Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries 1443876992, 9781443876995

Citation preview

Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries

Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries Edited by

Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac

Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies th st of the Late 20 and Early 21 Centuries Edited by Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Patricia Donatien, Rodolphe Solbiac and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7699-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7699-5

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue: Performing Conflicting History in Fort-de-France ......................................................................................... 9 Anny Dominique Curtius Birthing Chaos: Two Faced Women, Cultural Conflict and Betrayal in créoliste Writings .................................................................................. 31 Jacqueline Couti L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement dans l’œuvre d’Edwidge Danticat ..................................................................................................... 51 Dominique Aurélia Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict: Gerty Dambury and Gisèle Pineau ...................................................................................... 65 Gladys M. Francis La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe : les défis identitaires de l’ère postcoloniale ................................................................................. 83 Bruce Jno-Baptiste “The Business of Becoming a People”: Rebellion and Revolution in Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie ........................................................... 101 Rita Keresztesi Beyond Conflicting Belongings: Cultural Citizenship in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge ............................................ 119 Rodolphe Solbiac

vi

Contents

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts: The Caribbean Experience in the Context of Diaspora ....................................................................... 131 Patricia Donatien Presentation of the Artists........................................................................ 151 Contributors ............................................................................................. 153

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank various people for their contribution to this project; Professor Rédouane Abouddahab, Professor Carol Boyce-Davies, Professor Adlai Murdoch, Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Diane Taylor-Moreau, Martha Bazile and, Sylviane Burke.

INTRODUCTION PATRICIA DONATIEN AND RODOLPHE SOLBIAC UNIVERSITÉ DES ANTILLES

What is the relevance of studying conflict in the contemporary Caribbean? Starting this reflection from an immediate contemporary perspective we realize that, far from the touristic image of paradise, the present-day Caribbean region appears to be “the site of ongoing contests and conflicts by rival claimants which seek an autonomous space of their own” (Premdas 831). In addition, globalization appears as a source of conflict that takes the form of touristic cultural pollution and “loss of the homeland” as “the tourist industry re-casts the social and economic landscape as did the plantation” (Premdas 823). This vision invites us to further explore the role and impact of conflict in the construction and development of the Caribbean as well as to reflect on the way it can shape the future of this region. From a very general point of view, “conflict” can be defined as an antagonistic relation between two or several units of action, one of which at least tends to dominate the social field in which they interact. However, the concept of “conflict” can be viewed and understood in different ways. Conflict has several conceptual meanings according to the way it has been interpreted and applied within the fields of various disciplines, including philosophy, ethics, sociology, psychology, political science, geography and anthropology. Moreover, conflict is a natural dimension of human relationships: it is the condition of progress and represents societies moving forward from one generation to the next. Within families, groups, communities and societies, conflict throws individuals against one another, but also creates opportunities to reaffirm convictions, develop character, reinvent the world, define and edify approaches and visions of the future. An analysis of the construction of colonial Caribbean societies shows that it constitutes a process which encompasses different dimensions of conflict. Throughout the insular and continental Caribbean, whether English-, Spanish- or French-speaking, societies have been created on the basis of confrontation whether between civilizations, masters and slaves, or the dominant and the dominated. There has been competition between

2

Introduction

European colonisers, but also between black and Indian groups who have struggled for survival and the conservation of their beliefs and respective systems of representation. Seeking a higher social and symbolic status within these contentious societies, both individuals and groups have repeatedly experienced conflict. From a political perspective, the colonization of the Caribbean set up relationships of social conflict characterised by the refusal of Amerindian and African groups to submit to the control of Europeans who persistently sought to subjugate them. From a psychological perspective, cultural conflict, i. e. diverging codes, beliefs and values, is a constituent fact of Caribbean societies whose development has been the logical result of pressure, assimilation, and strategies of confrontation, but also of avoidance and negotiation by dominated groups. As a result, subcultures and complex cultural identities have emerged, characterised by double consciousness and diasporic consciousness (constituting a dimension of mental conflict for the people of the Caribbean, at both collective and individual levels). Whether it originated from antagonism, rivalry or opposition, all Caribbean countries experienced conflict in the most violent ways— combat, revolt, struggle and guerrilla warfare, ending in violent clashes or even massacres. However, rivalry between dissenting groups, communities or races does not always manifest itself exclusively through fruitless hostility and disorder. This type of conflict can also become a phenomenon of resistance resulting in the creation of defence mechanisms, which, through clashes and friction, led to what Edouard Glissant called “rhizome-identities.” Whereas conformity places cultural, scientific and spiritual output on the same level, conflict can be seen as a competition of creativity, capable of generating commitment and reconciliation. With the advent of Caribbean literature, authors, whatever their language, have always treated the question of conflict as central, their novels being shaped, to a large extent, by a complex sociological background. Here, conflict has been interpreted as separation, family division, social conflagration and moral objection, but also as resistance to conformity. Though it does not seek to provide an exhaustive examination of the question, this book consists of essays about conflict in the contemporary Caribbean. The studies proposed in these pages are framed by explorations of this issue in the Caribbean region, in transnational relationships with North America as well as in transcolonial relationships between Martinique, Guadeloupe and France. In fact, the Haitian society and its North American diaspora, the transcolonial French Caribbean islands, the

Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac

3

Anglophone Caribbean society of Trinidad as well as the Caribbean establishments in Canada constitute the societal components of the contributors’ analyses of conflict. The resulting diversity of viewpoints is also apparent in the fact that discussions of conflict include various ethnic and gender perspectives. Such studies, in being concerned with the Caribbean subject—whether Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean, male or female, diasporic or living in the region—provide varied entries to an understanding of contemporary conflict dynamics in the Caribbean. This book presents diverse approaches to conflict that inspire innovative conceptualizations. In addition to classical literary readings of works, contributors use interdisciplinary, cultural studies and Caribbean cultural studies to explore this question. Focusing on such forms as conflict with colonial history, the internal conflict of the artist, cultural conflict, ethnic conflict, and conflict in the representation of Caribbean identities, the essays included in this publication analyse the processes through which conflict shapes artistic, literary, intellectual and societal cultural production in the Caribbean. The studies in this book reflect the contention between official eurooriented history and, as Anny Dominique Curtius puts it, “the tormented chronology of non-history” that characterizes the Caribbean region. This contention with European colonial history constitutes an important dimension of conflict in the region that is reflected in the Caribbean cultural and scholarly productions, giving them a counter-cultural stance. The commitment of artists of the 1960s and 1970s to write or create against the imprint of colonial history consisted in confronting the literal violence of European colonization as well as the “epistemic violence and loss” resulting from “the prohibitions on African cultural expressions. [They also fought…] imposed languages, a school education in which the disciplines of History and Literature endorsed the superiority of the colonizers and normalized their perspective” (Donnell 80). However, the resulting cultural revolution of the 1970s produced an impressively influential “new ethics of relevance and belonging” that permeated “and cross-articulated political, critical, and creative agendas,” but did not “overwrite the persuasions of colonialism’s embedded narratives or guarantee a future free from its historical legacies” (Donnell 77). In this respect, the 1970’s “Great Tradition-Little Tradition” debate between artists and intellectuals appears as a significant manifestation of the societal conflict between cultural forms and values inherited from colonial institutions and folk traditions, vernacular languages and social concern with the grassroots (Donnell 76). Indeed, a feature that permeates

4

Introduction

several of the studies included in this book is that Caribbean societies were subject to struggles over meaning that were never purely academic. Anny Dominique Curtius’ article examines how the 1991 symbolic decapitation of the statue of Empress Josephine, and the subsequent cyclic and temporary acts of defacement, allow Martinicans to rewrite an official colonial history in transcolonial Martinique and reconfigure the traumas of slavery. Her Caribbean cultural studies approach uses everyday sociocultural practices as a matrix for a critical examination of relational dynamics between transcolonial Martinique and France in a globalized world. Curtius proposes to consider how agency, creativity and a duty of memory within these socio-cultural practices interrogate and disrupt the global perspective. This original approach notably discusses the re-appropriations of the beheaded statue by performance artist Sarah Trouche on November 16, 2012 as a broadening of the political subtext that sustains the statue and relocates Empress Joséphine within a quarrel between official History and the tormented chronology of non-history. Bruce Jno-Baptiste’s examination of conflict in the Caribbean region focuses on cultural production as a response to colonisation’s epistemic violence. Rooted in a cultural studies perspective, Jno-Baptiste’s essay introduces identity conflicts in the Caribbean as an expression of an historical desire to remodel Western civilization imposed by violence. It examines cultural, linguistic and intercultural conflicts as phenomena in which the harmful effects of colonial ideologies are confronted with the rectifications brought about by access to independence. Like Ralph Premdas, whose recent study of the Caribbean considers the impact of globalization, Jno-Baptiste “looks at identity as an area of change and contestation” (Premdas 811). Discursive production challenging Western representations is also central to Gladys Francis’ study, which examines original employments of rhythm and bodily movements in Gerty Dambury’s and Gisèle Pineau’s novels in order to disclose the way in which the theme of conflict inhabits the texts’ diegeses. Through an analysis of the placements, dis/placements and re/placement of bodies in movement, this article seeks to discern the roles of rhythm, dance and music in the explorations of bodily pain carried out in these texts. It also aims at disclosing the context that generates a counter discourse to Western representations of the island as exotic and ecstatic. Providing a contrastive analysis of the two Guadeloupeans’ representations of bodily conflicts, this study argues that these writings foster a space of transgression but also restore a zone of encounter, a

Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac

5

collective space of testimonials and female agency that engage in dialogue here and there. This book also contains discussions of poetic creativity resulting from literary expressions of conflict. They deal with conflict as a literary device on which the action of a work of literature depends, and examine the classic form of conflict between the protagonist and himself, and between the protagonist and other characters and forces. These literary articles also explore the Caribbean writers’ strategies for dealing with internal conflict resulting from postcolonial displacement and the redefinitions it entails. These studies also testify to the fact that academic works as well as creations by writers and artists of the first decade of the twenty-first century still address and are influenced by the conditions of colonial and neocolonial life that “confiscated the Caribbean subject’s history” by denying him “a relationship to the past based on established genealogy, succession, and a secure sense of place (Donnell 80).” Actually, Caribbean literary and artistic production at the beginning of this century is still significantly determined by this conflict with history, as works deal with or denounce the imprint of colonial history revealing a persistent commitment to the “rehumanization and indigenization” of those subjects whose humanity, ethnicity and history have been systematically confiscated by the conditions of colonial and neocolonial life (Donnell 80). In addition, these studies examine how the sociological background of relationships between ethno-cultural groups bearing the imprint of ethnic conflict informs the writers’ works. They refer to the heterogeneity of a Caribbean population shaped by colonization through migratory processes including deportation, displacement, deception and competition. They invite us to consider the impact of twentieth-century decolonization, which tended to accentuate processes of “othering” (Mohammed) leading to the emergence of inter-ethnic struggles as “a source of immense conflict especially in contexts of rivalry over power and pre-eminence by the ‘ethno-cultural communities’” (Premdas 820). Post-independence conflict is culturized around language and customs. Consequently, claims to membership rights, access to resources and political control are made in relation to the history of residence and levels of acculturation to European norms and language (Premdas 822). This culturization is patent in the Surinamese post-independence struggle about access to the country’s resources, based mainly on a conflict of representation of what it means to be black (Scott 4). 1 In this case, the 1

“Africa” and “slavery” are not only ethnographic or historical realities, but also semiotically inexhaustible figures that help organize and authorize a social

6

Introduction

Afro-descendent government fights the Boni and Saramaka black people’s traditional African culture because they consider it “backward.” Post-Independence Trinbagonian society is one of those Caribbean plural societies in which, according to Premdas, the failure of assimilation to create a single integrated society and the corresponding persistence of cultural pluralism, the problem of inheritance and the corresponding right to rule have become intensely contested issues (Premdas 820). 2 Grounding her research on Glissantian theory, Deleuze’s concept of deterritorialization and Homi Bhabha’s third space, Dominique Aurelia studies the migrant Haitian-American writer’s internal creative conflict resulting from his wandering between his native country and the USA of his “territorialisation.” Aurelia proposes to theorize Danticat’s literary articulation of this permanent quest for belonging and search for a third place of re-creation and reinvention of the self as “the poetics of staggering.” Also using the Glissantian theory of the rhizome, Rita Keresztesi examines the nature of conflict, either in the form of rebellion or revolution, through Earl Lovelace’s representation of the aftermath of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Trinidad in his latest novel, Is Just a Movie (2011). Her study reveals the Trinidadian writer’s vision of rebellion as the constitutive element to self-hood and national formation, from which derives a perception of conflict as expressions of homegrown social movements that may be considered rebellions on their way to a fullgrown revolution. Earl Lovelace’s exploration as such is concerned with the crisis of representation of the Caribbean identity for people of African descent. As David Scott puts it in a recent study titled “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” the representation of what it means to be Black in the Caribbean and Atlantic contexts is an area of conflict, as the imaginary of afro-descendants is peopled with different and competing interpretations (Scott 4). imaginary of historical identity and community. They do not constitute a unified social imaginary, of course—a social imaginary over which there is—or can be, — complete agreement; but they shape a pervasive social imaginary, nevertheless, in which the conflicts of interpretation within and across the temporality of generations only serve to underline the common possession of a distinctive past in the present (Scott 4). 2 In these states where African-Indian ratios are close, the competition for power by the main ethnic communities is not simply a matter to be decided by the electoral marketplace but by a moral claim based on historical precedence and, ironically, by the degree of assimilation of the cultural values of the departed and depreciated colonial power (Premdas 820).

Patricia Donatien and Rodolphe Solbiac

7

Complementing Keresztesi’s reflection, Rodolphe Solbiac examines Espinet’s exploration of the conflicts in/of representation that the diasporic Indo-Trinidadian subject confronts and that disrupt belonging to Trinidad or Canada. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines Renato Rosado’s definition of cultural citizenship with recent conceptualizations of citizenship and the nation, Solbiac reveals how Espinet’s novel articulates a poetics of the refoundation of belonging to the Trinidadian nation that emancipates its citizens from the colonial legacy of cultural and gender conflicts. Solbiac’s treatment of Espinet’s deconstruction of a male-centred nation-building imagination in the former British colony of Trinidad is complemented by Jacqueline Couti’s exploration of representations of femininity in francophone Caribbean literature. Making use of postcolonial, gender and sexuality theory in an interdisciplinary approach rooted in discourse analysis, Jacqueline Couti studies the impact of the ambivalent characterization of femininity in the works of Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau. Her examination of the use of metaphor and the relationship between power and the body in a French Caribbean setting introduces us to the problematic and conflictive deconstruction of a gendered colonial imaginary. It discloses the way in which “créoliste” discourse creates a two-faced construction of femininity, resulting in the transformation of the Martinican woman into a symbol of abjection and conflict. For many, imagination (e. g. Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris) and the work of art grant the Caribbean subject the tools to refashion his future. Imagination does not always contribute to emancipation, and can also create ambivalent figures that hinder progress. Couti’s study of transcolonial French Caribbean literature demonstrates the significant cultural transformation brought about by imagination and activism. This volume also addresses the question of conflict in contemporary art. Grounded in a background of transnational relationships between the Caribbean region and North America, Patricia Donatien’s essay explores the role played by art in the treatment and de-escalation of ontological and social conflicts between intercommunal groups. She proposes to analyse art as a space of negotiation and mediation of cultural conflicts. Her essay provides a study of the artistic expression of three artists of the American and Canadian Caribbean diaspora backed up by critical analysis grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Edouard Glissant and Wilson Harris. Donatien examines how these artists redefine space using their canvases, installations and supports as surfaces of deterritorialization

8

Introduction

of conflictive representations to conceive imaginary spaces for the resolution of historical and cultural conflicts.

Works Cited Donnell, Alison. “All Friends Now? Critical Conversations, West Indian Literature, and the ‘Quarrel with History’.” Small Axe 38 (2012), 75– 85. Mohammed, Patricia. “The Asian Other in the Caribbean.” Small Axe 13 (June 2009), 57–71. Premdas, Ralph R. “Identity, Ethnicity, and the Caribbean Homeland in an Era of Globalization” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 17 (2011), 811–832. Scott, David. “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition.” Small Axe 40 (March 2013), 1–6.

OF NAKED BODY AND BEHEADED STATUE: PERFORMING CONFLICTING HISTORY IN FORT-DE-FRANCE ANNY DOMINIQUE CURTIUS UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

It is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is there that, in our time, the perplexity of the living is most accurately experienced. (Bhabha, 1994, 170)

In September 1991, the statue of Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais Tascher de la Pagerie was beheaded in La Savane, a city park in Fort-deFrance, Martinique. Twenty-two years later, no one has claimed responsibility for the beheading, the head has never been replaced, and the event continuously generates passionate and compelling debates among intellectuals, contemporary artists, politicians and the general population of Martinique. This article is part of an ongoing reflection I started in 20081 about the symbolic meaning of the beheading of the statue. More importantly, this study is also an attempt to craft a field of inquiry in Caribbean cultural studies where everyday socio-cultural practices constitute the matrix for a critical examination of relational dynamics between transcolonial Martinique and France in a globalized world. In other words, drawing on the beheading of the statue of Joséphine and its ramifications, I propose to study everyday local practices not as static phenomena that are doomed to be swallowed by the global, but as local

1

This present study contains some excerpts from an earlier article (“À Fort-deFrance les statues ne meurent pas”) where I analyzed the dynamic of installation of several statues in Fort-de-France, and the tactic of defacement they were subjected to, including Empress Joséphine’s. Here, I move away from several arguments articulated in this earlier article by making the theoretical analysis of the beheading more sophisticated.

10

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

socio-cultural practices where agency, creativity and a duty of memory interrogate and disrupt the global. Thus, I want to explore how the recurrent cyclic defacement of the statue, the practices around its restoration, recent government decisions regarding the celebrity of Joséphine, and the latest symbolic reappropriation of the beheaded statue by performance artist Sarah Trouche in 2012 broaden the socio-cultural and political subtexts that sustain the beheading of the statue, and relocate Empress Joséphine within a quarrel between official History and what Edouard Glissant called the “tormented chronology of non-history” (Glissant, 1989, 65). I propose to read the mutilations and subsequent transformations of the statue as a local news item that has gradually redeployed itself into a counter discourse, profoundly embedded in the dynamics of rewriting official History in transcolonial Martinique and remodelling the cultural heritage of a people. The numerous speculations that constantly feed the quintessential question “Who cut off Joséphine’s head?” ultimately reveal that a specific silence needs to redeploy its meaning. After twenty years, what really seems to matter is how the beheaded statue enters into a dialogue with Martinicans, the French government, the City of Fort-de-France, scholars, tourists and artists who now consider the beheaded statue as contemporary art, leaving behind the identity of the offenders. Therefore, I tend to consider the desire to know the identity of the perpetrators as being part of a larger narrative that calls for an incisive interrogation about the redeployments and ramifications of an act that can no longer be approached through the lens of a local news item, as it is regularly regarded. I propose to read the beheaded statue as located in multiple contact zones2 that could justify a set of ambivalent practices for negotiating the tension of postcoloniality and sovereignty between France and Martinique. Ultimately, this dialectic of entanglement reaches out to some of the concerns of the globalized world. According to official records, Joséphine de Beauharnais Tascher de la Pagerie was born in the town of Trois-Ilets in the south of Martinique on June 23, 1763, and died in Rueil Malmaison near Paris on May 29, 1814. She married Alexandre de Beauharnais with whom she had two children, 2

My use of Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zone” enters into dialogue with several paradigms including trauma, power, dispossession, entanglements, transmutations and contemporary globalization that help to redefine the postcontact relation of Martinique with France. Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of the three Caribbean presences (Présence africaine, Présence européenne and Présence américaine) also constitutes a significant element in rethinking the contested genealogy that is central in my study.

