, 59, 72, 74, 108, 115–16, 121, 128, 130, 188, 191, 196 Amerindian, 10, 49, 68, 83–84, 138, 160, 187, 216, n. 35 Angelou, Maya, 2 Anglophone, 2, 7, 10, 24, 28, 50, 161, 194 Anselin, Alain, 144 antillanité, 13, 27 Le Discours antillais, 13, 20, 22, 65, 71, 118, 146–47, 182, 207 Antoine, Régis, 12 Aristotle, 17 Arnold, A. James, 52, 212, n. 13, 214, n. 48 art naïf, 167 Ashcroft, Bill, 215, n. 28 assimilation, 5, 15, 27, 42, 61, 82, 105, 112, 196 Attignol Salvodon, Marjorie, 146 audience, 12, 14, 15, 17, 31, 34, 42, 53, 67, 85, 88, 128, 133, 136, 161 autofiction, 7, 8, 142, 164 Barthes, Roland, 67, 110, 220, n. 8 Bébel-Gisler, Dany, 2, 21, 205 béké, 10, 25, 30, 37, 38, 41–43, 47–48, 88, 89–90, 103, 104, 106, 117, 120, 132, 156, 184, 190, 194

Index

Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 9 Bérenger, Philippe, 212, n. 16 Beringuier, Christian, 211, n. 51 Bernabé, Jean, 12 Bhabha, Homi K., 23, 55–56, 73, 75–76, 79 Bildungsroman, 9, 131, 184 Bongie, Chris, 11–12, 204 bourgeois, 7, 15, 27, 31, 32, 37–39, 42, 88, 107, 110, 112, 115, 117, 118, 121, 125, 154, 162, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196, 198, 201, 220, n. 8, 225–26, n. 32 Bouton, Jacques, 217, n. 1 Brer Rabbit (see Compère Lapin) Bridges, Yseult, 207 Brière, Eloise A, 163 Britton, Celia, 130, 150, 223, n. 41 BUMIDOM, 146 Burton, Richard D.E., 216, n. 39, 223, n. 43 Byron, Margaret, 223, n. 29 cachot, 45, 60, 215, n. 20 Cadet, Jean-Robert, 159 Campbell, Maria, 207 Canada, 159, 162, 163 See also ‘Quebec’ Cantet, Laurent, 226, n. 33 Capécia, Mayotte, 25, 40, 51–54, 187 Caribbean Barbados, 2 Dominica, 83 Guadeloupe, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 16, 21, 25, 26, 31, 44, 45, 83, 86, 88, 89, 91, 102, 103, 108–31, 132–57, 158, 193, 196, 203, 216, n. 35, 218–19, n. 27, 223–24, n. 44, 227, n. 21, 228, n. 28 Haiti, 2, 3, 16, 20, 23, 25, 124, 127, 128, 135, 158–80, 200, 203, 205, 227, n. 6 Jamaica, 2, 42 Martinique, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 15, 16,

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27, 30, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 45, 50, 55–82, 83–107, 128, 135, 136, 144, 152, 156, 158, 182, 203, 206, 213, n. 25, 216, n. 35, 218–19, n. 27, 224, n. 48, 226, n. 40, 227, n. 22 St Lucia, 13 Trinidad, 2, 56, 76, 101 carnival/carnaval, 126–27, 129, 200 De Cassagnac, 94, 103–04 Cave, Terence, 17 Césaire, Aimé, viii, 4, 7, 14, 18, 27, 28–29, 31, 34, 36, 54, 57, 59, 66, 78, 85, 89, 90, 104, 105, 129, 137, 140, 152, 183, 212, n. 14, 228, n. 30 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 18, 28–29, 31, 57, 85, 105, 137–138, 183, 228, n. 30 chabin/chabine 10, 51, 52, 88, 90–94, 95–98, 103, 106, 107, 218, n. 21 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 2, 5, 7, 11, 12, 23, 25, 29, 55–82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 99, 109, 110, 112, 129, 137, 182–186, 197, 198, 199, 212, n. 14, 215, n. 12, n. 15, n. 17, n. 20, 216, n. 38, n. 44, n. 45, n. 53, 219, n. 35, 224, n. 48, 225–26, n. 32, 228, n. 2 A Bout d’enfance, 2, 55, 57, 59, 61–62, 65, 68, 77, 78, 79–81, 82, 137, 182, 185–186, 197, 199, 215, n. 12 Antan d’enfance, 2, 55, 57, 59–60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 75, 80, 81, 183, 185, 215, n. 15, n. 17, 217, n. 58, 219, n. 35 Au Temps de l’Antan, 209, n. 15, 228, n. 2 Chemin-d’école, 2, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69–77, 80, 82, 198, 216, n. 44 Ecrire en pays dominé, 57, 78–79, 80, 84, 215, n. 12 Emerveilles, 59, 228, n. 2 Solibo magnifique, 57, 58, 62 Texaco, 62, 63–64, 70, 81, 182, 217, n. 60 Chandler Caldwell, Roy, Jr, 217, n. 13 children’s literature, 21, 56, 204, 223, n. 44, 228, n. 2 Clark, Vèvè A., 111, 198 Coates, Carrol F., 167, 225, n. 22 Cochut, André, 104 Le Code noir, 45 Coe, Richard, 8–9