Anny Dominique Curtius

11

Hortense and Eugène. During the French Revolution, both Alexandre and Joséphine were arrested and imprisoned. While Joséphine was eventually released from prison thanks to her friendship with Barras, one of the major leaders of the French Directoire, her husband Alexandre de Beauharnais was beheaded. In 1796 she became the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empress of the French, but in 1809 Napoleon repudiated Joséphine because she could not give birth to the sons he eagerly wanted in order to form a dynasty. In Martinique Joséphine is a controversial figure, and her status of Empress of the French does not spark pride and enthusiasm but ambivalence, confusion and rejection because her parents and her family at large owned plantations and were slave owners. Therefore, she is not spontaneously recognized as a Martinican heroine, and in this regard Édouard Glissant’s discussion in Caribbean Discourse of the absence of great popular figures and the adoption of victorious heroes in the Caribbean is significant: Because the collective memory was too often wiped out, the Caribbean writer must “dig deep” into this memory, following the latent signs that he has picked up in the everyday world. […] Because the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory, the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology. […] History as a consciousness at work, and history as lived experience are therefore not the business of historians exclusively. […] Would it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily advancing neurosis? […] Other people’s heroes are not ours; our heroes, of necessity, are primarily those of other people. (Glissant, 1989, 65, 69) “Parce que la mémoire historique fut trop souvent raturée, l’écrivain antillais doit « fouiller » cette mémoire, à partir de traces parfois latentes qu’il a repérées dans le réel. […] Parce que le temps antillais fut stabilisé dans le néant d’une non-histoire imposée, l’écrivain doit contribuer à rétablir sa chronologie tourmentée. […] L’histoire en tant que conscience à l’œuvre et l’histoire en tant que vécu ne sont donc pas l’affaire des seuls historiens. […] Serait-il dérisoire ou odieux de considérer notre histoire subie comme cheminement d’une névrose ? […] Les héros d’autrui ne sont pas les nôtres, nos héros par force sont d’abord ceux d’autrui.” (Glissant, 1981, 133, 136)

Reconsidering Glissant's invitation to have literature decenter official historical records, and participate in the writing of local history, what kind of new perspectives do Martinicans cast upon the painful events of the past? How do they elaborate a constructive dialogue between the silence

12

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

imposed by the repressed memory of slavery, and an agency that originates in a duty of memory performed in a healing and productive manner? Among several concrete initiatives that were taken for the 1998 commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, one should consider the draping of the beheaded statue of Joséphine in black3 as a socio-political act intended to unearth traumatic memories. This additional symbolic performance around the statue also echoes Christiane Taubira’s December 22, 1998 sponsorship of a bill4 that recognizes slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, and leads to former President Jacques Chirac’s January 31, 2006 decree stipulating that May 10 is the official day of the annual commemoration of the abolition of slavery in metropolitan France. 5 If Chirac and Taubira stand as institutional transmitters of memory, and if these French Metropolitan initiatives resonate with global human rights norms and discourses, from which perspective can we approach the beheading of the statue, its draping in black, and most recently its symbolic flogging by French performance artist Sarah Trouche? The dichotomy between the rhetorically charged debates at The French National Assembly and the Senate where these laws were discussed and voted on, and the spontaneous, anonymous and recurrent mutilations of the statue, obviously orient our investigation toward what belongs to History and what does not. Charged with emotion and combativeness, the mutilations bear witness to the complex undertaking of healing the painful traces of slavery and colonization. They also constitute fertile ground for rethinking how the anonymous perpetrators of these acts invite everyone to participate in a cycle of performances I call “acts of memory,” since they are linked to History and are no longer mere acts of vandalism, usually committed with no intended reference to institutional history. The notion of vandalism that may have been appropriate in September 1991, when the beheaded statue was first discovered, is no longer suitable, since from now on it is doomed to be symbolically re-appropriated by the conflicted memory of slavery, and each new re-appropriation offers a significant matter for reflection.

3

This event was initiated by the Comité Devoir de mémoire in Martinique. The Taubira Law was passed on May 21, 2001, and is named after Christiane Taubira, currently France’s Minister of Justice since 2012. 5 Articles 1 and 2 of Decree 2006-388 of March 31, 2006 stipulate that the ceremonies will be organized, “in Paris and in each metropolitan department at the initiative of the prefect as well as in the lieux de mémoire of slavery and the slave trade.” 4

Anny Dominique Curtius

13

Joséphine’s statue is the first to have been installed in August 1859 in the middle of La Savane, the public park that faces the bay of Fort-deFrance, where, in 1790, Joséphine and her daughter Hortense are believed to have narrowly escaped death during the storming of the city. Moreover, great festivities that took place over several days accompanied the inauguration, and noteworthy political figures from France and the Caribbean were present (Sur la Savane, 18). Renovations of La Savane have been undertaken since then, and in 1974 the statue was relocated from the centre of the park to a corner near Rue de la liberté, across from the Schœlcher Library and one block from the Préfecture. This relocation was a source of polemic6 between those who praised Aimé Césaire's initiative and those who deplored the debasement of a prestigious historical figure. One needs to remember that Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land] and André Breton’s “Le Brise-lames” [“The Breakwater”] in “Des épingles tremblantes” [“Some Trembling Pins”] (Martinique Charmeuse de serpents) [Martinique Snake Charmer] are critical preludes to the contemporary creative acts of memory that reconfigure the statue in its historical context: In this inert town, this sorry crowd under the sun, taking part in nothing which expresses, asserts, frees itself in the broad daylight of its own land. Nor in Empress Joséphine of the French dreaming high, high above negridom. (Césaire, 1995, 75)7 Hazy light bathes the savannah where lost amidst tall trunks of coconut palms, the blue-stained statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais casts a feminine and tender spell over the city. Her breasts gush from a highwaisted Empire dress; speech of the Directorate lingers on, rolling some African stones to mix the voluptuous nolo contendere potion of Creole talk. A Royal Palace lies buried in the ruins of old Fort Royal (pronounce it Fô-yal), the roar of great world battles—Marengo, Austerlitz, here retold heroically in three lines—don’t bore the ladies—yielding to charming,

6

The popular satirical song by Martinican artist Guy Méthalie, “Yo déplasé Joséphine” [“They moved Joséphine”], chronicles this polemic. 7 “Dans cette ville inerte, cette foule désolée sous le soleil, ne participant à rien de ce qui s’exprime, s’affirme, se libère au grand jour de cette terre sienne. Ni à l’impératrice Joséphine des Français rêvant très haut au-dessus de la négraille” (Césaire 1956, 28).

14

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue spread knees under the tittering roof tiles of La Pagerie plantation. 8 (Breton, 2008, 54)

While Aimé Césaire envisions the creation of a Martinican people ready to redefine an identity politics, Breton’s surrealist, gendered and sexual gaze at Joséphine redeploys Césaire’s call for a postcolonial reterritorialization of the cityscape of Fort-de-France with an astute connection between the Napoleonic imperialist wars and Joséphine’s inherited colonialist and assimilationist mentality. It is worth evaluating the different historical elements that adorn the statue. For example, Joséphine holds a medallion upon which is etched a profile of Napoleon, and on the front side of the pedestal a carved section represents Joséphine's coronation at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1804. On the backside of the pedestal, an inscription states that in “the year MDCCCLVIII (1858) of Napoléon III’s reign, the Martinican people raised this monument to honor the Empress Joséphine, born in this colony.” Complementing the beheading of the statue, inscriptions in Martinican Creole and in red paint advocating “respect for May 22”9 and identifying slavery as a crime against humanity covered both the pedestal and a notice about Joséphine posted next to the statue. This red paint evidently represents the blood flowing from the decapitated head, and recalls that of the victims of slavery, also symbolizing Joséphine’s imprisonment in 1794 and her condemnation to decapitation by the French revolutionaries, a predicament which she eventually escaped. More importantly, it redefines the urban space of Fort-de-France, all the while taking the form of a return on memory. Even if the statue has often been the target of various forms of temporary defacement, the decapitated head and the blood-red paint permanently actualize the ideological and political message sent by this symbolic gesture. It is significant that even though a new head was commissioned by the City Hall, the statue has never been fully restored 8

“Dans la lumière noyée qui baigne la savane, la statue bleutée de Joséphine de Beauharnais, perdue entre les hauts fûts de cocotiers, place la ville sous un signe féminin et tendre. Les seins jaillissent de la robe de merveilleuse à très haute taille et c’est parler du Directoire qui s’attarde à rouler quelques pierres africaines pour composer le philtre de non-défense voluptueuse du balbutiement créole. C’est le Palais-Royal enseveli sous les ruines du vieux Fort-Royal (prononcez Fô-yal), le bruit des grandes batailles du monde—Marengo, Austerlitz contées galamment en trois lignes—ne pas ennuyer les dames—expire à ces genoux charmants entr’ouverts sous les riantes tuiles de la Pagerie” (Breton, 1948, 37). 9 May 22 refers to the date of the abolition of slavery in Martinique, and its commemoration in Martinique on that date.

Anny Dominique Curtius

15

Fig. 1. 1. The beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine before the 2010 renovation

with it, and nor have the Creole inscriptions and red paint covering the statue been cleaned, as if the full restoration had become an impossible gesture. Thus, when Françoise Vergès wrongly declares in her interview with Aimé Césaire, in Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai [Negro I am, Negro

16

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

I remain] that, “nobody even tries anymore to replace Joséphine's head because it is always removed the following evening” (Césaire, 2005, 10), one realizes how the beheading has generated a cycle of unfounded rhetorical interpretations. It is important to consider that, in 1992, one year after the act of mutilation, the French Government officially acknowledged the statue as a National Heritage site. This event is all the more significant because as part of a site protected by a state procedure on account of its importance to France’s historical and cultural heritage, the head should have been replaced, and the restoration shielded from future acts of defacement. As I mentioned in my introduction, Joséphine generates passionate debate among Martinicans. While some see her as the pride of the island as the Empress of the French, or praise her passion for botany, others remain vehemently critical, and associate her solely with her role in the reinstatement of slavery in 1802. However, no historical text proves that Napoleon re-established slavery in the colonies under pressure from Joséphine, who would have wished to maintain the slave system and thus preserve the economic power of generations of slave-owners to which she herself belonged. Nevertheless, Joséphine is caught in the quarrel between official History and the “tormented chronology of non-history,” and has therefore been beheaded both by History and local history. Joséphine’s statue is tied to a historical period of conquest, slavery, colonization, liberation and assimilation. If one imagines the tactics of those who intentionally perform their acts of memory, one can see how these periods that shape the politics of memory in Martinique have guided the offenders in their choices of specific symbolic mutilations. In fact, in Martinique, because there is a need for more significant symbolic sites of memory that would allow for a serene dialogue on the history of the slave trade, on slavery and colonization, “the need for memory is also an excessive need for history” (Nora 1984). Therefore, it becomes necessary to reconfigure the statue as a political site of memory. As a controversial symbol for Martinican society but a glorifying sign of the French republic that has gained the prestigious status of National Heritage Site, the beheaded statue has, since September 1991, become a “non-place.” By using Marc Augé’s concept of non-lieux, I situate my argument within a gap that is present in Augé’s articulation of his concept. While he considers that social structures strongly relate to places, he underscores that other places of the globalized world (transit spaces such as airports for example) that do not allow for an intense relation with social dynamics need to be conceptualized as non-places. However, the border between non-places and places cannot be hermetically sealed

Anny Dominique Curtius

17

insofar as the symbolic sociality that initially separates the two opposite terms of the paradigm can become the matrix that blurs the separation and initiates a new relational dimension. This interstitial zone that grounds my reflection has been subsequently identified by Augé, since he believes that the notion of place cannot be approached from an empirical perspective, and that “either place or non-place [do not] really exist [. . .] in the absolute sense of the term. The place/non-place pairing is an instrument for measuring the degree of sociality and symbolization of a given space” (Augé, 2008, viii). This interstitial zone between place and non-place, along with Appadurai’s concept of “ideoscape”, are appropriate theoretical venues to rethink how the beheaded statue occupies a symbolic space in the city of Fort-de-France. It is a non-place insofar as it is located within the logic of the symbolic preservation of an official cultural and historical French heritage that needs to be interrogated because it has not established coherent and lucid connections with the Martinican people as regards the traumas of slavery. Nevertheless, the beheaded statue can be considered as a place because in the politics of memory in Martinique, while these defacements satisfy the anonymous offenders and their ideological followers, they disturb those who believe that the acts of mutilation send the wrong message. In relation to Augé and Appadurai’s conceptualization of the ideoscape, I see the beheaded statue as a place that calls for a duty of memory by legitimizing, in an open space, public debates and counterideologies that destabilize dominant French discourses, and try out different patterns of temporary and utopian local sovereignty. In other words, the statue of Joséphine before 1991 is a non-place which, once mutilated, becomes a place, that is to say a social and political symbol that serves as proof of the need for a dialogue between official historical records and non-history. The beheaded statue is located one block from the Préfecture, a “high place” of power, which symbolically represents the French Republic in the cityscape of Fort-de-France. Thus, decapitated and stained with red paint, the French Republic is wounded not only because it is disrespected, but also because the Empress of the French is insulted. One needs to bear in mind that the primary function of the statue is written on the pedestal: “to honor the Empress Joséphine.” Nevertheless, this function is disrupted since in 1991 it entered into a floating zone of ambivalence where the official message it is supposed to convey is assaulted, erased, threatened or forced to compete with a specific oppositional narrative that appropriates colonial history with the intention to deploy a different meaning. In 1992, only one year after it was beheaded, the statue was declared a protected historical monument, raising the question of the kind of history

18

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

that is celebrated in 1992. Is it the history of “the people of Martinique who raised this monument to the Empress born in this colony,” as it is officially inscribed on the pedestal? Or is it the non-history of a group of Martinicans who desecrated the statue by demanding in Martinican Creole “respé ba Matinik, respé ba 22 mé” [respect for Martinique, respect for May 22], and asking for slavery to be acknowledged as a crime against humanity? The two historical dynamics do not coalesce and the official classification of the statue clearly falls into a hazy and conflicted zone. According to strict regulations from the Ministry of Culture, a classified National Heritage Site cannot be destroyed, displaced, modified or restored without permission from the Ministry of Culture. Since 1991, by reconfiguring the cityscape of transcolonial Fort-de-France, the imposed model of the perfection and neatness of historical monuments has been disrupted, and the decision forces everyone to acknowledge the evidence of an ambivalence, and of a contradiction—that of a community complacent with the process of departmentalization, 10 yet renegotiating the traumas brought about by assimilation, and refusing to obliterate the complexities of Martinique’s H/history. Thus, the perpetrators act on behalf of those who assert that the acts of memory constitute the community's way of refusing to be passive spectators of an official historical narrative. Twenty-two years after the statue was beheaded, what should have been done with the statue, and whether the city of Fort-de-France should have replaced the missing head, are still passionately debated. The question still remains: has Fort-de-France succeeded in its attempt to articulate a subtext that confirms the disfigured statue as the locus of a crisis with History? Does the beheaded statue give new meaning to missed opportunities for a true liberation from colonial ties? La Savane, home of the statue of Joséphine, has been recently renovated. Within this dynamic of renovation, the statue was removed in 2010 to be “restored,” and a “new” Joséphine now stands in the park. However a new premeditated act of memory gives an additional meaning to the cycle of reappropriations, and to the beheaded statue, since the name of Joséphine is now erased from the inscription. The text that now reads: 10 In March 1946 Aimé Césaire was the sponsor of a law that transformed French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion into French Overseas Departments. The French Government called the project Law of assimilation. For Césaire, since the word “assimilation” had humiliating cultural connotations and serious consequences for the human being, he chose to rename the Law and proposed the neologism “departmentalization,” based on the term “department” as it is used for the administrative division of Metropolitan France.