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communism, 104–105 Compère Lapin, 5, 30, 190–91 Comtesse de Ségur, 191 Condé, Maryse, 2, 3, 7, 11, 16, 23, 32, 44, 53, 66, 88, 95, 108–31, 144, 146, 154, 155, 186, 188, 189, 190–93, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 212, n. 21, 216, n. 45, 218, n. 15, n. 22, 219, n. 2, 220, n. 5, 221, n. 27, n. 29, 225–26, n. 32, 227, n. 21, 228, n. 2 Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, 2, 3, 7, 23, 88, 108–31, 144, 154, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 218, n. 22, 220, n. 8, 227, n. 21 Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, 23, 191–93, 195, 198 La vie sans fards, 32, 124, 212, n. 21 Condon, Stéphanie, 223, n. 29 Confiant, Raphaël, 2, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 29, 34, 43, 50, 66, 68, 83–107, 109, 110, 112, 134, 182, 186, 188, 194, 196, 197, 199, 213, n. 25, 214, n. 45, 215, n. 15, 218, n. 21, 218–19, n. 27, 219, n. 34, 225–26, n. 32, 226, n. 40, 228, n. 2 Le Cahier de romances, 2, 15, 34, 83, 85, 86, 89–90, 93, 213, n. 25 Ravines du devant-jour, 2, 7, 83–107, 134, 187, 188, 199, 226, n. 40 Conroy Kennedy, Ellen, 212, n. 12 coolie/koolie, 10, 25, 30, 49, 50, 85, 98, 99–103, 106, 123, 197, 218–19, n. 27 Corbin, Henri, 27, 88–89, 217–18, n. 14, 222, n. 9 Cottenet-Hage, Madeleine, 112, 214, n. 44 créolité, 12, 23, 27, 43, 55, 57, 70–71, 73, 85, 97, 107, 112, 130, 146, 163 Eloge de la Créolité, 12–14, 27, 55, 57, 59, 61, 65, 68, 70, 71, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 97, 138, 146 Crosta, Suzanne, 40, 213, n. 37 Crowley, Patrick, 65 cyclone, 66, 70, 132, 134, 137, 140, 178, 183 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 1, 27–28, 31, 32, 34, 54, 71, 138, 223, n. 37 death, 15, 21, 26, 27, 40, 45, 46, 48, 62, 65, 79, 81, 84, 91, 105, 125, 138, 159, 162, 175, 178, 179, 185, 222, n. 12 See also ‘veillée’ and ‘wake’