Anny Dominique Curtius

19

Fig. 1. 2. Pedestal of the renovated statue with the name Joséphine erased

“To the empress born in this colony” originally said: “To the empress Joséphine born in this colony.” With the name of Joséphine erased from History, and with red paint still covering the chest and the robe of the

20

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

statue, it becomes essential to question the new status of the allegedly freshly restored statue that still does not have a head. The beheaded statue is about a conflict between official History and local history, as well as between local and national institutions. On the one hand, despite its “restoration,” the decapitation is officialized by the City of Fort-de-France since the head has not been restored; on the other hand, however, the French Government has recently proposed another twist to the story. In September 2011, on the initiative of former French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand, the Ministry of Culture and Communication created a new label for historical sites, called Maison des illustres [House of Notorious People]. It “promotes dwelling places that are of special interest either in terms of their history or of the famous people that lived in them.” The official website of the Ministry specifies that this architectural heritage combines a diverse range of museum structures (house-museums, house-archives, houses created by artists), and estates that hold unsuspected treasures, and which remain unjustly ignored. 11 Taking into consideration the involvement of notorious people in French political, social and cultural history, the new label is meant to keep their memory alive. Thus, the birthplace of Joséphine, La Pagerie, a plantation house located in the town of Trois-Islets, on the south western coast of Martinique, received the label of Maison des illustres in 2011. Two other plantation houses12 in Martinique, now transformed into museums, were also designated as Maison des illustres. 11 http://www.france.fr/en/arts/article-old/%E2%80%9Cmaisons-des-illustres %E2 %80%9D-label 12 At present, 111 houses in France and the Overseas French Departments have received this recognition. Several Martinican intellectuals, including writer Patrick Chamoiseau, criticized the French Ministry for its unilateral choice. Chamoiseau notes that all the places identified are former plantations. He specifies: “If historians, politicians and men with a conscience in Martinique had simply been consulted, one might have suggested Aliker’s home, still abandoned on Deproges street, or the house of Césaire in Redoute, of Gilbert Gratiant, or René Mesnil and Edouard Glissant in Diamant, maybe the headquarters of the Communist Party of Martinique in Terres Sainville, the house of Lagrosillière in Sainte-Marie…, one would have identified places where the admirable Victor Schoelcher, or Louis Telga, Rosannie Soleil, Frantz Fanon have stayed, or even the many anonymous shacks that constitute as many traces of heroism and courage without writing, without fuss and without words” [“Si les historiens, responsables politiques et hommes de conscience martiniquais avaient été simplement consultés, on aurait sans doute vu surgir la maison Aliker encore abandonnée rue Ernest Deproges, celle de Césaire à Redoute, celle de Gilbert Gratiant, celle de René Ménil, ou celle d’Edouard Glissant au Diamant, peut-être le siège du Parti communiste

Anny Dominique Curtius

21

Keeping in mind the fact that this new initiative by the Ministry of Culture emphasizes that the label is meant to develop tourism, it is obvious that since the French Government has been unable to “reappropriate” the statue of Joséphine in Fort-de-France as an official National Heritage Site, particular attention is now given to Joséphine’s birthplace. Thus it becomes a distinguished and official location that honours Joséphine according to the new standard, since the beheaded statue in Fort-deFrance, even if it is “restored,” cannot appropriately fulfill this mission. Widening the scope of my analysis to La Pagerie, in order to insert Joséphine in a larger Black Atlantic dynamic, it is relevant to underscore that Joséphine’s birthplace is also a matter of controversy. On the nearby island of St. Lucia, a national narrative rooted in History suggests that Joséphine was not born in Martinique. Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, St. Lucia was ceded to France and became a dependency of Martinique. Consequently, land in St. Lucia was granted to white Martinican plantation owners. Joséphine’s father was among those planters who acquired land in St. Lucia, and actually settled on the island with their families for a very short period. Historians have debated popular beliefs and imagined appropriations of a historical figure like Joséphine, and Michael Louis gathered some evidence of her alleged birth in St. Lucia in Was Empress Joséphine Born at Paix Bouche? Exploring a Community’s Tradition (2003). Furthermore, Lyne-Rose Beuze reports that a St. Lucian historian, commenting on the admiration of St. Lucians for Joséphine, is believed to have declared: “si zot pa lé-y ba nou-y” [“if you do not want her, giver her to us”] (2010, 23). Caught up in the dialectic of imagined origins and national pride, St. Lucians request that Martinicans return what is supposedly theirs. Thus, they articulate a disjunctive national narrative where Joséphine is once again “disseminated.” Following Homi Bhabha’s paradigm of “dissemination,” I see how the imagined and concrete appropriation of Joséphine by St. Lucians enters into a dialogue with Martinique’s ambivalent praise and symbolic beheading of the Empress. It is revealing to note that the marketing strategies of some Caribbean Cruise companies clearly appropriate the alleged birthplace of Joséphine at Paix Bouche near Gros-Ilet as the perfect way to promote St. Lucia as a

martiniquais aux Terres Sainville, la maison Lagrosillière à Sainte-Marie…, on aurait cherché quelque lieu de séjour de l’admirable Victor Schœlcher, de Louis Telga, de Rosannie Soleil, de Frantz Fanon, ou encore ces innombrables cases anonymes qui sont autant de traces d’héroïsmes et de courage sans écriture, sans cirque et sans parole”] /http://www.christophe-girard.fr/2011/09/18/maisonsd’illustres-ou-lieux-terribles/.

22

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

key destination for tourists in the Caribbean. Information on the web sites of Caribbean Cruises and Princess Cruises notes: The estate of Paix Bouche, open to visitors, is where it is believed Empress Joséphine was born. (CruiseLines. us) Established in 1746, Soufriere is the island's oldest town, and the reputed birthplace of Napoleon's Empress Joséphine. (Princess Cruises)

While Caribbean Cruises leaves some doubt on the birthplace by using “it is believed,” with the term “reputed,” Princess Cruises clearly presents its statement as being closer to a historical piece of information. The parallel between St. Lucia’s postcolonial and global imaginary and Martinique’s postcontact presence in the world is a significant case study. While Joséphine’s appropriation by St. Lucia is linked to practices of ephemeral consumption in the local, neoliberal and globalized industry of tourism on the one hand, Martinique’s historical claim is embedded in an entangled poetics of memory. Bhabha’s notion of dissemination offers an appropriate conceptual angle to observe the beheading of the statue as Martinique disengages itself from a French national discourse about Joséphine’s celebrity, and St. Lucia shifts toward an opportunistic national discourse. However, the Martinican and St. Lucian fractures13 are redeployed beyond these homogeneous boundaries and temporalities of the nation space targeted by Bhabha, and lie within a more complex entity of a post-Black Atlantic imaginary where obvious and utopian modes of fractures still generate contacts. While an entangled poetics of memory in Martinique disrupts official historical records about slavery, St. Lucia’s national imaginary translates and dislocates the routes of slavery into the global and neoliberal routes of the cruise ships in a logic of economic survival.

Happening On November 15, 2012, I gave a lecture at Colgate University about the beheading of the statue of Joséphine, and during the Q&A one aspect 13

In the case of Martinique, my use of “fracture” is related to several conceptual dimensions such as fracture coloniale, postcontact and transcolonial that all participate in a fertile debate about post-departmentalization imaginaries in the French Republic. My use of “fracture” in the case of St. Lucia is obviously rooted in the logic of its independence in 1979, but also in the nation’s tactic to bolster its economy by reconfiguring its status in the globalized tourist industry.

Anny Dominique Curtius

23

of the discussion focused on the complexity and impossibility of determining whether the cycle of symbolic reappropriations of the statue will end or continue. On November 16–18, 2012, French visual and performance artist Sarah Trouche was invited to participate in the second edition of the Martinique Pool Art Fair held at the hotel L’impératrice in Fort-de-France. This open exhibition is the only Caribbean art fair that is meant to create a convivial synergy between artists and the public. L’Impératrice is located across La Savane and faces the beheaded statue of Joséphine. On November 16, in a revealing performance, Sarah Trouche, her naked body covered with red roucou oil, walked from L’Impératrice to the beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine and flogged the statue thirtythree times. 14

Fig. 1. 3. Sarah Trouche, Pool Art Fair, 2012

Sarah Trouche’s performance generated controversy between those who were shocked by the nudity, 15 and those who welcomed the 14

Sarah Trouche’s performance can be watched online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivfn0WGFKmM. 15 The video was removed from Youtube on November 21, 2012 because “its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

24

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

performance as a timely act rooted in the dialectic of the duty of memory. In that perspective, Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of the partage du sensible [distribution of the sensible] is appropriate for interrogating the intertwining of arts and politics through Trouche’s intervention on a disputed Martinican social terrain. For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is “a system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it”16 (Rancière, 2004, 12). The translation of Rancière’s concept of « partage » [“distribution”] accurately reveals the various degrees of subjectivities through which both Sarah Trouche and the viewers of the performance interact. Trouche’s subjectivities unsettle a commonality, dislocating French and Martinican social discourses about Joséphine, and sensitizing Martinican people about new tactics of understanding, embracing, rejecting and problematizing Joséphine’s statue through her artistic reappropriation of the politically motivated beheading. On the other hand, the viewers’ subjectivities must process the immediacy of Sarah Trouche’s performance, and critically dialogue with the artist’s desire to shift a customary vision of Joséphine that I call the colonial logos, and transform an apparent stability surrounding the beheaded statue on La Savane. For Rancière, political and aesthetic practices are ways of doing [manières de faire] in relation to other ways of being and forms of visibility. Thus, when Trouche declares that her performance must trigger a reconstruction, she seeks, as a French woman, to share a sense of common history with a Martinican community. In addition, more than a confrontation, she wants to articulate an encounter around latent discursive paradigms about the statue that need to be stimulated. The red roucou oil, originally used by indigenous Caribbean populations for body painting, is astutely recuperated by the artist to creatively juxtapose the African and indigenous Caribbean experiences of engineered extermination, bloodshed, suffering, survival and resistance during the post-Columbian conquest, the Middle Passage, and on the plantation. Responding to the harsh criticism accusing Sarah Trouche of exhibitionism and opportunism, Martinican artist Habdaphaï, co-organizer of the Martinique Pool Art Fair, stated that she is a politically conscious artist, not an exhibitionist:

16

“J’appelle partage du sensible ce système d’évidences sensibles qui donne à voir en même temps l’existence d’un commun et les découpages qui y définissent les places et les parts respectives” (Rancière, 2000, 12)

Anny Dominique Curtius

25

Her body, used as a tool, is a brush creating visual art, raising questions. In Martinican society, if artists decide not to share their creations, something will be missing in the balance of society. We are here to bully, shake up, denounce, share beauty and ugliness, and face human stupidity also. (Habdaphaï 2012)17

As for Sarah Trouche, she rooted her performance within the dialectic of conflicted social and historical processes: This performance is an action that was elaborated after discussions initiated by Martinicans. It seems to me that the role of the artist is to trigger a debate. The role that Joséphine is made to play is part of Martinican history. History belongs to the past, but it also has consequences in the present. I hope that this action will generate a necessary debate for a reconstruction. (Habdaphaï 2012)18

The questions of beauty, aesthetic regularity and the supposed normality of the frameworks that should support the production and exhibition of art are obviously at the core of Trouche’s performance, since it does not exclude any possibility, and dislocates borders, logic and the purity of forms. Her performance is a poetics of oppositionality that participates in the rewriting of History by disrupting and challenging the colonial logos of the cityscape near La Savane. As an artistic intervention that rewrites a social text from a disputed socio-historical context, Sarah Trouche’s political, oppositional and eccentric corporeality reminds us that there is something uncanny about the presence of the statue of Joséphine in the city of Fort-de-France. Thus, following in the steps of Césaire and Breton, whom I argue initiated a cycle of symbolic defacements of the statue in their poetry, and following the 1991 perpetrators as well as the subsequent architects of the reterritorialization of Joséphine, Sarah Trouche decenters a historical logos by using her body as a counter monument, and as a fabric on which several complex layers of agency are 17

“Son corps-outil est comme un pinceau qui réalise une œuvre visuelle, qui lance un questionnement. Dans cette société martiniquaise si les artistes décident de ne pas partager leurs créations, quelque chose manquera à l’équilibre. Nous sommes là pour brusquer, bousculer, dénoncer, partager, les beautés, les laideurs, faire face à la bêtise humaine aussi.” 18 “Cette performance est une action qui a été imaginée suite à des discussions initiées par des Martiniquais. Il me semble que le rôle de l’artiste est de lancer le débat. Le rôle que l’on prête à Joséphine fait partie de l’histoire de la Martinique. L’histoire appartient au passé mais elle a des conséquences dans le présent. J’espère que cette action permettra de relancer un débat nécessaire pour une reconstruction.”

26

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

stitched. A statement on her website reads that: “her work revolves around and emanates from her many trips and expeditions to meet people living in micro and globalized societies. Her reflections on them reveal the anomalies, ambiguities, and social and political contradictions and tensions within them.” Sarah Trouche’s naked, roucou-painted body is a poetics of entangled and polysemic bodies that enters into a dialogue with Joséphine’s body and several other historical modalities. Indeed, beyond Trouche’s nudity, one might also visualize Joséphine’s body being unclothed and deposed from its highness, in order to be symbolically flogged like the slaves. Trouche’s body also enters into dialogue with Glissant’s conceptualization of the dispossessed African slave as a “naked migrant,”19 and Derek Walcott’s poetic reappropriation of the Middle Passage of “the ocean that kept turning blank pages looking for history,” of the “packed cries,” of the “drowned women” and “the men with eyes as heavy as anchors who sank without tombs” (The Sea is History 1979, 25– 26). In this regard, her performance, that she calls action, interacts with my notion of the “act of memory” as a locus of agency: Actually, I am originally a painter. I still paint; it helps me think through how to set up my actions. I started concentrating in performance ten years ago because I was drawn to the freedom it allows in the medium, the immediate reaction and confrontation, and being face to face with my audience. I call my performances “actions” because of the active engagement performance instills in an audience—to me it is very different than looking at a painting or sculpture. (Trouche 2012)

Dissecting the oppositional corporeality through which Sarah Trouche creates a counter-monument, on November 17, 2012 pediatrician Serge Chalons, president of the Comité Devoir de mémoire, Martinique, articulates the following incisive text: What is this young woman wearing, a white woman, incidentally, submitting “Joséphine with her neck severed,” the Empress of the French, two centuries later, to punishment by flogging, on the Square of La Savane, alongside the Rue de la Liberté in Fort-de-France… The Empress, standing, frozen marble-like, in her greatness, but being flogged by a

19

In Introduction à une poétique du divers, Glissant identifies three types of migrations in the Americas: the armed migrant, the family migrant and the naked migrant, the latter being the dispossessed African slave.

Anny Dominique Curtius

27

“Toucouleur” painted woman, standing down below, in her extreme nudity… Thus upsetting the order of things and time …. (Chalons, 2012)20

In a city where there are no museums of modern art, in spite of a prolific Martinican community of painters and contemporary artists, these acts of memory that reterritorialize Joséphine in a postcontact and globalized mentality, constitutes the most meaningful ideological theatre to fill the holes of an erased memory.

Works cited Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Augé, Marc, Non-places. An Introduction to Supermodernity, Trans. John Howe, London, New York, Verso, 1995/2008. [Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1992.] Beuze, Lyne-Rose, « Joséphine, l’impératrice mal aimée en Martinique », « Hommes et femmes célèbres et figures populaires de Martinique », Cahiers du Patrimoine, Conseil Régional de la Martinique, no 29, juin 2010. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Breton, André, « The Breakwater », in « Some Trembling Pins », Martinique Snake Charmer, trans. David Seaman, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2008. [« Le brise-lames », in « Des épingles tremblantes », Martinique charmeuse de serpents, Paris, Sagittaire, 1948.] Césaire, Aimé, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005. —. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 1995. [Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris, Présence africaine, 1956.]

20

This unpublished text was Serge Chalons’ spontaneous reaction to Sarah Trouche’s performance, sent to the media covering the event: “Que porte cette jeune femme, blanche, mais qu’importe, faisant subir à « Joséphine cou coupé », impératrice des Français, deux siècles après, le châtiment du fouet, sur la place de la Savane qui longe la rue de la Liberté à Fort-de-France…Debout, l’impératrice, figée dans le marbre, du haut de sa grandeur, mais soumise au fouet d’une femme « toucouleur », à ses pieds, dans une extrême nudité… Bouleversant ainsi l’ordre des choses et du temps ….”

28

Of Naked Body and Beheaded Statue

Chamoiseau, Patrick, « Maisons d’illustres ou lieux terribles? »

Curtius, Anny Dominique, “De cuerpos desnudos pintados y de estatuas decapitadas: la historia interpretativa de Fort-de-France”, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, "Francia en Latinoamérica/ Latinoamérica en Francia”, Año XXXIX, N° 78, 2do semestre de 2013, pp. 175-194. —, « À Fort-de-France les statues ne meurent pas », International Journal of Francophone Studies 11. 1 (2008), 87-106. CruiseLines. us, http://www. cruiselines. us/mot/carib3. html Web. 25. Oct. 2013. Glissant, Edouard, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994. —, Caribbean Discourse, Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1989. [Le discours antillais, Paris, Seuil 1981.] Louis, Michael, Was Empress Joséphine Born at Paix Bouche? Exploring a Community’s Tradition, Castries, St. Lucia Heritage Tourism Programme, 2003. Habdaphaï, « La censure au service de l’intolérance » [Censorship at the service of intolerance]. Frère Indépendant. WordPress. com, Nov. 2012. http://frereindependent.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/la-censure-auservice-de-lintolerance-by-habdaphai/ Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, 222-237. Nora, Pierre, Les lieux de mémoire. La République. Volume 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1984. Princess Cruises, http://www.princess.com/find/popupPortPOI.page?voyageCode=E307 &tourCode=&travelOrder=&portid=SLU&resType=C25. Oct. 2013. Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London, Continuum, 2004. [Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Paris, La fabriqueéditions, 2000.] Sur la Savane. Chroniques d’un haut lieu foyalais, Musée régional d’histoire et d’ethnographie. Conseil Régional de la Martinique, 2000. Trouche, Sarah, “Discovery Series: Company interviews the lovely Sarah Trouche”, 02. Jan. 2012.

Anny Dominique Curtius

29

http://www.welcometocompany.com/discovery-series-companyinterviews-lovely-sarah-trouche 24 Oct. 2013. —. “Pool Art Fair Martinique – 2012: Sarah Trouche.” Online video clip. Youtube. 17 Nov. 2012. http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=Ivfn0WGFKmM25. Oct. 2013. —. Sarah Trouche Official Website, n. d. http://www. sarahtrouche. com 24. Oct. 2013. Walcott, Derek, « The Sea is History », The Star-Apple Kingdom, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Table of illustrations 1. Beheaded statue of Empress Joséphine before the 2010 renovation, Fortde-France. Personal photograph by the author. Dec. 2008. 2. Pedestal of the renovated statue with the name Joséphine erased, Fortde-France. Personal photograph by author. Dec. 2011. 3. “Pool Art Fair Martinique – 2012: Sarah Trouche.” Online photograph. Web. 21. Oct. 2013. https://www.google.com/search?q=sarah+trouche,+fort-de-france& source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=AnxpUu-EBujv2QW4h4HAD A&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1319&bih=880#facrc=_&imgdii=_&i mgrc=iKSG8OOkA67vXM%3A%3BBIos8UrEd4YUOM%3Bhttp%2 53A%252F%252Ffrereindependent.com%252Finvite%252F18815961 64aa.main.2.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fgroups.yahoo.com%252 Fgroup%252Fjennie%252Fmessage%252F3253%253Fvar%253D1%3 B700%3B496

BIRTHING CHAOS: TWO-FACED WOMEN, CULTURAL CONFLICT AND BETRAYAL IN CRÉOLISTE WRITINGS JACQUELINE COUTI UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY

Traditionally, French Antillean novels by male authors such as Joseph Zobel’s La Rue case-nègres (1950) glorify the topos of the fanm poto mitan. 1 This archetype of a devoted maternal figure strives for her progeny’s or family’s well-being and social advancement without the support of a male companion. This motherly model is not restricted to the French Antilles, existing in the Caribbean as a whole (Mohamed 61, Crawford 324). Literature from Martinique and Guadeloupe echoes, then, the Caribbean society’s understanding of maternity as an enhancement of womanhood, particularly for single women finding respectability in a maternal role (Lesel 34, 90; Cottias 68; Crawford 327). 2 However, since the 1980s, Martinican and créoliste writers Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau have emphasized representations of Creole femininity that transform the traditional fanm poto mitan into a source of derision and contempt. 3 In their work, the fanm cho—loose woman and insatiable sexual partner— serves as a positive model of the feminine. 1

In French-based Creole, the poto-mitan represents the central pillar of the shanty and, by extension, the maternal figure becomes the pillar of the family. The single mother might be considered a stigmatized individual; on that stigmatization, see Myriam Cottias, 56. Yet, more often than not, Caribbean discourse glorifies the single mother’s position when she dedicates herself to her children. The multiplicity of ways mothers have cared for people in the Caribbean cannot be neatly reduced to rigid categories. See Charmaine Crawford, 324. 2 This characterization of the feminine comes from French Caribbean proverbs that are merciless to women but praise mothers. See Marie-Rose Lafleur. 3 For these authors, créolité or creoleness is a cultural and political project aiming at promoting all things Creole and combating colonialism as well as French acculturation. This is what they claim in their 1989 manifesto “Eloge de la créolité.”