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Index Deleuze, Félix, 174 Delgrès, Louis, 22, 135, 140, 155, 156, 197 Demers, Dominique, 226, n. 36 Demme, Jonathan, 221, n. 30 Departmentalization/départementalisation, 12, 16, 36, 193 Derrida, Jacques, 119 diaspora, 2, 3, 7, 20, 21, 23, 51, 101, 113, 114, 132, 141, 144, 149, 150–51, 158, 159, 160, 163, 167, 189, 191, 203, 224, n. 3 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 218, n. 23 Dobie, Madeleine, 144 Doubrovsky, Serge, 8, 142 doudou, 41, 133 doudouiste, doudouisme, 132–33 Douglas, Rachel, 191, 200 Drot, Jean-Marie, 225, n. 30 Dubray, Régis, 21 Dunn, Margaret M., 189 Durand, Guillaume, 227, n. 22 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, 83, 217, n. 2 Duvalier, François, 16, 20, 127, 161–62, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 201 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 162 earthquake, 132, 137, 158, 180 See also ‘séisme’ education, 5, 15, 18, 19, 21–22, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38, 39, 43, 46, 47, 50, 55, 56, 63, 73, 74, 78, 82, 115, 136, 139, 154, 191, 192, 196, 197, 202, 204, 205, 206 Ega, Françoise, 25, 45–49, 50, 51, 54, 95, 186–87, 190, 218, n. 22 Escarpit, Denise, 12 D’Esnambuc, 83, 84 Essar, Dennis F., 11, 160 Etcherelli, Claire, 123 ethnoclass, 10, 26, 30, 37, 38, 39, 43, 50, 51–52, 65, 84, 88, 89–107, 117, 123, 156, 158, 159, 162, 189, 204 Eurocentric, 27, 29, 37, 47, 63, 73, 78, 82, 123, 216, n. 44 Evans Braziel, Jana, 176 évolué, 33, 154, 196 exile, 23, 45, 132, 141, 145, 147, 150, 151, 160, 161, 162, 176, 178, 207 exotic, 11, 41, 124, 128, 132, 133 exploitation, 37, 39, 47, 96, 130, 189, 192, 194

245

Eyerman, Ron, 22 family, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 47, 49, 58, 59, 86, 91, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103–04, 110, 112–17, 124–25, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 156, 162, 169, 172, 176, 181–86, 192, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 222, n. 7 Fanon, Frantz, 14, 17–20, 27, 28, 32–34, 40, 52, 53, 54, 71, 72, 73, 74, 116–17, 125, 127, 129, 130, 140, 154, 187, 216–17, n. 53 father, 26, 30, 35, 40, 41, 47, 49, 53, 63, 65, 75, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 111, 118, 137–38, 140, 142, 161, 162, 176, 181, 185, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197–201, 205, 228, n. 32 See also ‘absent father’ feminism, 6, 96, 183, 187, 188 femme matador, 181, 182–83 Ferguson, James, 226, n. 34 film, 24, 29, 33, 36, 124, 162, 166, 210, n. 46, 213, n. 23, 222, n. 22, 224, n. 48, 226, n. 33 Fish, Jefferson M., 218, n. 16 Fort-de-France, 4, 15–16, 37, 38, 45, 47, 49–50, 57, 62, 70, 75, 83, 85, 94, 104, 105–06, 152, 194, 199, 206, 211, n. 49, 217, n. 58, 225–26, n. 32 Franklin Frazier, Edward, 181 French Guiana, 27, 203 Freud, Sigmund, 17–18, 19, 33, 53, 117, 130, 144, 188 Fulton, Dawn, 149, 223, n. 37 Gallagher, Mary, 6, 37, 67, 215, n. 18, 219, n. 34 Gallet, Dominique, 210, n. 46 García Márquez, Gabriel, 207 Garnier, Alain, 214, n. 46 Garraway, Doris, 10, 218, n. 25 gender, 6, 7, 23, 24, 46–47, 48, 50, 70, 93, 142, 181–202, 207 Germe, Étienne, 210, n. 43 Giraud, Michel, 223, n. 30 Glissant, Edouard, 7, 13, 14, 20, 22, 23, 34, 54, 57, 61, 65, 71, 79, 82, 89, 118, 130, 146, 155, 182, 205–06, 207, 210, n. 43, 213, n. 25