32

Birthing Chaos

Maryse Condé was the first scholar to condemn créoliste representations of sexuality and femininity, and many voices have since joined her critical stance. 4 Yet, few studies in French Caribbean Studies explore the cultural and political implications of both writers’ imageries of sex and femininity. 5 This type of investigation unmasks the contradictions and flaws of a masculine project, which highlights a fragmented and conflictive Creole society under the guise of cultural promotion. Indeed, créoliste representations of contentious sexual imagery and gendered antagonism do not merely display Creole machismo6—they also betray the malicious effects of colonialism, namely how in the Caribbean “the imperatives of organized systems of oppression and exploitation” have ordered gendered constructions (Ramshand 312). Using Julia Kristeva’s concept of the ambivalent two-faced mother (157), a supportive and castratory as well as abject figure, and applying the lens of Caribbean feminist epistemology to créoliste antagonistic ideas, sex and gender open new perspectives for analysis. 7 This approach sheds new light on Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s views in their early novels of not only maternal and feminine imagery but also ideas on masculinity, créolité and cultural if not political consciousness in a French Caribbean context. Questioning these authors’ antagonistic constructions of womanhood demonstrates how their discourse manipulates a colonial taxonomy of black women from the Caribbean to promote the nationalistic claims of their identity project. Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s linking of women’s sexuality to the colour of their skin to transfigure the traditional maternal

4

Consult Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé for more about this. Françoise Vergès’s “Métissage, discours masculin et déni de la mère” (1994), Joséphine Valenza Arnold’s “Comment peut-on être Martiniquais” (2006) and Bonnie Thomas’s Breadfruit of Chestnut: Gender Construction in French Caribbean (2006) are notable exceptions. 6 For instance, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes (2007) illustrates this idea, as the novel showcases the persistence in “Caribbean discourse of figuring the traumatic memory of slavery in terms of the wounded, or wounding female body.” See Maeve McCusker, 149. 7 In psychoanalytical and feminist discourses, the term “castratory” is a neologism that often expresses what Julia Kristeva examines in “The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” as the displaced fear of castration, namely the many psychical relocations of the fear of the vagina. Caribbean Feminist scholarship from the British Commonwealth continues to expose the ongoing, relentless contestations over who will exercise power and how power is deployed. See Eudine Barriteau, 10. See also collective works edited by Barriteau and Rhoda. E. Reddock. 5

Jacqueline Couti

33

imagery and assert a cultural and political agenda is not without failings. 8 I will first examine the créolistes novels that most showcase the mother as an accomplice of colonialism and how the national trope of the mother as the motherland crumbles. For that purpose, I will explore more texts by Confiant. With both authors, though, the mother embodies a site of abjection, castration and conflict; that is to say, alienation and Frenchification (acculturation to French culture). Symbolic womanhood does not give birth to the Creole nation but rather chaos and the impossibility of national and cultural awareness. This maternal imagery epitomizes the cultural betrayal threatening créolité while echoing the perversion of the more favoured tropes of the plantation/slave ship as the crucibles of créolité (Milne 53). 9 The mother stands as the accomplice of the symbolic father or master10 and colonial system. She is a threat to black masculinity and the culture it hopes to uphold. Early créoliste novels demonstrate a conflictive two-faced femininity while manipulating a colonial motif that Frantz Fanon theorized in Peau noire, masque blanc and Les damnés de la terre as the colonized woman as a cultural traitor. 11 I will finally examine the fanm cho as an instrument of remasculinization that neither threatens nor strengthens the idea of the nation. The nationalist undertone of Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s discourse derives from an anthropological idea of the nation as a group of individuals sharing the same vision or an “imagined community,” to use Anderson Benedict’s terminology. 12 The créolité movement aspires to such a shared vision of the cultural and political and so translates cultural nationalism at its core. In a word, in this acceptance of the national idea the cultural is political. In this framework, their representations of sexuality and motherhood also translate their anticolonialist vision. I 8

The taxonomy of women of colour linking and cataloguing their sexuality to their phenotype is a colonial concept that Moreau de Saint-Mery Médéric-Louis-Elie explores in Description de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue (1797). For a recent anthropological approach to the evolution of this taxonomy, see Stéphanie Mulot, 266–275. Mulot examines, among other things, the representations of the kochoni (bitch or slut). 9 “Créoliste” and “créolité” refer to the literary and cultural movement that R. Confiant, P. Chamoiseau and J. Bernabé started in Martinique in the 1980s. They promoted their movement and their ideas in Éloge de la créolité (1989). 10 The béké, the white Creole, and the white man from the métropole represent the symbolic Father in postcolonial discourse. 11 For a recent study on Fanon’s theorization of the black woman as a traitor see Chantal Kalisa, “Exclusion as Violence: Frantz Fanon, Black women and colonial Violence,” 19–41. 12 See Benedict Anderson (1991)

34

Birthing Chaos

propose that the fanm poto mitan in créoliste writing signifies the maternal imago born out of slavery and inherited from the plantation system that psychoanalyst Jacques André defines, in L’inceste focal dans la famille noire antillaise (1988), as the mère focale in French Antillean contexts— the “Focal Mother.” Hence, in the créoliste work and a French Antillean context in general, matrifocality denotes the centrality of the maternal figure in an individual psyche and must not be confused with matriarchy (a society in which women, particularly mothers, have the central roles of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property) or matrilinearity (a system tracing descent through the mother). 13 Due to the misdeeds of slavery, such as forced concubinage and the legal refusal to recognize slaves’ paternity, the Caribbean family unit differs from the traditional European or Western standard due to the significance of mono-parental families (Garraway 210, Cottias 58). Paying attention to the unique qualities of the Afro-Caribbean family on each island leads to a more accurate analysis. While French Caribbean women may occupy a central, privileged role, their society remains patriarchal. If the father is absent from the home, he may still be able to rule it from afar, or the symbolic Father, namely the White paternal imago, will rule instead (Gautier 164; Burton 1994, 207). Consequently, the father’s problematic “absence” and the mother’s pervasive mental presence reflect the contentious side of colonial and post-colonial society and demonstrate the internal mechanisms of the domination principle in the Caribbean. Eventually, in the créoliste texts examined here, most mothers are revealed to uphold a system inherited from a colonial structure in which black men have no real power. This notion indicates that in the French Caribbean, despite the end of slavery, the end of colonial status and the beginning of departmentalization in 1946, 14 the domination structure created by colonization remains. The ambivalent staging of the two-faced woman and gendered conflicts expresses the internal rifts of a Creole society thirsting for development and modernization.

13

The understanding of matrifocality may also vary from island to island. In 1946 Martinique changed its colonial status and became a French overseas department. 14

Jacqueline Couti

35

The Fanm Poto-mitan—the “Two-faced Mother” a. Rewriting the Fanm Poto-mitan— Abject Mothers and Cultural Betrayal While créoliste fiction sometimes represents maternity in a positive fashion, the critique of contentious maternal figures prevails, especially in early novels. In a French Caribbean context, the bad mother signifies a terrible bond of emasculating dependence and symbolizes subordination from the island to the métropole. The theme of France as the suffocating and all-consuming motherland has become commonplace in French Caribbean anti-colonial discourse (Britton 74). I propose that the fanm poto mitan in créoliste writings revisits this oppressive maternal figure as the incarnation of the mère focale, the “Focal Mother.” From childhood, this powerful psychic image controls Creole males and stands as an oppressive mental representation that establishes feminine power over masculine psyche in the unconscious (André 39, 373). 15 As the mother and her body often constitute a source of abjection (Kristeva 13), the symbolic presence of the fanm poto mitan in the centre of society can only generate the antagonism of a masculine discourse that seeks to promote a threatened black masculinity. When confronting the abject, that defiling object, which might be the feminine body threatening to corrupt his ego, the man realizes his vulnerability (Kristeva 14). In a French Caribbean setting, the horror born out of the encounter with a corporeal space that the masculine individual cannot fathom illustrates how epistemology, namely acquiring knowledge and awareness of the world around us, becomes corporal. As a matter of fact, the “body is both a repository of our consciousness and unconscious and, simultaneously, the physical medium through which we experience the world and engage actively with it” (Mohamed 40). Hence, discourse, which constructs ideas of gender, should not be separated from the social practices that created it. In this theoretical framework, the corporal space appears as a site of investigation for societal conflicts. 16 This is what the exploration of maternal imagery illustrates. Indeed, constructions of motherhood take many challenging forms in créoliste writings. 15

Concerning psychoanalytic research on the French Caribbean family, the “Focal Mother” and the castration of the father from African descent, see also Livia Lesel. 16 Most of the findings of Caribbean feminist theorists around the construction of gender and power in a region marked by colonialism, enslavement and indentured system can be applied to the French Antilles and its literature. See Barriteau Eudine and Rhoda. E. Reddock.

36

Birthing Chaos

In Confiant’s Le Nègre et l’Amiral (1988), the last wife of Alcide, the womanizer, symbolizes the feminine danger of assimilation to colonial power. As the headmistress of a school, Romaine dedicates herself body and soul to the oppressive Vichy regime. 17 The omniscient narrator, using Alcide as focalizer, remarks that this woman “fueled a blind faith in Maréchal Pétain” (89). 18 The narrative voice echoes Fanon’s ideas’ concerning colonized women, as for him they might be the colonial “ally in the work of cultural destruction” (1997, 49). The colonial project feeds out of this common republican motto, justifying control of primary education by the church: “Let us win over the women and the rest will follow” (1997, 37). In the novel Le Nègre et l’Amiral, the narrator observes that “Romaine had, like him [Alcide], a dozen brothers and sisters that had stayed in sugar cane fields by the Galion Plantation, at La Trinité, and she concentrated on forgetting them by pretending to no longer understand Creole and straightening her hair with a hot iron” (88). Romaine loathes her black ancestry and plantation roots. These attributes pull her down the social ladder that she is struggling to climb and prevent the respect she thinks she deserves as a headmistress. Her refusal to speak Creole and her willingness to change her hair’s texture signal her Frenchification and suggest her conflictive relationship to her creoleness and blackness. 19 Her disdain for her husband confirms her colourism—her favouring of light skin. Spitefully, Romaine claims that her husband is darker skinned than she is, even though the narrator underscores that both protagonists are the same colour. This female character’s refusal to accept her own colour signifies her self-denial and emphasizes her need to repress all that is black in order to achieve her goal—acceptance into Martinican bourgeois culture. Her colourist stigmatization pervades her maternal actions. She seizes her newborn son to “examine the color of his genitals and the texture of his hair” (88). Reassured, the new mother exclaims: “He didn’t take after his father. His hair isn’t woolly, just a little frizzy [. . .]. Thank the Lord! I’ve made a little brown [. . .] (89). These comments leave no doubt about Romaine’s opinions of dark-skinned Martinicans—a “little brown” is worth more than a “little black.” The rejection of blackness also 17 In his study of Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école, Burton examinesthe topos of education as an efficient carrier of Frenchification. See Richard D. E. Burton (242–243). 18 Whenever possible, I quote translated versions of the books examined; otherwise translations are mine. 19 For a study of the sociocultural implications of hair straightening in the French Caribbean, see Juliette Sméralda.

Jacqueline Couti

37

signifies the maternal legacy of denying paternal authority and rebuffing the dark-skinned—the father. Romaine’s delight in front of her “little brown” child with only “slightly” frizzy hair betrays her obsession for the peau sauvée, “saved skin,” namely light skin. She exhibits the maternal obsession with lactification, or the desire to whiten the race that for Fanon “every woman in Martinique” embodies (1967, 47). Thus, Romaine exemplifies the Fanonian cliché of the black woman as “the ultimate symbol of assimilation and the traitor to the black race” (Kalisa 31). Due to her behaviour, this protagonist incarnates the Focal Mother—the maternal imago representing “le porte-parole du Maître”—“the Master’s mouthpiece” (André 243). Through the mother, the white man (the symbol of métropole’s colonial power) continues to control colonized people’s psyches. He represents the law and remains the mother’s object of desire. In Le Nègre et l’amiral, the Maréchal Pétain figures the Master and Romaine’s primary preoccupation. Consequently, according to the narrator, “Romaine raised her child in the cult of whiteness and the absurd idea that he wasn’t a little black boy but someone special and different” (89). This caricature of the bourgeois Martinican mother only sees blackness as ugly. She damages her child Cicéron’s psyche by deceiving him about his racial identity. For the narrator, as a successful prototype of alienation, Romaine symbolizes abjection because she destroys male Creole identity and, in so doing, Creole culture. Her son does not learn to speak Creole until the age of fifteen, which keeps him from integrating with the masculine counter culture that resists bourgeois commands—he is no womanizer like his father. In fact, an insane bag lady dressed as a Carmelite nun rapes the twenty-two-year-old virgin Cicéron. As the Focal Mother and Master’s mouthpiece, Romaine emasculates her son in destroying his bond to Creole culture. Alcide has no say in his child’s upbringing as his wife robs him of his fatherly role. He can only helplessly watch her debilitating influence on his child. In Confiant’s novels, the abjection of black mothers and their betrayal takes many forms. In Mamzelle Libellule (2000), when the homodiegetic narrator Adelise still lived in the countryside, her mother forced her into the torments of the sugarcane fields (29). For the young girl, the plantation appears as a terrible space because of the sexual misery that she discovers there and that her mother pretends to ignore. Yet this parent seems to be concerned with preserving the virginity of her daughter—she warns against Théramène and his so-called licentious behaviour (31). For Adelise, these maternal warnings reek of hypocrisy. The narrator explains that “the man that represented a true danger, [her] mother turned a blind eye to him”

38

Birthing Chaos

(32). The overseer, the agent of colonial authority and the white Creoles or békés, “a hulking mulatto from Vauclin,” stands as a sexual menace (32). Born out of slavery, his comportment mirrors that of the majority of békés who seize black women and lead them astray. From then on, the overseer’s sexual voracity demonstrates his willingness to exercise the same power as his béké employer. That mulatto man uses his position of power “to track down women he could take. Any woman would do, young or old, green or experienced” (32). The overseer’s sexuality betrays his alienation because it evokes that of the white Creole master. When the overseer meets Adelise for the first time, he caresses her breasts in front of her mother and addresses this maternal figure with these words: “you’ve got quite the little lady!” (32). His lewd behaviour does not offend this usually overprotective mother. On the contrary, this female protagonist swells with pride and replies: “You wouldn’t know it, but she’s already fourteen” (32). The maternal words underscore an implicit permission to possess Adelise’s adolescent body. For the narrative voice, this so-called fanm poto mitan affirms herself as an accomplice of the oppressive system that condemns her daughter to be raped. Even when Raphael Confiant depicts a positive maternal image, the black mother is still subtly criticized. In La panse du chacal (2003), Devi, a Hindu woman, becomes the supportive partner of a black man, Anthénor. The narration exploits this female protagonist’s conception of motherhood to reinforce the benefits of créolité. The narrative voice describes a positive feminine image promoting the black man’s patrilineal filiation. This female protagonist silently withstands the humiliation of men from her mother’s ethnic group and the contempt of jealous black women. She senses “that it was the price to pay for the Indian race to be finally accepted by the Creoles, so that it could become Creole” (347). Devi, the Indian newcomer, 20 is not of black ancestry—she cannot embody the Focal Mother as her own patriarchal culture defines her, and she has no history of slavery in the New World. She can identity her mixed-race son in these terms: “This son of India and Africa can only call one land his home: Martinique” (345). Théophile’s description of her son is telling. The white teacher from métropole claims that [. . .] the child that Devi carried would be Caribbean, a new kind of Caribbean being, born of the island soil and owing nothing more to the old world of his forebears [. . .] “What the mulatto, too attached to his planter father and European values, could not do, the mixed Indian-Negro 20

Often, Indian indentured workers in Martinique came from Pondicherry.

Jacqueline Couti

39

could,”21 he insisted, even though he would be denigrated by the name of échappé-Couli. (348)

Contrary to black mothers, Devi represents a positive maternal figure at the disposal of the black man. Her maternity expresses créolité and its underlying promotion of créoliste masculinity. The criticism of the mulatto as an accomplice to Frenchification emanates from the teacher’s words and underscores the conflictive aspects of créolité or Creole culture. Black mothers who allow the existence of mulatto children betray the Caribbean culture, birthing children that can only love their white father. Indian maternity and its subordination to Creole paternity allow the child to take root in this new land of the black father. Théophile’s comments also imply the power in black paternal blood and deny the matrilineal validity of women of colour. This échappécouli (of Indian and African heritage) does not possess white blood; he will not have the same relational problems with France as those experienced by mulattoes. Still, the characterization of Devi’s son is problematic and leads the reader to question créolité. Historically, the Afro-Indian proved to be a source of discord in the Caribbean. 22 The “new” mixed-race individual is a well-known conflictual character in Trinidad—the dougla (Puri 24). 23

b. From the Forgotten Mother to the Forgetful Mother Contrary to Confiant, Chamoiseau often seems to portray women more positively (Burton 129; Thomas 87). Still, his work, through the subtle critique of the Focal Mother and fanm poto-mitan, denounces the ambivalent power-system and French Creole culture created by colonization. This critique goes through the questioning of maternal figures in Chronique des septs misères. The characterization of forgotten and forgetful mothers sketches the outlines of a society where the desire for legitimacy and power distorts not only maternal but also gender relations. Initially, Man Elo, formerly known as Héloise, incarnates the positive and heroic figure of the Fanm poto mitan from French Caribbean culture. As a shopkeeper and single mother fighting for the well-being of her child, from a Martinican standpoint she is an admirable mother. Yet, 21

This reads “Indien-nègre” in the original. Maryse Condé’s novel Traversée de la mangrove (1989) depicts the difficult integration of Indians and échappé-coulis in Guadeloupe. 23 Dougla originally meant mixed or hybrid in Bohjpuri and Hindi. Today it often means bastard in Trinidad. 22

40

Birthing Chaos

the narration also insinuates that Man Elo cannot protect her son, “a child of trauma” resulting from rape—Pierre Philomène, also known as Pipi (McCusker 36). Pipi’s identity crisis, his inability to root himself, his obsession with his origins, his past and the absence of his father will eventually kill him. His mother rejected Anatole-Anatole because that individual transformed himself into a demonic creature, a dorlis (an incubus), to rape her while she was asleep. Their first encounter was a conflict in which she rejected him and his love interest. He followed her from the cemetery to her house and tried to get invited inside. Horrified, she yelled at him: “What do you want mis’rable fiend? [. . .] Scram or I’m tossing holy water on you!” (20). From the start, she sees him as a demonic creature and rejects him. Ignoring her refusal, he enters the house she had locked up and barricaded. Admiring the dorlis’s skills, the narrator explains that the incubus “went inside of her without waking her up and spent eight delicious hours on her sleeping body” (20). The ensuing sexual abuse marks the beginning of antagonism and fear, which feeds the mother’s resentment and shame toward her aggressor. Symbolically, Héloïse’s raped body also exemplifies a recurrent trope in Caribbean discourse, for the female corporal space often embodies the traumatic memory of the colonial past (McCusker 149). When Anatole-Anatole comes to visit her the night following the birth of their son, she refuses to acknowledge him as the father of her child and denies this man once more. Consequently, the “dorlis hurried away, his heart broken” (22); the narrator’s sympathy for this man rejected by the mother of his son arises here. At the end of the novel, though, Héloïse overcomes her antagonism and fear to acknowledge her rapist’s paternity of her child, calling him the “father of my son” (167). Making amends, she seeks the dorlis to save their son from the darkness and madness threatening him. Her change of heart comes too late—she learns that her rapist died a while ago during one of his illicit nocturnal visitations. The narration implies that her initial conflict with Anatole-Anatole fed his life-long spree as a rapist, and so her antagonism and refusal to let the father interact with his son was lethal. The narrative voice, though implicitly critiquing the cultural space that engendered such a conundrum and conflictual relationships between these protagonists, also seems to blame the mother. As a matter of fact, the questioning of maternity appears at the beginning of Chronique des sept misères. The despair and anger of a father confronted with his wife’s inability to give birth to a male heir is inescapable. Their house and the femininity around him emerge as both space and source of conflict, respectively. Félix Soleil’s anguish signals

Jacqueline Couti

41

his spouse’s abjection as Fanotte’s maternity threatens his manhood and thus his ideas of masculine culture. The narrator adds that “Félix Soleil came to associate women with all of the misfortunes of his life, then of the whole world, and soon, of the universe” (12). Félix Soleil adheres to the French Antillean proverb “fanm sé sèpen” (“woman is a snake”). 24 At the birth of his last daughter, Héloïse, his ninth female child, Félix Soleil cries out, vexed, before disappearing for six days: “Yin ki fanm, fanm ki an tÿou mwen!” (“I’m up to my neck in nothing but women!”) (9). Félix does not forgive his wife for this last child, which he sees as the ultimate betrayal. For him, daughters call his masculinity into question, so his antagonism toward them never wanes. To console him, his friends assure him that he has been cursed. They repeat to him “how impossible it was for a guy with all balls in working order to beget only girls [. . .]. Somebody slapped a hex on you” (12). Ironically, the commentary used to boost Félix Soleil’s morale brings forth the emasculation of a father unable to “sire” a son. The loss of masculinity results from his wife’s supposed disobedience; for Félix, she refuses to give him a boy. She then appears as a traitor—she prevents him from being the man he wants to be. Félix’s resentment and antagonism signify the fear of maternal power and procreation which is frequently associated with abjection. The narrator also underscores her as a failing maternal figure, as he explains that “the mother, Fanotte, a woman crushed and deadened by her husband’s authority, was paying no attention to her daughters” (11). As a wife trying to please her hateful husband, she cannot dedicate herself to her children that she ignores. Over time, Fanotte, the at-fault party, makes herself inconspicuous. She blends into the décor and devolves into a forgotten mother figure. Through the years, pushed away by her husband and ignored by her daughters, Fanotte moves from the centre of the hut to the periphery where she disappears. She dies “so discreetly amid tatters of her straw mattress” (15) that no one notices her demise at first. This forgotten mother does not symbolize the glorious poto-mitan. In his shanty, the father reigns or tries to convince himself of his own control. The critique of the maternal figure as a cultural traitor takes several forms in Chronique des septs misères. The single parent Clarine has already aborted a child due to her mother’s exhortations, and the young girl’s lover abandons her when he learns of her pregnancy. Implicitly, though, the narration highlights Clarine’s problematic relationship to 24 On gendered biases against women in French Antillean proverbs, consult MarieRose Lafleur.

42

Birthing Chaos

motherhood. After her abortion she abandons the child she conceived with the recently deceased Albino Gogo to marry the mulatto Ti-Joge. Clarine hopes that marriage will return her to a state of purity and place her in good graces. 25 When she first meets this light-skinned man, she is smitten. When he asks her if she is mother of the baby she replies: “Sé … pa ich mwen kilà non… Sé ich an adanm” (“It’s … not my chile…It’s another lady’s”) (49). In Creole, the use of the double negative “pa…non” emphasizes her maternal denial and foretells her son’s abandonment. The narrator explains that Clarine pretends not to be the mother of the illegitimate child she is holding because “she wanted, instinctively, to make herself new for this man” (49). Consequently, the day Ti-Joge told her that he would stop by her house, she frantically remembers her first lover’s “disappearance” after learning about her pregnancy and his looming paternity. What would her new suitor think of raising a child who was not his? She does not give Ti-Joge the opportunity to answer this question. Like a mad woman, she leaves her house with her baby to abandon him and ends up in the Cathédrale Saint-Louis. Her rejection of her child implies that of the deceased father and marks the preference for the mulatto, who resembles the white man and often symbolizes acculturation to French culture and assimilation. According to the narrator, the handsome mulatto “had French at his complete command” (49), a mastery which signifies his Frenchification. In créoliste ideology, Clarine’s desire for respect and social promotion likens her to the Focal Mother. To become respectable and “new,” Clarine must hide her sexuality and refuse the role of nurturing mother. She therefore becomes the forgetful mother. For her, respectability (being a married woman) matters more than motherhood, being a single mother. Clarine’s choice has disastrous effects on her abandoned son, better known by the name Bidjoul. He is condemned to a life of wandering, which he ends by throwing himself in front of a car. Here, a subtle critique of marriage and the desire for respectability emerges. For the character of Dalmeida in Le Nègre et l’Amiral, Creole language is the bastard product of a people and a culture (128), and its rejection symbolizes denial of the culture which created it. Hence, refusing the illegitimate child also represents the maternal rejection of a certain Creole culture. In opposition to the Indian Devi in La panse du chacal, Clarine betrays Creole culture and destroys it. Like Romaine in Le Nègre et 25

See Jacques André, 74–88. In this chapter, the psychoanalyst explores the notion of the expected child as a reminder of sin, the expression of forbidden sexuality and the sexual concealment on which a young girl’s education is built.

Jacqueline Couti

43

l’Amiral, who refuses to speak Creole and believes that her child is “a little brown,” Clarine reveals herself as the “Master’s mouthpiece”—precious ally in cultural destruction. Yet, in créoliste novels, if mothers are often depicted negatively, depictions of women who appear to be sexually liberated are more positive.

La fanm cho In Chronique des sept-misères, the character Marguerite is also a single mother, but she is remarkable for her buoyant sexuality. She therefore incarnates the fanm cho, the créoliste instrument of “remasculinization.” 26 As a matter of fact, she first mends Pipi’s “dilapidated body” and delirious mind (128). When “reviving his interest in screwing” (133), she finally allows a pathetic Pipi to be reborn into manhood. The narrator characterizes her as a “beauty [who] had had a tumultuous love life” (134). The vigour and sexual appetite of this chabine, a métisse with gold coloured skin, corroborates the French West Indian prejudices against a woman of that colour. 27 In Creole, the unflattering expression fanm cho (the loose woman in heat) describes a single woman or mother whose sexuality is not in check. This individual fascinates because while she exudes femininity, her sexual behaviour resembles that of a man; in a sense she is phallic without expressing the idea of castration (André 94). Usually, in Caribbean society, the male individual reinforces his reputation and masculinity though his sexual exploits, while women must protect their respectability by removing all sexual desire. Marguerite embraces her wantonness. The narrative voice in Chronique de sept misères does not negatively judge the behaviour of this female character. On the contrary, in this masculine discourse, the expression of female libido often allows for the glorification of virile sexual prowess. Among Marguerite’s twenty lovers, five frequent her hut with diligence. However, to the great displeasure of these men, “Pipi and Marguerite hurled themselves into the sole happiness here below of those who spend their days out of luck,” meaning fornicating (134). Marguerite devotes herself to Pipi and forgets about her other lovers. Attaching herself to one partner, Marguerite loses part of her fanm cho behaviour. The narrator states that the five frequenters are deprived of the only happiness 26

On the literary representations of the fanm cho as a masculine tool to promote Creole virility, see Jacqueline Couti, 52–55. 27 See Stéphanie Mulot, 266–275) who examines, among other things, the social representations of the kochoni (bitch, slut). She distinguishes between the chabine (the yellow gal) and the reputable woman. See also Jacque André, 94.

44

Birthing Chaos

that destitute people can achieve liberally and gratuitously—sex. First, Marguerite’s five lovers are persuaded that “the essential brevity of the commerce of love” foreshadows Pipi’s eventual boredom with his new mistress (134). Marguerite’s and Pipi’s insatiable sexual appetites for each other disrupt the five lovers’ “sexual routine” (134) and destabilize a particular Creole culture in which women are at the sexual disposal of all men. The couple cannot stop spending “sportive nights making exuberant love,” their coitus representing an intense moment of freedom and pleasure (134). Their passion is such that one evening in a mango tree, “on the strongest limb, they indulged until dawn in carnal acrobatics so perilous that the five spying paramours forgot their resentment for a few hours to become admiring and even supportive onlookers” (135). The narrative voice describes the intercourse as a sportive spectacle that generates amazement in its spectators and unites a group of divided men. Having sex with the fanm cho allows Pipi to show off his sexual prowess and hence assert his masculinity. In so doing, he is preventing other men from doing so and going against a Creole masculine culture, which has nothing to do with French bourgeois ideas of morality. In Confiant’s Le Nègre et l’amiral, the topos of the fanm cho goes further. The bôbô Philomène, that is to say, the neighbourhood prostitute, incarnates the ultimate loose woman and attracts the reader’s attention. This “everyman’s woman” and her profession acquire a sacred quality that generally goes unnoticed (272). Often, male writers describe the prostitute with fascination or sympathy. The hetaera or sex worker represents the obscenity of wild and threatening femininity (Kristeva 196). Confiant complicates the role of the prostitute with the concept of sacred prostitution—the expression of ultimate love, a motif that Charles Baudelaire held dear. For this poet, the “most prostituted being [. . .] is God, since he is the friend of every individual, since he is the endless communal reservoir of love” (635). Baudelaire derives such ideas from Joseph de Maistre, who was one of the authors the poet read the most (McGinnis 12). Studying the motif of sacred prostitution according to Maistre’s principles of substitution and reversibility captures the scope of Philomène’s character—the sacrificial and atoning figure. 28 In Vierge du grand retour, the reader can better grasp the sense of the sanctification of Philomène’s sacred prostitution, which reveals itself in 28

See Reginald McGinnis, who writes that “sacred prostitution, as Maistre understood it, represents the archetypal figure of reversibility: the voluntarily substitution of the suffering victim in the place of another” (McGinnis 13). Also see Daniel Vouga, 63–65.

Jacqueline Couti

45

the section entitled “Genèse.” This part recalls the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, which according to Elisabeth Badinter establishes woman as the subordinate of man (153). The authorial voice of Confiant’s novel exclaims: God created Philomène in his image, and she became a magical Mamzelle, still wrapped in a sheath the color of the sky. God blessed her and said, “Be forever barren, more barren than the male papaya tree, because your womb is not made to know the numerous pains of childbirth. You will open up to man, every man, rich or penniless, black or white, green or seasoned, and offer him pleasure so as to help him bear his plight.” (14)

If the prostitute Philomène is made in the image of God, she symbolizes Baudelairian prostitution. The authoritarian voice that dictates Philomène’s station in life gives her no choice in her sexual behaviour and expresses its oppressive masculine power. If she follows the precepts that are dictated, she can never disappoint men. As a sacred prostitute, Philomène must serve men “to help [them] bear [their] plight” (14). The male individual finds himself at the centre of this hetaera’s preoccupations. Moreover, this “everyman’s woman” is domesticated and controllable—the man has no reason to be afraid of her. Her blessing of infertility celebrates her inability to procreate—motherhood would take her away from the man she serves. The idea of self-sacrifice is tied to references that date to the beginning of time (McGinnis 10–13). To honour the goddess Ishtar, Babylonians consecrated to her service sterile women that were unable to find a place in society. This consecration let these female individuals participate in society by becoming spouses to the population and serving the community. 29 From a feminist point of view, the characterization of Philomène as a sexual object devoted to the pleasure of her master is not “magical.” For the narrative voice, God chose the hetaera to fulfil a precise task, to achieve what most women refuse to do—love black men unconditionally. As a divine instrument, her sexuality distinguishes itself. From a Caribbean feminist point of view, Confiant’s vision of sacred prostitution represents the antithesis of the Focal Mother and so betrays the distrust that black men may feel toward the cultural traitor—the black woman. This idealized idea of prostitution, of black women unconditionally loving black men, recalls the power struggles between genders as bourgeois women such as Romaine are often viewed as impediments to the national 29 To learn more about sacred prostitution and the role of prostitutes, see Jean Bottéro, 165–198.

46

Birthing Chaos

and cultural consciousness. Confiant’s representation of sacred prostitution may prevent discussions around the economics of sexual exploitation but not interrogations around the nefarious effect of colonialism and enslavement in the construction of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean. Initially, questioning Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s conflictive imagery of motherhood demonstrates the development of a two-faced femininity, both magnificent and abject, which reinforces or destabilizes the masculinity of the French Caribbean man. Their writing glorifies the fanm cho while debasing the fanm poto mitan. Eventually, though, examining the praise and uncompromising criticism of antagonistic feminine figures in a French Caribbean context reveals a masculine claim with a nationalist agenda, which in turn illustrates a complex gendered conflict. From this créoliste perspective, the existence of masculinity necessitates that the mother of colour be killed because she too often births chaos. In the above texts, Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau show that disposing of the fanm poto mitan (symbol of the métropole) breaks the bond of dependence that obstructs the construction of masculine identity. Moreover, from a Martinican point of view, the sexualization of women signals the promotion of a freedom that local society does not tolerate (André 64). The promotion of the fanm cho reminds readers that in créoliste fiction the only acknowledged images of motherhood are those of perverted matrixes incarnated by the plantation and the slave ship, as they are the true and yet conflictive crucibles of créolité (Milne 53; Garraway 19). Like Philomène or Marguerite, women who seem to please the créoliste narrative voice in early novels distinguish themselves through their sexual activities or commerce. Contrary to the woman of colour Man Elo—who rejects the black father as a rapist and a demon—Devi shows herself to be the potential mother of a new Creole race that embraces blackness and whiteness to promote black fatherhood. Devi exudes no lingering stench of compromise like women of colour. In La Panse du chacal, the black father figure finally expels that of the symbolic, omnipresent Father. If the sexual representations examined convey cultural claims, the conflicted staging of abject mothering leads us to reflect upon the claims of créolité that Confiant and Chamoiseau extolled in Éloge à la créolité (1989). More than the motif of racial and cultural mixing or the praise of creoleness, the topoi of fragmentation, chaos, violent friction and conflict at the centre of societal structure stand out.

Jacqueline Couti

47

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict R. O. G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. André, Jacques, L’inceste focal dans la famille antillaise, Paris, PUF, 1987. Arnold, Joséphine Valenza, « New World Seductions and Old World Seducers », in A. James Arnold, ed., A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Amsterdam, John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2001, 239-259. Badinter, Elisabeth, L’amour en plus: l’histoire de l’amour maternel (XVIIe-XXe siècle), Paris, Flammarion, 1980. Barriteau, Eudine, “Disruptions and Dangers: Destabilizing Caribbean Discourse on Gender, Love and Power,” in Eudine Barriteau, ed., Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, University of the West Indies Press, 2012, 3-40. Britton, Celia, Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought, Oxford, European Humanities Research Center, University of Oxford, 2002. Bottéro, Jean, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. Burton, Richard D. E., La famille coloniale. La Martinique et la mère patrie 1789-1992, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994. —, Le roman marron: étude sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997. Chamoiseau, Patrick, Chronique des sept misères, Paris, Gallimard-Folio, 1988. [Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2003.] Crawford, Charmaine, “Who is Your Mama? Transnational Motherhood and African-Caribbean Women in the Diaspora,” in Eudine Barriteau, ed., Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, University of the West Indies Press, 2012, 323-353. Confiant, Raphaël, La Panse du chacal, Paris, Mercure, 2004. —, La vierge du grand retour, Paris, Gallimard, 2007. —, Le Nègre et l’amiral, Paris, Grasset, 1988. —, Mamzelle Libellule, Paris, Serpent à plumes, 2000. [Mamzelle Dragonfly, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2001.] Couti, Jacqueline, “Le chant du koké de Patrick Chamoiseau: rapport des sexes, marquage phallique et politique de négociation culturelle,” in

48

Birthing Chaos

Samia Kassab-Charfi, ed., Interculturel Francophonies. Tracées de Patrick Chamoiseau 22 (novembre-décembre 2012), 47-64. Cottenet-Hage Madeleine and Maryse Condé, eds., Repenser la créolité, Paris, Éditions Karthala, 1994. Cottias, Myriam, “Un genre colonial ? Mariage et citoyenneté dans les Antilles françaises (XVIIe-XXe siècle,” in Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Elini Varikas, eds., Genre et postcolonialismes : Dialogues transcontinentaux, Paris, Edition des Archives Contemporaines, 2011. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks. New York, Grove Press, 1967. —, The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Grove Press, 1991. Garraway, Doris, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean, Durham, Duke UP, 2005. Gautier, Arlette, Les sœurs de solitudes. La condition féminine pendant l’esclavage au Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe, Paris, Editions Caribéennes, 1985. Kalisa, Chantal, Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982. Lafleur, Marie-Rose, Lang au famn: ou ce que le créole dit des femmes, Guadeloupe, Ibis Rouge, 2005. Lesel, Livia, Le père oblitéré. Chronique antillaise d’une illusion, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003 (1995). McCusker, Maeve, Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007. McGinnis, Reginald, La prostitution sacrée: essai sur Baudelaire, Paris, Belin, 1994. Moreau de Saint-Mery Médéric-Louis-Elie, Description de la partie française de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue. Vol 1, Paris, Librairie Larose, 1958. Milne, Lorna, Patrick, Chamoiseau: espaces d’une écriture antillaise, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2006. Mohamed, Patricia, “Unmasking Masculinity: and Deconstructing Patriarchy: Problems and Possibilities with Feminist Epistemology,” in Rhoda. E. Reddock, ed., Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, University of West Indies Press, 2004, 38-67. Mulot, Stéphanie “‘Je suis la mère, je suis le père !’ : l’énigme matrifocale. Relations familiales et rapports de sexe en Guadeloupe,” Thèse, EHESS, 2000.

Jacqueline Couti

49

Puri, Shalini, « Canonized Hybridities, Resistant Hybridities », in Belinda Edmonson, ed., Caribbean Romances, Charlottesville, UP of Virginia, 1998, 12-38. Ramshand, Kenneth, “Calling All Dragons: The Crumbling of Caribbean Masculinity,” in Rhoda. E. Reddock, ed., Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, University of West Indies Press, 2004, 309-325. Reddock, Rhoda. E., Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis. Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, University of West Indies Press, 2004. Sméralda Juliette, Peau noire, cheveux crépus, Pointe-à-Pitre, Édition Jasor, 2004. Thomas, Bonnie, Breadfruit or Chestnut? : Gender Construction in the Caribbean Novel, Oxford, Lexington Books, 2006. Vergès, Françoise, “Métissage, discours masculin et déni de la mère,” in Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé., eds., Repenser la créolité, Paris, Éditions Karthala-Université du Maryland, 1994, 69-84. Vouga, Daniel, Baudelaire et Joseph de Maistre, Paris, Corti, 1958.