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globalization, 61, 80, 81, 150, 163, 176–77, 206 Gracchus, Fritz, 188 grandfather, 45, 56, 92, 176–77, 226, n. 40 grandmother, 39, 40, 44–45, 47, 48, 53, 91, 94, 97, 99, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153, 155, 158, 160, 168, 170, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194–96, 200, 201, 202, 205, 223, n. 44, 224, n. 3, 228, n. 28 Greene, Graham, 158 Griffiths, Gareth, 215, n. 28 griot, 41 Guattari, Gilles, 174 Gyssels, Kathleen, 142, 143 Haigh, Sam, 144–45, 154 Hardwick, Louise, 210, n. 35, n. 39, n. 40, 214, n. 42, 215, n. 22, 220, n. 20, 227, n. 21 Hewitt, Leah D., 108, 219, n. 4, 221, n. 27 Hezekiah, Randolph, 37 Holocaust, 150, 223, n. 41 hooks, bell, 187, 188 Huggan, Graham, 11 Hughes, Langston, 2, 114 immigration, 59, 100, 144–46, 149, 152, 154, 161, 203, 218–19, n. 27, 222, n. 22 indentured labourer, 10, 46, 50, 98 India, 10, 25, 46, 49, 50, 56, 75–76, 98–103, 218–19, n. 27 intertextuality, 14, 22, 23, 27, 51, 57, 62, 68, 78, 88, 121–24, 129, 160, 191, 217–18, n. 14, 221, n. 27 Irigaray, Luce, 183 Isherwood, Christopher, 168 James Alexander, Simone A., 228, n. 27 Johnson, Erica L., 113 Lacrosil, Michèle, 24, 44, 54, 153, 195, 196, 215, n. 20 Laferrière, Dany, 2, 11, 20, 23, 158–80, 200–01, 204, 224, n. 8, 225, n. 22, n. 32, 226, n. 36, n. 38, n. 42, 228, n. 32, 228, n. 2 Le Charme des après-midi sans fin, 2, 20, 158, 160, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170–80, 201

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L’Odeur du café, 2, 20, 158, 160, 161, 164–72, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180 Laguarigue, Jean-Luc de, 56 Lamming, George, 2, 207 Larrier, Renée, 146 Laye, Camara, 207 Lebrun, Jean-Claude, 215, n. 21 Lecarme, Jacques, 10–11, 65 Légitimus, Pascal, 222, n. 22 Leiris, Michel, 91 Lejeune, Philippe, 6, 9, 57, 85, 109, 142 Lionnet, Françoise, 219, n. 2 littérature-monde, 175, 226, n. 38 loi du 23 février 2005, 3 loi Taubira (see ‘Taubira’) Lycée Schœlcher, 15, 27, 37, 49, 86, 89, 206, 211, n. 49 Mabanckou, Alain, 207 Maignan-Claverie, Chantal, 10, 92, 96, 218, n. 24 Makki, Mona, 210, n. 46 Makward, Christiane, 52 marron, 70, 87, 94, 106 marronnage, 19, 70, 87 Marshall Zobel, Emily, 213, n. 29 Mathis-Moser, Ursula, 165, 224, n. 8 Maximin, Daniel, 2, 4, 23, 27, 132–41, 155, 156, 196, 197, 221, n. 2, 222, n. 7 Tu, c’est l’enfance, 2, 132–41, 157, 196–97 Maximin, Martine, 227, n. 21 McCusker, Maeve, 3, 16, 24, 56, 57, 63, 67, 139, 156 McKay, Claude, 2, 42, 51 Medina, Pablo, 207 Meehan, Kevin, 214, n. 44 Ménil, René, 141, 222, n. 17 métissage, 9–10, 13, 25, 30, 49, 50, 73, 83–84, 91, 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 107, 187, 199, 218, n. 24 metonymic gap, 66, 86, 126, 129 Middle Passage, 63, 139, 153, 155, 187, 195, 224, n. 48 Miller, Christopher L., 155, 224, n. 48 Miller, Elinor S., 34 Milne, Lorna, 70, 215, n. 19, 216, n. 44 mimicry, 23, 56, 69, 75–77, 79, 82 mission civilisatrice, 5, 32, 34, 63, 71, 77, 82, 112, 122, 136, 160, 193, 196, 201