L’INSCRIPTION DE LA POETIQUE DU CHANCELLEMENT DANS L’ŒUVRE D’EDWIGE DANTICAT DOMINIQUE AURÉLIA UNIVERSITE DES ANTILLES

La mer est pour nous une étendue avant d’être une profondeur. (Edouard Glissant, La Cohée du Lamentin, 2005, 95)

L’histoire de la Caraïbe montre que les acteurs de la vie intellectuelle et culturelle ont toujours été portés à la traversée et à la transgression des frontières territoriales. En outre, colonisations et décolonisations ont déclenché des flux migratoires, des phénomènes d’exil et de diaspora qui ont engendré un déplacement des expressions culturelles identitaires, leurs ancrages territoriaux devenant incertains. Les confrontations culturelles, les formes d’hybridation et/ou de créolisation résultant de ces déplacements sont souvent créatrices de dynamisme, d’innovation et de diversification. Ainsi, s’agissant de la littérature haïtienne en particulier, il est coutume de distinguer des écrivains « du dehors » qui résident et publient à l’étranger (Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Jean Métellus) de ceux du « dedans » (Lyonel Trouillot, Frankétienne).1 Cette littérature qualifiée aussi de littérature migrante donne souvent une image idyllique de la déterritorialisation ou du « third space » tel que le définit Homi K. Bhabha en occultant l’instabilité, le conflit et le trouble qu’elle engendre chez les auteurs. Dans cette perspective, la « territorialisation » peut apparaître comme un moyen de protection et de préservation qui pose la question de l’appartenance et de la résolution du conflit. En effet, l’expérience diasporique des écrivains est empreinte d’instabilité puisqu’elle consiste en un voyage physique ou imaginaire mais toujours troublant, entre deux espaces culturels d’appartenance : le 1

En Haïti, sont considérés comme moun andéyo (gens du dehors) ceux qui vivent à la campagne en opposition à ceux qui vivent à Port-au-Prince, la capitale.

52

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement

pays du dedans (la « patrie ») et le pays du dehors (le lieu d’implantation). Seul l’imaginaire permet la négociation de nouvelles identités textuelles et culturelles, véritables reflets des processus complexes de transformation et de (re-) production qui caractérisent l’écriture en diaspora. Il s’agira d’examiner en quoi l’œuvre de l’écrivaine haïtienne/ américaine Edwige Danticat illustre cette recherche d’inscription dans un espace par le biais de la mise en œuvre permanente de la poétique du chancellement.

La poétique du chancellement Ce concept peut être défini comme la recherche d’un équilibre dans un tiers-espace de re-création et d’invention de soi qui tente de se déterminer dans l’entremêlement de l’appartenance et de l’errance. Cet espace liminaire qui pourrait suggérer un vide, une absence, est au contraire, vibrant et dense. Interstice mais non refuge, il est instable, imprévisible et heurté. Il rappelle l’état du limbo régi par l’incertitude et la dislocation du corps. Avant de se méta-morphoser en danse folklorique pour touristes, le limbo est d’abord une danse rituelle en l’honneur de Legba, le dieu des carrefours, l’ouvreur de barrières. Selon l’anthropologue Sojah StanleyNiaah « cette danse reflète le cycle complet de la vie. Le danseur se déplace sous une barre que l’on descend le plus bas possible, puis il émerge de l’autre côté, arc-bouté comme dans le triomphe de la vie sur la mort » (Stanley-Niaah 196). Cette posture paradoxale de repli et d’étirement peut être juxtaposée à l’idée de la position ontologique « compliquée » de l’écrivain, qui, telle que Deleuze nous le rappelle, est un terme qui provient du latin complicare, « plié ensemble, et replié ». 2 Cette liminalité rappelle le rythme du limbo, concept développé par le poète Edward Kamau Brathwaite qui associe le danseur de limbo en déséquilibre sublimé, à la condition de l’Antillais après la traversée traumatique du Passage du Milieu, de l’Afrique au Nouveau Monde (Brathwaite 2005). Ainsi Danticat inscrit-elle cette poétique du chancellement dans les espaces liminaires visibles et invisibles du dit et de l’indicible, là où ces espaces se joignent et se heurtent. Là où les fils se tissent et se dénouent : c’est-à-dire le texte mais aussi l’au-delà du texte. Edwidge Danticat née en Haïti rejoint sa mère à New York à l’âge de douze ans et depuis son premier roman Breath, Eyes, Memory publié en 1994 (traduit en français par Le cri de l’oiseau rouge) qui la classe alors parmi les vingt meilleurs jeunes écrivains américains, elle est devenue, au 2

Deleuze, Gilles, Le Pli, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988, 189

Dominique Aurélia

53

fil des prix prestigieux qui lui ont été décernés pour ses romans ou essais suivants The Dew Breaker (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), Brother, I’am Dying (2007), l’une des plus grandes romancières américaines de la Caraïbe. Edwidge Danticat raconte la même histoire : celle de son pays Haïti, torturé, violenté, défiguré par une horreur orchestrée depuis bientôt trois siècles. Une histoire d’hommes et de femmes brisés, déplacés, qui s’acharnent à survivre en dedans ou en dehors, ici ou ailleurs dans la diaspora. L’entreprise de Danticat est de reconstruire cette histoire par la réinvention de la mémoire, par le biais d’un grand récit composé de récits morcelés qui se projettent dans l’espace du texte dans une esthétique du discontinu et de la déliaison. Lors d’un entretien accordé à la revue Callaloo en 1995, Danticat explique : « I look to the past–to Haiti–hoping that the extraordinary female story tellers I grew up with–the ones that have passed on–will choose to tell their story through my voice. For those of us who have a voice must speak to the present and the past ».3 De la sorte, elle agence les ressources de l’hétérophonie (plurivocalité) et de l’hétérologie (pluralité des langages), pose des épigraphes comme des ponts entre les rives d’Haïti et de l’ailleurs, emprunte les voies de l’intertextualité en écho à Jacques Roumain (Masters of The Dew / The Dew Breakers) ou en response à Dany Laferrière, drape ses personnages des couleurs des divinités vodou, et les fait habiter l’eau, le vent et l’éphémère comme autant de lieux de mémoire indéchiffrables : « Les lieux de mémoire, nous indique Pierre Nora, ne vivent que de leur aptitude à la métamorphose, dans l’incessant rebondissement de leurs significations et le buissonnement imprévisible de leurs ramifications. [. . .] Tous les lieux de mémoire sont des objets en abîme » (Nora 38-39).

Epigraphes La quête de Danticat est celle d’une territorialisation dans le lieu même de l’écriture. Les épigraphes illustrent à mon sens, l’interstice dans lequel elle se dé/place : To the brave women of Haiti Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, Sisters, cousins, daughters, and friends, On this shore and other shores. We have stumbled but we will not fall. (1994, 5)

3

Voir à ce propos, Ethan Casey « Remembering Haiti », 1995, 525-526

54

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement

Cette épigraphe qui ressemble à un grand « Rélé »4, est celle de Breath, Eyes, Memory son premier roman. Ce paratexte s’adresse à toutes les femmes d’Haïti, décrit cet étirement entre les rives (this shore and other shores) et reproduit presque à l’identique le passage sous la barre du limbo (ici symbolisé par l’Océan Atlantique) et la recherche d’équilibre (we stumbled but we will not fall) : Trébucher mais ne jamais tomber. Examinons la première épigraphe de Brother, I’m dying paru en 2007. Par cette épigraphe, l’auteure dédie le texte de manière assez mystérieuse à : […] la prochaine génération de « cats » Nadira, Ezekiel, Zora, Timothy et Mira Ce n’est qu’à la fin du roman que sera dévoilé le sens de cette phrase : il s’agit de l’américanisation de Dantica en Danticat. « La boîte vocale de mon oncle me parvient clairement et je l’entendis répondre “Joseph Dantica” […]. En français et en créole notre T demeurait muet, mais j’ai souvent taquiné mon oncle en lui disant qu’en anglais nous étions des “cats”, des chats, et pas lui » (265). Ce morphème « cats » résume non une transplantation réussie mais une expérience diasporique douloureuse, marquée par le sceau du deuil et de l’injustice. Ce « cats » est aussi un autre lieu du chancellement. L’autre exemple est tiré de The Farming of Bones (1998) qui raconte l’histoire de la dualité de l’île d’Hispaniola, partagée entre Haïti et Santo Domingo, et du sanglant massacre de vingt mille Haïtiens en 1937 à travers le point de vue d’Amabelle. L’épigraphe s’énonce de la sorte : « A vous confidentiellement, Metrès Dlo, Mère des Rivières, Amabelle Désir » Ici, par un jeu métafictionnel, c’est Amabelle Désir, le personnage principal qui dédie le texte écrit par Danticat en langue créole, puis en français à la divinité de l’eau. Danticat procède à ce même jeu de reprise dans son épigraphe dans la version en anglais : « In confidence to you, Métrès Dlo, Mother of the rivers », comme si l’expression Métrès Dlo ne pouvait se concevoir que dans la langue créole qui habite « le paysage du retour ». (Walcott-Hackshaw 82) Les personnages de Danticat, bien que vivant aux Etats-Unis, sont très peu décrits comme évoluant dans leur environnement américain, ils habitent un paysage intérieur qui est celui d’Haïti. L’Amérique est le pays du dehors et Haïti, du fait de sa situation politique, est celui qui revient sous forme de cauchemars, qui hante la mère de Sophie Caco dans Breath Eyes Memory, Dany et Claude dans The Dew Breaker, ou encore Amabelle Désir dans The Farming of Bones. Ces personnages parlent la 4

En créole signifie « cri »

Dominique Aurélia

55

nuit, comme hantés par les fantômes de l’autre bord. En écho, Salman Rushdie lui répond à travers son essai Imaginary Homelands. It may be argued that the past is a country, from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being “elsewhere.” (19) […] These writers, exiles, emigrants, or expatriate are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. […] We will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands. (20)

Danticat se retrouve au sein de cette question identitaire conflictuelle : être une écrivaine haïtienne-américaine ayant choisi la traversée des langues pour décrire un dedans non idéalisé qui se trouve en-dehors. La liminalité qu’elle habite est porteuse de chancellement entre les langues. Si l’on se réfère seulement à certains titres, on réalise qu’ils sont des traductions du créole vers l’anglais : par exemple The Dew Breaker renvoie à l’expression créole « choukèt lawozé » en référence aux Tonton Macoutes qui interpellent leurs victimes au lever du jour. The Farming of Bones est également l’adaptation anglaise d’une expression créole « nap travay tè po zo ». Ce choix de la traversée des langues (anglais, créole, français, espagnol) s’inscrit comme un épitomé de cette poétique, marque une appartenance non à un espace binaire, mais à un lieu qui est celui de l’invention de soi, le lieu de la littérature impossible (Barthes, 1953, 31).

Métrès Dlo et autres « ouvreurs de barrières » Le trope de l’eau dans The Farming of Bones est une figure que Danticat développe comme espace de résistance. L’eau est la métaphore du baptême, du deuil et de la renaissance. Petite fille, Amabelle a assisté à la noyade de ses deux parents emportés par la rivière Massacre. Plus tard, devenue adulte, elle-même rescapée du massacre, le corps comme un palimpseste de cicatrices, Amabelle imagine que seule la rivière pourra l’écouter. Elle recrée dans ses rêves la grotte cachée par la cascade où elle retrouvait en secret Sébastien (son mari décédé au cours du massacre) et le re-place : Son nom est Sébastien Onius et son esprit doit être dans la grotte derrière la cascade, à la source du ruisseau, dans cette caverne de craie couverte de

56

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement mousse humide, avec sa fresque d’un vert lumineux, le vert sombre des feuilles de papayer sous la pluie (303).

L’eau devient alors une frontière fluide, une zone liminaire qui relie plus qu’elle ne sépare. Dans The Farming of Bones, les personnages sont condamnés à traverser et à retraverser les deux pays (Haïti/Santo Domingo situés sur la même île) ballotés entre le passé et le présent, les rêves et la réalité, sans issue. Ainsi l’immersion d’Amabelle, à la fin du récit, est une invocation à Mamy Watta5 et à Legba sous les traits d’un vieux clochard qui lui indique que la source qu’elle recherche est celle de la lumière : L’eau était encore chaude [. . .] je fis appel à mes rêves de douceur, à des rêves d’une étreinte plus tendre, dans lesquels j’étais libérée de mes craintes des coulées de boue et du sang montant en bulles du lit du fleuve, là où l’on dit que les morts ajoutent leurs pleurs aux flots. […] le professeur (c’est le nom du clochard) fit demi-tour et partit, en faisant claquer ses sandales comme deux grands oiseaux agitant leurs ailes humides. Lui, comme moi, cherchait l’aube. (332)

D’évidence la référence à l’eau nous renvoie au concept de Black Atlantic élaboré par Paul Gilroy (1993) qui propose l’océan Atlantique et le bateau négrier comme marqueurs symboliques de l’expérience diasporique des Amériques, figurant la mise en place d’une histoire traumatique et chaotique liée à une topographie des déplacements et à un contact entre des mondes hétérogènes, ou encore au poète Derek Walcott pour qui l’océan Atlantique s’inscrit comme image de l’inconscient collectif caribéen avec ses terreurs englouties. Dans le recueil The StarApple Kingdom (1979), il magnifie ce concept à travers le poème « The Sea is History » où l’océan devient le locus de l’intemporalité, du début et de la fin, le tombeau et le berceau, la source alternative de l’histoire dans le paysage. En revanche, dans The Farming of Bones, le trope de l’océan n’est pas opératoire car si les récits de la Traversée (passée ou contemporaine comme dans le cas de Danticat) expriment généralement le deuil dans l’océan, ici le mythe de la Mammy Wattta (ou Manman Dlo/Métrès Dlo) réitère l’émergence créatrice dans l’immersion comme le danseur de limbo qui resurgit après sa descente vers la terre. Métrès Dlo rend ainsi la vie 5

Voir Adam, Lois « Mami Wata, “Mother of Water” is alluring and extremely beautiful. She is highly sexual and has the power to bless her lover with wealth and artistic gifts or destroy him » (1990, 22). Cette figure mythique est très présente dans les Middle Passage narratives comme paradigme de la mémoire par exemple Beloved (Toni Morrison).

Dominique Aurélia

57

possible au-delà des barrières terrestres, libérant Amabelle par la noyade, la conduisant vers les rives où elle pourra rejoindre Sebastien. Brooks de Vita, dans son essai Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African/Diaspora and Black Goddesses démontre les multiples métamorphoses des divinités africaines projetées violemment dans l’espace du dehors (l’esclavage dans les Amériques) et analyse l’inscription inconsciente des cultes africains dans la littérature de la diaspora africaine : The empowering legacy of riverain goddesses who dwell at the mouth of the sea seems to have dissipated throughout the Diaspora into folktales of lonely, gift-giving or trapped mermaids and hags, such as in the Haitian tale “Mother of Waters” and the African American tales “Sukey and the Mermaid” (2000, 62).

Métrès Dlo est aussi appelée Lasirène en Haïti (the mermaid) et c’est par un rite d’entrée, son invocation, qu’Amabelle lui demande de lui donner la force de dire l’indicible, « the unspeakable things unspoken » (Toni Morrison, 1983). Dans le recueil de nouvelles Krik krak (1996) la nouvelle « Children of the sea » (12) évoque la présence de Lasirène et du monde des esprits qui habitent sous l’eau. Danticat fait ainsi référence à Yemaya à l’origine la divinité des rivières en Afrique qui, au cours de la traversée de l’océan Atlantique avec les esclavagés devenus des subalternes, réside sous l’eau avec les victimes englouties du Middle Passage. Cette notion du subalterne qui habite sous l’eau « anba dlo » est développée par l’anthropologue Mimi Sheller dans son dernier ouvrage Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom : To think about what is below also means to interrogate the spatializations of power that maintain and make material such high-low distinctions and social judgments in the first place (Ulysse 20086). In addition to these bodily and profane meanings, moreover, there is a further sacred meaning within West African and Caribbean cosmologies in which the ancestral spirits are thought to dwell beneath the waves – or, as Haitians say, en ba dlo. (2012, 31)

Cette liminalité d’entre deux eaux, cet intervalle intense nous renvoie aux concepts d’espace lisse et d’espace strié développés par Deleuze et Guatarri dans Mille Plateaux :

6

Ulysse, Gina Athena. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

58

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement […] dans l’espace strié comme dans l’espace lisse (la mer étant l’archétype de l’espace lisse), il y a des points, des lignes et des surfaces. [. .] Dans l’espace strié, on va d’un point à un autre. Dans le lisse, c’est l’inverse : les points sont subordonnés au trajet. Dans l’espace lisse, c’est le trajet qui entraîne l’arrêt, là encore c’est l’intervalle qui est substance. (1980, 597) […] le lisse dispose toujours d’une puissance de déterritorialisation supérieure au strié (599).

Ce vibrant espace liminaire, ni air, ni terre fait aussi écho à la vision du « third space » qu’Homi K. Bhabha a élaboré comme étant « interruptive, interrogative and enunciative » (1994, 178). C’est dans cet espace que Danticat interroge et « s’énonce ». Dans ce site fluide où, selon certains mythes africains les vivants et les morts se côtoient, elle résout le conflit de l’appartenance en façonnant un temps non linéaire et en dissipant les frontières entre la réalité et le mythe. On retrouve aussi cette notion de liberté paradoxale dans Breath, Eyes, Memory à travers le trope du sel : « you wanted to taste salt » raconte sa mère à Sophie. Dans son ouvrage Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival, Meredith M. Gadsby note : “Sucking salt” exemplifies hardship because of its bitterness, inability to serve as sustenance when food (or economic prosperity) is not readily accessible, and allusions to saltwater/Middle-Passage imagery connoting involuntary migration and enslavement of people of African descent. However, its transcendent capacities reside in its consumers' preparedness for “bitterness” and adversity, as they find alternative ways to counter physical and metaphorical hunger and in resistance to involuntary migration and enslavement. (2006, 143)

Au cours de son second voyage en Haïti à l’occasion des funérailles de sa mère, Sophie entend non loin du cimetière, depuis le champ de cannes, des travailleurs entonner un chant où l’on raconte comment une sirène s’est métamorphosée en humaine par amour (229). En écoutant ce chant, Sophie réalise qu’il y a là quelque chose d’essentiellement haïtien et que les conteuses sont des ravaudeuses qui tissent et rapiècent le grand corps auquel toutes les femmes appartiennent. Alors comme dans un rituel d’exorcisme du traumatisme, de la blès, elle s’en va arracher les roseaux de cannes là où sa mère avait été violée. Cette référence à la Mammy Watta en pleine terre, loin de son élément naturel, l’eau, fonctionne comme un code métafictionnel des récits de la Traversée.