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Index Montaigne, Michel de, 4 Moreau de Saint-Méry, 98, 99 Morgan, Janice, 215, n. 16 Morgan, Teresa, 209, n. 14 Morris, Ann R., 189 Morrison, Toni, 121, 123 mother, 22, 29, 30, 33, 36, 38–40, 43, 44, 47, 48–49, 58, 59, 63, 90, 93, 95–98, 100, 105, 111, 114, 115, 118, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 138–39, 142, 143, 148, 153, 159, 179, 181–83, 185–86, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 214, n. 45, 218, n. 22, 219, n. 35, 223–24, n. 44, 227, n. 21, 228, n. 28 See also ‘grandmother’, ‘othermothering’ Mount Pelée, 30, 47, 49, 136, 211, n. 49 See also ‘volcano’ Munro, Martin, 36, 159, 160 Murdoch, H. Adlai, 134 Naipaul, V S., 56, 75, 76, 79 Napoleon, 3, 135, 155–56, 160 négrillon, négrillonne 28–29, 31, 55, 57–58, 59–82, 90, 91, 94, 104, 107, 137, 151, 185, 199, 212, n. 14, 219, n. 35 négritude, 2, 13, 27–28, 29, 42, 72, 73, 137, 151 Nesbitt, Nick F., 122, 221, n. 26 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 9 Nobel (Prize), 13, 25, 76, 138 Ollivier, Emile, 3, 159 O’Regan, Derek, 220, n. 23 Ormerod, Beverley, 148 Oyono, Ferdinand, 9 Palcy, Euzhan, 36 Paris, 4, 26, 28, 35, 41, 42–43, 49, 52, 53, 110, 113, 115, 117, 124–25, 127, 133, 141, 143, 144, 148, 149, 152, 153, 163, 166, 167, 199, 223–24, n. 44, 227, n. 21 Peau d’Ane, 190–91, 228, n. 23 Pépin, Ernest, 3, 4, 16, 84, 102, 133, 142, 186, 193–94, 196 Coulée d’Or, 84, 102, 193 Perec, Georges, 8 petit-nègre, 5, 10, 15, 32, 37, 39, 43, 128

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Pettinger, Alasdair, 225, n. 13 Pfaff, Françoise, 108 Philippe-Charles, Christophe, 25 photograph, 11, 47, 56, 114–15, 121, 125, 177 Pilote, 83, 217, n. 1 Pineau, Gisèle, 4, 7, 11, 16, 23, 112, 132, 133, 141–57, 188, 189, 194, 195–96, 197, 199, 200, 201, 217, n. 59, 223, n. 40, n. 44, 224, n. 46, 228, n. 2 L’Exil selon Julia, 2, 7, 23, 132, 141–57, 195, 199, 200, 217, n. 59, 223, n. 40, 223–24, n. 44 Mes quatre femmes, 23, 141, 195, 200, 224, n. 46 plantation, 5, 10, 12, 30, 36–40, 41, 42, 57, 62, 63, 70, 72, 91, 104, 128, 136, 156, 181–82, 184, 193, 194, 218, n. 19, 223–24, n. 44 policy, 3, 22, 34, 119 politics, 3, 20, 49, 69, 103–06, 120, 127, 132, 174, 201 postcolonial, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 55, 69, 80, 113, 124, 129, 192, 204, 206 poto-mitan/poteau-mitan, 181–83, 184, 186, 188, 190, 227, n. 6 Pouchet Paquet, Sandra, 7 prize/prix (literary), 29, 34, 35, 52, 62, 85, 89, 133, 138, 161, 163, 164, 225, n. 18 Proust, Marcel, 111, 122, 135 psychoanalysis, 8, 16, 17, 19, 32, 34, 130, 142, 159, 188 publishing (industry), 8–9, 11, 55, 85, 159, 225, n. 18 Quebec, 158, 159, 161, 163, 225, n. 18 See also ‘Canada’ quimbois, 7, 48, 92 Ragusa, Kym, 207 raz-de-marée, 134 See also ‘tidal wave’ recognition, 1, 16–22, 23, 25, 41, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 63, 64, 73, 74, 81, 94, 95, 96, 100, 117, 118, 120, 131, 139, 153, 154, 161, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206 See also ‘scene of recognition’ Republicanism, 21, 63, 105, 146, 156, 173 restavec, 159

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rewriting, 23, 28, 122, 191, 200, 221, n. 27 Rhys, Jean, 207 Richer, Clément, 29–31, 54 Rosello, Mireille, 15, 220–21, n. 25 Ruiz, Pedro, 225, n. 28 Said, Edward W., 147 Saint-John Perse, viii, 25–27, 54, 60, 66, 86, 89–90, 103, 134, 135, 138, 217–18, n. 14, 219, n. 32 Saint-Pierre, 30, 47, 211, n. 49 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 4 Sarraute, Nathalie, 8, 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 215, n. 18 satire, 11, 19, 29, 31, 164 scene of recognition, 1, 16–22, 23, 25, 41, 44, 46, 47–49, 50, 54, 55, 63, 64, 81, 94, 95, 96, 100, 117, 118, 120, 131, 139, 153, 154, 161, 181, 185, 186–94, 196, 197, 201, 202, 204–06 Schœlcher, Victor, 45, 48, 50, 193, 211, n. 49 See also ‘Lycée Schœlcher’ Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 228, n. 28 Sebbar, Leïla, 207 Second World War, 36, 50, 110, 145 Segalen, Victor, 13, 14, 79, 210, n. 43 séisme, 134, 137 See also ‘earthquake’ Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 27, 31 Serrano, Richard, 212, n. 10 sexuality, 10, 46, 51–52, 53–54, 61, 85, 96, 100, 103, 104, 121, 123, 136, 137, 159, 161, 162, 165, 186, 188, 189, 192, 194, 221, n. 29, 222, n. 9, 228, n. 28 Shelly, Sharon L., 66 slavery, 3, 5, 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 36, 41, 45, 48, 54, 57, 58, 63–64, 83, 91, 96, 100, 104, 106, 112, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 161, 181, 187, 188–89, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 201, 202, 205, 206, 223, n. 40 Sméralda-Amon, Juliette, 100–01 Smith, Sidonie, 209, n. 17 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 192 Taleb-Khyar, Mohamed B., 210, n. 38, 221, n. 35

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Taubira, Christiane, 3, 21 Taylor, Lucien, 57 Thomas, Bonnie, 182, 183, 188 Thomas, Dominic, 145 tidal wave, 153 See also ‘raz-de-marée’ Tiffin, Helen, 215, n. 28 Tirolien, Guy, 31–32, 212, n. 21 Tontons Macoutes, 127, 161, 162, 169, 171 Toumson, Roger, 37 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 22 tout-monde, 23, 57, 61, 79, 80, 82 trace/tracée, 56, 70, 71, 216, n. 38, 223, n. 40 transnationalism, 56, 159, 160, 207 trauma, 17, 19, 20, 22, 57, 91, 100, 119, 139, 144, 150, 153, 154, 159, 187, 188, 197, 198, 199, 202 UNESCO La Route de l’esclave, 21, 205 veillée, 31, 92 See also ‘death’ and ‘wake’ Vergès, Françoise, 20 Virassamy, Maurice, 25, 49–51, 54, 84, 98–99, 100–01, 102, 106 Le Petit coolie noir, 25, 49, 50, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 vodou, 162, 175, 225, n. 13, 227, n. 6 volcano/volcan, 30–31, 46, 47, 132, 134, 135–36, 137, 138, 148, 222, n. 7 See also ‘Mount Pelée’ Waberi, Abdourahman A., 207 wake, 92, 125 See also ‘death’ and ‘veillée’ Walcott, Derek, viii, 2, 13, 210, n. 41 Wright, Richard, 2, 25 Zobel, Jenny, 40, 213, n. 29 Zobel, Joseph, 15, 16, 24, 35–44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 78, 92, 128, 129, 136–37, 184, 186, 194, 196, 214, n. 42 La fête à Paris (republished as Quand la neige aura fondu) 42–44, 213, n. 41 La Rue Cases-Nègres, 14–16, 24, 25, 35–42, 43, 45, 46, 92, 128, 130, 136–37, 184, 186, 194, 195, 197

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