Dominique Aurélia

59

L’eau, à travers ces textes, s’inscrit comme une surface constamment pliée, dépliée, repliée7 en écho à la posture du limbo et comme l’épitomé de la poétique du chancellement. La présence de divinités du culte vodou telles Erzulie/Oshun participe, à mon sens, non pas de l’exotisme en réponse à l’horizon d’attente du lecteur américain mais bien de cette mise en œuvre de la poétique du chancellement. Ce faisant, Danticat valorise une cosmogonie et une épistémologie méprisées et occultées par le colonialisme. Ces « interventions » des divinités dans le sous-texte, loin de mettre à plat le récit, opacifient l’écriture, en compliquent (dans son acceptation deleuzienne « plier ensemble, replier »8) la réception. Ce sont des lieux de transgression, des espaces marginaux où se déploient les relations rhizomiques. « Un rhizome ne commence et n’aboutit pas, il est toujours au milieu, entre les choses, inter-être, intermezzo » nous rappelle Deleuze (1980, 36). Dans son article, Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migration: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of E. Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, Jana Evans Braziel démontre comment Danticat fait de la jonquille (plante bulbeuse aux racines adventives) un symbole floral de la transplantation9 et de l’expérience diasporique rapprochant le discours de l’auteur de la pensée glissantienne. Ces jonquilles sont des symboles de résistance et de survie. Comme les migrants ou les sujets en diaspora, les jonquilles s’enracinent dans des sols nouveaux, mais les fleurs, les racines, le sol s’altèrent au cours du processus. Les jonquilles, bien qu’elles se développent à partir de bulbes, prennent néanmoins valeur de rhizomes au sens deleuzien, et tels des rhizomes, prolifèrent, se déplacent et se transforment. « Le rhizome », nous rappelle Deleuze, « se rapporte à une carte qui doit être produite, construite, toujours démontable, connectable, renversable, modifiable, à entrées et sorties multiples, avec ses lignes de fuite » (1980, 32). Ce trope botanique illustre la proposition de l’écrivain haïtien-québécois Joël des Rosiers (1996) qui pense la diaspora comme métasporique, c’est-à-dire comme un mouvement continu à travers les frontières d’identité et d’identification, les nationalités, les langues et les lieux.

7

Echo palpable avec les concepts d’espace lisse et d’espace strié formulés dans Mille Plateaux (Deleuze, Guatarri, 1980) 8 Deleuze, Gilles, Le Pli, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1988, 189 9 Cette notion de transplantation nous renvoie à l’archétype du jardin, lieu d’enchantement, de métamorphose et de recréation qui, dans ce contexte, fait écho à l’expression haïtienne « femme jardin », représentation de la femme qui travaille la terre. Le jardin étant par ailleurs la représentation lyrique du sexe féminin.

60

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement

Au-delà de l’illustration du rhizome, la jonquille est aussi le symbole d’une autre figure de résistance qui est celle de la couleur jaune dominante dans Breath, Eyes, Memory, la couleur de la divinité Yoruba Oshun, l’orisha des eaux douces et de l’amour, pouvant prendre aussi la forme d’une sirène selon Brooks de Vita : « Another river goddess who takes a mermaid form is Oshun, who has “skill in the art of mixing deadly poisons” and owns “the inner court, where witch lays her eggs” » (Brooks de Vita 128-129). C’est avec une robe couleur safran, brodée de petites jonquilles, que Tante Atie habille Sophie lors de son départ pour New York pour aller rejoindre sa mère. Une couleur pour la protéger, symbolisant le rite de passage de l’adolescence à l’âge adulte, mais aussi le passage à la fois physique et spirituel d’un monde à l’autre. Avant son départ d’Haïti la petite Sophie est obsédée par un cauchemar récurrent dans lequel elle est drapée dans la couleur jaune des draps de sa mère, une couleur qui la « noie ». My mother’s face was in my dreams all night long. She was wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair. She opened her arms like two hooks and kept shouting out my name. Catching me by the hem of my dress, she wrestled me to the floor. . . . I was lost in the yellow of my mother's sheets. (28)

Une autre incursion d’Oshun est sa présence dans The Farming of Bones sous forme d’épigraphe « A vous confidentiellement, Metrès Dlo, Mère des Rivières ». Transplantée dans le Nouveau Monde, Oshun, devenue Erzulie en Haïti, arbore les couleurs rouge et bleu. Dans le roman, les deux couleurs, le rouge et le jaune, s’entrechoquent, s’opposent puis s’entremêlent lors de la délivrance de Sophie (délivrance du testing et du viol qui l’a accouchée) qui choisira de manière transgressive de parer de rouge le corps de sa mère dans son ultime voyage vers Haïti, drapée du cri flamboyant de l’oiseau rouge (autre élément de l’iconographie d’Erzulie et d’Oshun, rappelant de manière syncrétique le symbole chrétien de la Pentecôte) opérant ainsi une transmission matrilinéaire (la grand’mère porte une robe de couleur violette qui est la synthèse du rouge et du bleu, la couleur de la connaissance suprême ou de l’attention10 au sens haïtien). En outre, dans la nouvelle « 1937 » (Krik Krak, 1996) qui est une autre version du massacre des travailleurs haïtiens à Santo Domingo, la figure du soucougnant est mise en scène. Le soucougnant est, dans les mythes 10 Capacités intuitives et sensorielles décuplées lorsqu’on a atteint un certain grade d’initiation.

Dominique Aurélia

61

antillais, une femme qui change de peau la nuit et qui maîtrise le vent et l’éphémère. C’est de fait, une créature subversive puisqu’elle se dévêt de sa nature première, se disloque, se métamorphose et prend son envol pour accomplir ses désirs. Figure de la femme libérée, elle opère une déconstruction métaphorique de l’autorité patriarcale coloniale. Mais contrainte de revenir avant l’aube pour reprendre forme humaine, elle se retrouve aussi dans une position liminaire entre le dedans et le dehors, entre la terre et l’éphémère. Dans l’analyse qu’elle consacre au roman Breath, Eyes, Memory, Clare Counihan estime que le roman est pris dans la contradiction de la logique de résolution du conflit et celle de la mémoire. Selon l’auteure, Danticat ne parvient pas à réconcilier cette ambivalence insoluble : celle de témoigner des traumatismes de l’histoire en la transposant en catharsis. En effet, dans la fiction de Danticat, la tension reste présente et il semble que ses personnages ainsi que ses lecteurs soient dans l’incapacité de trouver l’apaisement. Je pense qu’à travers cette absence de closure caractéristique de toute son œuvre, Danticat ne cherche pas à résoudre le conflit de l’histoire d’Haïti et de la mémoire de sa diaspora, ni celui de l’auteure déplacée, hantée par les fantômes de son pays. La poétique de la trame qu’elle met en œuvre ne s’inscrit sur aucun tissage. C’est une figure qui se déploie et s’entrelace, s’assemble et se rompt à l’image des personnages en abyme. Elle tisse des fils et des lignes qui s’enchevêtrent, se rompent, se nouent, se répètent, se contrarient et se tendent jusqu’à former un réseau de relations sous-jacentes puis résurgentes comme dans la danse du limbo, où les danseurs, ses personnages, essaient de se métamorphoser en ouvreurs de barrières. C’est parce qu’elle « crée dangereusement » (comme l’indique le titre de son dernier essai11), qu’elle habite et revendique12 le « hyphen », le trait d’union entre les mots, cet interstice ambivalent, complexe, inconfortable, qu’elle peut donner à ses personnages déplacés, une voix pour témoigner de l’indicible, une texture pour inscrire sa poétique du chancellement. L’œuvre de Danticat refuse de poser la différenciation entre le dedans et le dehors car ce qu’elle tend à démontrer c’est la reconceptualisation de la différence. Edwidge Danticat a choisi le chancellement et l’incertain contre la stabilité et la rigidité parce qu’elle négocie constamment sa subjectivité fluide par-delà les limites spatiales et conceptuelles imposées par les normes. Elle prouve que la formation des identités culturelles ne 11

Create dangerously: the immigrant artist at work, 2011. Interview publié dans Small Axe 36 (novembre 2011), 39-61.

12

62

L’inscription de la poétique du chancellement

dépend pas d’un territoire stable, mais plutôt d’un espace culturel mobile, plissé. Ses textes dépassent les normes imposées et deviennent des instruments de résistance, d’innovation et de reconnexion, au-delà des différences de temps, de lieu et d’espace. Comme on dit d’un danseur de limbo, Danticat est une écrivaine du limbo qui sublime sa schizophrénie culturelle en puisant, dans la liminalité qu’elle habite, la substance des lieux et des mémoires entrelacées pour déployer une stratégie de la transcendance, une poétique du chancellement.

Ouvrages Cités Aurélia, Dominique, « In Search of a Third Space: Fabienne Kanor’s Humus », Small Axe 15 (2011), 80-88. Bhabha, Homi, K, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 1994. Barthes, Roland, Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris, Seuil, 1953. Braziel, Jana, Evans, « Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migration: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of E. Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid », Meridians 3 (2003), 110-31. Brooks de Vita, Alexis, Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African/Diaspora and Black Goddesses, Westport, Greenwood Press, 2000. Casey, Ethan, « Review of Breath, Eyes, Memory », Callaloo 18 (1995), 525-526. Counihan, Clare, « Desiring diaspora: Testing the Boundaries of National Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, and Memory », Small Axe 37 (2012), 36-52. Danticat, Edwidge, Breath, Eyes, Memory, New York, Vintage, 1994. —. Krik? Krak!, New York, Vintage, 1996. —. The Farming of Bones, New York, Penguin, 1998. —. The Dew Breaker, New York, Knopf, 2004. —. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, New York, Vintage, 2010. Deleuze Gilles, Guattari F, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille Plateaux, Paris, Minuit, 1980. —. Le Pli, Paris, Minuit, 1988. Donatien-Yssa, Patricia, L’exorcisme de la blès, Paris, Editions Le Manuscrit, 2007. Gadsby, Meredith, M, Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Dominique Aurélia

63

Gilroy, Paul, Black Atlantic, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Edouard, La Cohée du Lamentin, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. Morrison, Toni, « Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation », inBlack Women Writers 1950-1980, ed. Mari Evans, Garden City, New York, Anchor-Doubleday, 1984, 339-345. Nora, Pierre, Les lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1984-1992. Pulitano, Elvira, « An immigrant Artist at work, A conversation with Edwidge Danticat », Small Axe 36(2011), 39-61. Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, London, Granta Books, 1991. Sheller, Mimi. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2012. Stanley-Niaah, Sojah, « Mapping of Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto », in Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, eds., Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, Cambridge, MA, South End, 2007. Ulysse, Gina Athena, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self Making in Jamaica, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008. Walcott, Derek, The Star-Apple Kingdom, London, Cape, 1979. Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth, « Home is where the heart is: Danticat’s landscapes of return » Small Axe 27 (2008), 71-82.

GUADELOUPE’S KA-RIBBEAN BODIES IN CONFLICT: GERTY DAMBURY AND GISÈLE PINEAU GLADYS M. FRANCIS GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, ATLANTA GA USA

Introduction Published in 2012, Gerty Dambury’s novel Les rétifs [A Restive People] and Gisèle Pineau’s Cent vies et des poussières [Hundred Lives and Dust or Hundred Lives and Counting] create and reveal cartographies of bodily pain in the context of the island of Guadeloupe (a French Overseas Department since 1946). Les rétifs expressly refers to the actual massacre that occurred in Pointe-à-Pitre in May 1967, when construction workers instigated a strike for a two franc pay increase and parity on social rights that led to military barbarism when the French authorities gave the order to shoot at the protesters. Four decades later, a modern Guadeloupe is unveiled in Cent vies et des poussières through the portrayal of a young woman named Gina, whose life in the ghetto is punctuated by eight pregnancies and the various challenges that such arduous conditions entail. Both texts unequivocally defy the silencing of sufferings. De facto, Les rétifs recalls painful passé historical events that have been obscured and disremembered through a classified “top-secret defence” status. Analogously, Pineau chooses to dualize Gina’s story with that of a pregnant fugitive slave woman who once lived free in what is now Gina’s decadent slum. The author divulges how heroic Maroons’ stories have been divested, forgotten or replaced by snippets of speculation by descendants who have now become sufferers of a consumerist society. This study examines the theme of conflict that consumes and haunts the texts’ diegeses through original employments of rhythm and bodily movements. We seek to discern the roles of rhythm, dance and music central to the mapping of bodily pain exposed in these texts, analyze the placements, dis/placements and re/placement of these bodies in movement, and conjointly examine wherewith these paroxysmal displays of pain

66

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

generate a counter discourse to Western paradigms that anchor representations of the island as exotic and ecstatic. We will also reveal the ways in which Dambury and Pineau contrast one another in their representations of bodily conflicts. Our goal is to demonstrate that these Afra-writings foster a space of transgression that disrupts the inconspicuousness of the perpetrators and reinstates a zone of encounter in which l’ailleurs and l’ici engage in a dialogue. This dialogue is rather violent, but in it transgressional writing allows a process of deconstruction and reconstruction within the collective space of testimonials, female agency and the resisting karibbean body in movement—similar to the ka drum that is still the major symbol of resistance in Guadeloupe.

Displacing. Amnesia, Memory, Atemporality, Reverted Esotericism and Immediacy Dimensions of time and space are utterly disjointed and jumbled in both texts. The amalgamation of past, present and future is combined with the maroonage of living bodies and spirits that pervade the voice and physical space of the main protagonists. This process contrives rhythmic dissonances that mirror the amplitude of the displacement of levels of consciousness, knowledge and discernment of the islanders with regard to their local history, because as Maryse Condé states in La civilisation du bossale: “There is no memory in the Caribbean … No foundation myth, no genealogy of heroes or semi-legendary kings” (Condé 1978, 7–8). In this manner, in Pineau’s text, it is Gina’s mother (not a younger protagonist) who links the Guadeloupean ancestry line to that of “the Egyptians, our ancestors” (14), disrupting the false dominant paradigm of “our ancestors the Gals”—a process of historical reparation vocalized by the grandmother (the older generation). The main protagonist of Dambury’s novel is a schoolgirl, Emilienne, who lingers in the courtyard of her Pointe-à-Pitre house as she expects the return of her father after a few days. The text is organized in a threedimensional space; headmost, the private space of Emilienne’s house, then the public space represented by descriptions of the urban city of Pointe-àPitre, Emilienne’s school, and La Place de la Victoire (where the conflicts and killings will occur). These public and private spaces swivel on Emilienne’s courtyard that undeniably serves as a central paradigm of the three-dimensional structure that it completes. Cent vies et des poussières is constructed on a similar ternary structure with the exception that the private space encloses Gina’s belly (through her pregnancies), her private home, and particularly the ghetto of La Ravine claire. The public space is

Gladys M. Francis

67

l’ailleurs—everything that is exterior to La Ravine claire. The unknown free Maroons’ mass grave located right under Gina’s slum rounds off the ternary structure. Dambury’s public space mirrors a prison, a repressive and oppressive locus where workers or pupils who resist unjust conditions are silenced. In opposition, it is the private space that constitutes a prison in Pineau’s text. Indeed, the “belly” swallows plights relative to the ghetto and “births” children that will soon be unwanted, unloved by Gina and left to nurture the degeneration of that space. Both novels make the same innovative use of their central axis that is in lieu of the collective. There is a wandering (errance) of souls haunting Emilienne’s courtyard. The spirits are characters; they are given the authority to lead the “movements” that will unfold the truth. They are materialized into physical entities and are performing a quadrille (square dance). The author then starts to deepen the dead’s amorphous nature. Their voices become instruments (violin, chacha, siyak, and tambour d’bas), personifying dancers or rhythms. Hence, testimonies from the living and the dead are ubiquitous in creating a unique collective voice mimicking the behemothic mystery that surrounds the tragic events of 1967. Most importantly, this represents “l’être est en commun, sans jamais être commun” (Jean-Luc Nancy 1986, 225). The multi-vocal story becomes equivocal, similar to the improvised chanting and dancing that pace the text. This atemporal framework reveals the depth of the loss of memory by locals (despite their gender, class or age). Under Gina’s house lays the skeleton of Théophée (and her toddler), a pregnant slave who ran away to La Ravine claire to save her unborn baby from being sold and forced into slavery on a béké (slaveholder’s) plantation. By extension, we understand that the soil of La Ravine claire is the grave of all the Maroons who lived there, free until colonialists murdered them. The spirit of Théophée wanders throughout the text; her voice, like a chorus, paces the text. Like a chanted incantation, her voice gives a rhythm to the story and serves as a heterodiegetic narrator (commenting overtly on Gina’s endeavours, expressing premonitions or obviations, commenting on feelings, action, characters, or speaking directly to the reader). Life and death are synthesized in the texts. The Afra-writings plunge us into the blending of material and immaterial worlds. The authors construct and pervert the traditional use of esoterism (through the unveiling of secrecy) in order to initiate the public into rare and unusual events taking place in Guadeloupe. Antoine Faivre offers an exhaustive examination of the esoteric in L’ésotérisme (2003), and akin to his analysis (and that of Pierre Riffard) our authors create an alternative textual cosmos, making the visible and invisible as one. Emilienne and Gina are

68

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

also guided by the presence of spirits, voices and visions that affect their knowledge, experiences and possible transmutation. The voices transmit knowledge and initiate the main protagonists and readers. The atemporal structures actualize a cosmogonal setting while also serving as the creation of a point of origin (the myth of Théophée in Pineau’s case). The atemporal chanting creates cosmic cycles, the writing becomes a chain of initiation, and the text becomes terrain, the locus of secrets. But, unlike esoteric practices that keep secret writings from the majority, our authors open these symbolic spaces that are testaments to the value and tenacity of the peoples of Guadeloupe across centuries. The timeless intervals blur the distance between then and now, as now becomes then, and then now. This spatio-temporal errance allows a deconstruction of past events that have been neglected by the mainstream or surmised by historians. The displacement of bodies is necessary, for recalling can only be done through the investment of those who lived through or were victims of these events. This generates authenticity to the piecing of voices that were displaced in history. These paroles are now ancrées and encrées to the texts that participate in the construction of the visibility of non-canonical heroes: The present of postcoloniality can be formulated as a moment of going beyond through return to the present. Interstitiality can be understood as a temporal paradox in which looking to the future necessarily entails a return. The present, the past, and the future do not keep to their proper places, whether in the continuum or rupture, but haunt each other; making for what Bhabha calls “the unhomely condition of the modern world.” (Suk 62)

Nonetheless, it also opens a troubling account of unchanging conditions for Guadeloupeans who seem to endure the same colonialist and imperialist powers from Théophée, to Emilienne, to Gina. Pineau’s text does the process quite explicitly through the linkage of Théophée and Gina and it is unmistakable that Dambury’s 1967’s diegesis calls into play similar events that took place in Guadeloupe in 2009 (with the LKP).

Replacing. Maroonage of Words, Orality in the Feminine and the Chaos of Rhythm In Les rétifs, the courtyard is the space of maroonage of words and is paced by music, dancing and instruments. The parole is also filled with linguistic stereotypy (metaphoric or stereotyped). These paremic forms (proverbs, sayings, apothegms) are fixed forms that symbolically reinforce

Gladys M. Francis

69

the characters’ affiliations to the cultural community of Guadeloupe. In addition, the stereotyped parole gives an account to the chain of ancestral memory in the feminine. In Les rétifs, Nono (the spirit of an elderly woman who died two years before the massacre) speaks “en hauteur” (27), and recalls memory “il faut commencer par le début” (27). In Cent vies et des poussières, it is a woman (Marga Despigne) who transmits historical facts dating back to 1840 about Théophée, her son Théodor and Judor the Maroon, who finds her in the woods and welcomes her to La Ravine claire, then a “paradise” (30). In Cent vies et des poussières, the passage of oral histories is always done within the femme-conteur figure. As a woman, Théophée ruptures the super-male archetypal figure of the heroic Maroon. If Théophée meets Judor who becomes her companion (and the father of the child she will not live to give birth to), Pineau does not detail their love affair, nor does she focus on a female Maroon figure that would respond to a “femme-matador” archetype. In fact, Théophée is never envisioned in a weak/strong binary to justify a feminist/masculinist viewpoint. The Afra-writing entails a unique creative potential because the body/text mirrors the hybridity of its socio-cultural context. Homi Bhabha considers these non-binary oppositions to be a strategy that opens new ways to negotiate cultural meaning: Indeed Bakhtin emphasizes a space of enunciation where the negotiation of discursive doubleness by which I do not mean duality or binarism engenders a new speech act… the hybrid strategy of discourse opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. It makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside; the part in the whole. (Bhabha 1996, 58)

Renée Larrier, in “Configurations of Voice in Francophone Caribbean Narrative,” examines the importance of storytelling within the colonial era and its ramification within the writing of French Caribbean authors. Larrier makes a correlation between cri/écriture—conteur/écriture and explores accounts given by the authors of the movement de la créolité and Édouard Glissant. She goes on to explain that the conteur uses a parole that hides the camouflaged shout of “protests that surged among the many cries of pain and agony from the hold of the slave ships” (276). In the plantation, the conteur functions as the holder of the collective memory,

70

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

and is a medium that transmits the collective cri as well as stories of survival and resistance to the slaves, “the conteur’s heir is the écrivain who inscribes the collective Caribbean voice in order to counter the distortions and erasures of official history” (276). “Les contes créoles des Antilles […] mettent en question ou en vertige le mythe de la Création. […] La parole du conte ne peut faire semblant de ne pas savoir qu’aux origines de l’Antillais ou Caribéen il y a non une Genèse, mais un fait historique combien de fois établi, et combien de fois raturé de la mémoire publique, qui est la traite négrière. L’holocauste de la traite et le ventre du bateau négrier […] sont une genèse d’autant plus impérative, quand même elle procède d’une démarche du composite. Cette “origine” d’une nouvelle sorte, qui n’est pas une création du monde, je l’appelle une digenèse. (Glissant 2000, 266–267)

The text becomes the voicing of the voiceless (the dead, spirits, Maroons…). The authors become the porte-paroles that inscribe the testimonies of the silenced collective, their pain. Dambury and Pineau are going back to the trace and use the conteur to deliver the paroles of bodily pain. If the storyteller and marqueur de paroles figures have been praised and theorized by the creolists, it remains through their lens, a male gendered space. Les rétifs and Cent vies et des poussières decentralize this masculinist transmission of oral culture by incorporating the voice of marginalized groups, such as children, disabled or elderly people, homosexuals, or prostitutes: “The desire to speak [and] create history is undeniable” (de Certeau 49) in both novels while bringing marginalized voices to the centre. Yvonne Daniel’s ethnographic research on Caribbean quadrilles points out that quadrille was a European dance creolized by Africans and their descendants to assert “their human dignity”: Africans […] replaced the African performance that was abhorred by Europeans with imitations, parodies, and creative extensions of the [European] colonial performances that they could observe […] across the Caribbean, African descendants perfected their versions of European body orientation, dance steps, and dance sequences, stating nonverbally that they, too, could dance socially esteemed dances. They took from the dominant group what the dominant group valued most: their elaborate dance practices […] African-descended performers signaled good manners and impressive social standing through a variety of contredanse-related performances. Over time, African descendants appropriated European contredanse-derived performance across the entire Caribbean region. (Daniel 2010, 216)

Gladys M. Francis

71

The courtyard illustrated in Les rétifs is the locus of circles of quadrille performances (transfused with the performances of storytelling). A brief enumeration of chapter titles illustrates the quadrille’s vocabulary or dance formations: “1ère figure pantalon,” “2ème figure l’été,” “3ème figure la poule,” “4ème figure Pastourelle.” Dambury does not select the gwo ka, which comprises dancing and singing from African style movements. As we will see, the selection of quadrille as the central beat of the novel merits close attention. Quadrille is the essence of creole variations and stylizations (Cyrille 2002), described as a set of dances in line, circle and square formations. Dambury selects the quadrille, which is unquestionably the most hybrid dance found in Guadeloupe (linking Africa, European France to the Creole locus of Guadeloupe). It is this transcultural dance that Dambury uses to voice a conflict that involved France and Guadeloupe (that is never truly French from the dominant perspective despite its “French Department” labelling). Most Caribbean quadrilles are European dances performed by Africandescended performers according to European dance values, i. e. “Africanized European” dances or more properly European dance variations […] this particular category, Caribbean quadrilles, does not routinely comprise “new” dance creations, which are generally recognized as veritable Creole dances: […] Jamaica’s reggae; Trinidad’s calypso; Guadeloupe’s gwoka; or the French Caribbean’s zouk. The dance forms just named are neither African nor European, but new Caribbean creations or Creole dances; they are not variations. (Daniel 2010, 227)

In the courtyard, the spirits are the quadrille performers. The dance structure seems to follow the existing quadrille rules but as the truths are being contées and performed, they are deviated. The spirits become quadrille dancers, are then transformed into percussions, and finally the tours de parole are no longer respected. The quadrille seems to transpose itself unto a gwoka performance as the voices simultaneously ask to enter the circle to lead the rhythm, lead the dance, lead the chanting, lead history, and perform disobedience. In quadrille, the European violins and accordions usually carry the song line; Dambury respects the tradition by making each parolier an instrument and setting rules for a parolier lead (je). While each “je” testimony performs, they each become the singularity of a collective space “nous” that will be transformed into a voix/voie dissidente. The chaos of rhythm, the unmapping of rules, the hybrid creole space of encounter between the “other” and “nous” quickly become parts of an occupied and rebellious space. Just like the Guadeloupeans on strike, the text becomes a body/text—it rebels. The bodies in movement undertake a maroonage on the page. The writing is in-between genres; it is

72

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

a hybridization of poetry, prose and drama. The interstice created by the improvised quadrille corresponds to the storyteller/respondent interaction. It also corresponds to the musical polyrhythm of the quadrille that puts in place in song form a call-and-response structure. The interplay is plural— it is textual, musical and physical. Polyphony and polyvocality reflect the collective voices that create a new set of apparatus in face of the immensities of the conflict put in place with la rencontre de l’autre. The improvisation echoes the chaos of a constructing space of consciousness (Francis 2015). Pineau presents Gina as a talented baker. It is that space of creation that prefigures improvisation. She tests new recipes, new ingredients and remains anxious and excited to uncover the outcome. The “process of making” is also what leads Gina to be impregnated eight times. While she does not have the space and the means to welcome new children into her home and life, it seems that each pregnancy is analogically similar to a new recipe. She never knows how the child will “turn out,” and when she is unsatisfied with the outcome she goes on to enjoy the improvising of a new recipe; a new pregnancy, with the hopes that this time it will be “perfect.” The belly (the oven) is the only space in which Gina produces in opposition to her consumerist dispositions. The maroonage is articulated in-between l’en dedans/l’en-dehors, inside the aller-venir. If Dambury's music and dance constitute a creative zone of passage to the “other” state, in Cent vies et des poussières alienation dominates that zone.

Placing. Cartographies of Pain Bigotry constantly overhangs Pineau’s text. Indeed, 80% of La ravine claire’s inhabitants are “femmes seules” (45). The author refers here to the parent isolé law established in 1976 that provides financial assistance to temporarily widowed, divorced, separated, abandoned or single individuals who are left alone to bear the responsibility of at least one child (this social service is also open to single women who are pregnant). The law obligates that the single parent must live alone. Gisèle Pineau raises serious concerns with regards to fathers wanting to be present in their children’s lives but find themselves cast out from their children’s households due to such social welfare constituencies. Marital/companionship relations are represented as penalized under governmental guidelines if a man lives in the household. Love is consequently decimated by materialistic needs, relegated to an exchange value. The more children a woman has, the more money she gets (47). “Neediness” becomes a valuable asset (by extension “scarce cities”).

Gladys M. Francis

73

In the text, the single status is more appealing to women who prioritize a guaranteed welfare check from the government. The boyfriends are portrayed sneaking into their own houses, or being kicked out for fear that neighbours would report them. The “parent isolé” status is demonized through Gina’s pregnancies. Love is replaced by sexual intercourse. Men serve as breeders (32), and when they are good fathers or partners Gina performs the unsatisfied girlfriend to get rid of them. State money has replaced fathers; everything is “sans pères, sans repères” (26). The plantation has been replaced by the State (l’État). We witness undeclared civil wars—the single status for CAF money, out of wedlock births, marriages being called off because of pernicious jalousies, suicides…: [an] exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject…The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. (Butler 3)

The female body is endangered. We see this through Phillis’ character—the father of her son tries to make her a sex slave, her motherhood is the result of rape (24) and she undergoes thirteen abortions (49). Social and sexual economics are paired. To survive, Dollis prostitutes herself, which is how she builds her “château” at the heart of La Ravine claire (48); the mansion will soon be home to her hanged body and the slum’s bad boys (273). We see the description of many young mothers (43), of “kids loving kids” (24). Gina’s heart is similar to a machine; she shuts off her love for her children as easily as turning the lights on or off. She does not take responsibility for her children’s slips through life. When Steeve gets eight years in prison, she is disappointed and wishes he had been given twenty years instead (80). She stops loving Steeve (77), declares him dead (80), hopes that he dies in prison (90), and does not answer his letters sent from his cell. She also “erases Mona” from her heart (84), who started taking crack at the age of fourteen. Gina repeats that she loves babies, not children (171) and choses to love them as long as they are babies. Dambury’s textual presentation of women’s struggles differs sizably from that of Pineau. Whereas the hyper-strong matrifocal matronne/Super Madres images of indestructible and unbreakable women are not present in Pineau’s text, they are however transposed by oppressive structural violence causing women to have no sense of self-determination. This

74

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

dilatation of stories on pain and suffering stresses a construction of a shared fate of misery and abandonment antipodal to Dambury’s standpoints. Les rétifs places every voice/dancer/parolier at the centre, challenging the dichotomist power relations of the “haves” and “have nots” seen in Pineau’s novel. Conflict is therefore explored within different strategies—Pineau’s writing focuses on a homelessness state while Dambury explores conflict within agency. In fact, the locals are inbetween appartenance (belonging) and its opposite, but are subjects (not objects). In fact, Dambury’s départenance configuration shows a sense of pride within the Guadeloupean cultural identity, while also expressing gestures of departures from repressive neo-colonialist strata (strikes and fights for equality and fairness). Women in Les rétifs are not super strong Black female heroes or women doomed by structural violence; they are sisters, neighbours, mothers with their personal shares of happiness and trials. Storytelling in the feminine in Cent vies et des poussières is a compelling account of the erotic in the feminine. Pleasure is talked about among women without taboo. Vivi’s friend masturbates (169), Vivi expresses her jouissance with sexual intercourse with men (171), Gina claims loving it when a man ejaculates inside her (which probably correlates to her desire to become pregnant), and Sharon masturbates (224). The vivid traces of orality do not however correspond to traditional contexts of teller-respondent. If they are done through women in Pineau’s text, Dambury for her part includes the voice of a gay man, Hilaire. Les rétifs disrupts the heteronormative and phallocentric aims of the traditional storyteller. Dambury incorporates the presence of the homosexual man in the collective voice. Constituting an integral part of the spirits serving as storytellers, Hilaire voices the taboos surrounding his gender and sexual inclinations. He also shares his rebellious cross-dressing act to provoke his homophobic neighbour. The government and its illegal operations are central to both texts. It is the collective voice that raises questions of morality implicating the government. The sociopolitical conflicts reach beyond black/white/mulatto oppositions. Through Les rétifs, exploitation also concerns black leadership toward the “petits travailleurs noirs” or the “petit bourgeois” vis-à-vis the “petits travailleurs noirs.” This is what we discover through Guy Albert’s description of Emilienne’s father (his boss), presented as a greedy employer. Cent vies et des poussières is a hysteria. La Ravine claire, once a land of “valiant Maroons,” is now of a different lineage (23). It is a ghetto filled with firearms, gun trafficking (25), pimps, and rape (25), sex trade activities, gangs, drugs, poverty and prostitutes. The

Gladys M. Francis

75

residents seem possessed and trapped. Gina’s sister Vivi is financially challenged to purchase daily necessities but cannot help buying pumps on a regular basis. The high-ceilinged buildings have nothing impressive to them, and serve as suicide sites. Vivi will jump from the fifteenth floor of La Tour Schoelcher. Pineau compares Vivi to the victims of 9/11, trapped in smoke and fire and throwing themselves from the Manhattan World Trade Center out of hopelessness. Underprivileged islanders are compared to robots pushing their shopping carts that they fill “de manière compulsive” (44). Gina takes the bus towards l’ailleurs to do the body performance of the wealthy woman who can afford groceries. She is described filling her cart during three long hours “to act rich,” then leaving, abandoning the stuffed cart somewhere in the supermarket. The same cacotopia is visible inside Gina’s household. Steeve (in his early twenties) gets an eight-year prison sentence for an armed robbery at a gas station. Her daughter Mona is addicted to crack, wanders in the ghetto, gets pregnant, delivers Katy, a crack-baby “with one eye looking toward the left and the other toward the right” (92), and it is Gina who serves as the baby’s caregiver. Sharon becomes obsessed with her possible “falling in life” when she hears a conversation between her sister Mona and their mother. In that conversation, Mona tells Gina that she called evil upon Sharon’s soul by naming her “Sharon”—pronounced “Charongn” in creole, and meaning “carrion” (charogne in French). None of Gina’s children seem to give her pride. Junior’s stuttering becomes a sufficient reason to push him away, for example. Gina’s rationale for not loving her children once they are no longer toddlers (and teething) becomes dubious when she rejects Billy for being an “ugly” kid (159). Likewise, it is only shame that Gina feels when she looks at Billy limping (he is shot in the knee after his attempt to take over Steeve’s drug empire). To use Françoise Lionnet’s expression, the text is a “phenomenology of pain.” Chaotic and dystopian settings are similar to a fast spreading plague. Pineau mentions violence, consumerism, gambling, Allocations Familiales and CAF in the same sentence (44). She questions the feasibility of rehabilitation for that community by pinpointing the youth’s absence of school and parenting education. Young men are not kept out of jail, and schools are ghettoized—“les gosses placés selon leur code postal” (54). The children of La Ravine claire are proliferating “pullulaient” (24) and are condemned from the start (26). The anaphor “passer de vie à trépas” (to move from life to death) is articulated seven times in the novel and reinforces the dystopia of the ghetto. Cent vies et des poussières illustrates the modern challenges that poor families in La Ravine claire face on a daily basis. The island is not an

76

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

isolated and protected space; it is rather a sponge that absorbs everything that surrounds it. We see the negrophobia of women toward their Black skin when Dolly bleaches hers (143). Pop stars have replaced the island’s Christian figures—Gina’s son Steeve (the famous “bad boy”) looks at his Bob Marley poster as a source of protection and when he senses that he will soon be seized by the police and taken away for a while, he reinsures Sharon that Bob will always shield her from evil. Gina is addicted to sitcoms (47), Telenovelas and American soap operas (42–3). As a matter of fact, most of her children’s names are American: Steeve, Sharon, Billy, Junior. At times, the stories give into a Jerry Springer effect. It seems that Gina wears blinders placed by a consumerist society. There is a sense of profound loss in Cent vies et des poussières, and we witness extreme behaviours: abusive relationships, children dropping out of school, children that are not yet eight years old selling drugs, black young men going to jail, pimps, drinking…. The children are in front of the TV watching “séries policières” (154) and reproduce the same havoc in real life. Indeed, Pineau incriminates the media for reinforcing negative images and pernicious stereotypes for the black youth.

Resisting. Transgressional Women’s Writing of Ka-ribbean Bodies At the end of the novel, after a long frenzied dystopia, Pineau attempts to display a filigree of hope. In that manner, when the title of the novel is used in the text it recalls that Gina’s sister (who killed herself) always believed in reincarnation (229). This statement is later paired with Théophée’s revelation. We must remember that Théophée was killed in La Ravine claire while carrying a child in her womb. It is therefore this important omniscient narrator that will disclose to the reader that Gina’s eighth pregnancy is “different” and that this child will “save and heal all of Gina’s children” (275). In opposition, Dambury’s voicing of resistance is a most momentous statement. Les rétifs’ multiple stories create a human web symbolizing solidarity and cultural identity, through Creole words, Caribbean music and rhythms, the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, the traditional home decor, and the everyday run-arounds of the population: [Gerty Dambury] nous entraîne hors de la cour, nous présente la Guadeloupe. Et l’on y est, odeurs, couleurs, paysages de grands fonds, champs de canne à perte de vue. On roule à tombeau ouvert dans l'Allée du Manoir, on cavale dans les rues étroites de Pointe à Pitre, on se perd dans l'agitation de la place de la Victoire. Elle donne du rythme, conjure l’ennui, transgresse l’ordre établi. (Leïla Leclaire 2012)

Gladys M. Francis

77

We definitely observe the leitmotiv of bodies wandering in pain in Dambury’s courtyard, which is similar to the courtyard presented in Abderrahmane Sissako’s movie Bamako. It is in there that all sociopolitical events are narrated and where the margins put the West on trial. The courtyard allows the voicing of the dominés who have never been heard. Their discourse counterbalances Western imageries through which the dominés are constructed as passive and lacking the desire to fight for their rights and reach better economic stability. In Pineau’s novel, the courtyard has been replaced by television. The storyteller has become the American TV shows. This is the exact illustration of Occidentalism that we find in Sissako’s movie—children, their parents and other family members gathering at night, not to listen to the traditional griot but to watch an American western on TV. Like Bamako, the novels are similar to a cinéma vérité [“true cinema”], a style of documentary movie-making with long takes and little or no directorial or editing control over the finished product. This is transmitted in writing through the atemporal, the three-dimensional structures, the improvised rhythms, and plurivocal and polyphonic voices. It is important to stress that Les rétifs mirrors Dambury’s strong refusal to give into canonical and damaging representations of the subaltern. Les rétifs makes a remarkable and clear attempt to represent the subaltern as an agent of change without falling into disfigurations of gender spaces (hypersexual women, defeminized women, hyper masculine men, heteronormative relationships, poto mitan women) or disfigurations of geographical spaces (a ghettoized island, stereotyped lazy/happy/poor islanders). To achieve a counter-canonical discourse, Dambury’s restive characters are represented within private/intimate spaces, everyday life and conversations. There is a poignant refusal by Dambury to adorn pain and recognize what comprises beauty on the island. The cartography of pain is therefore balanced with the tangible humanizing of everyday people and their characters—passive personalities (Emilienne’s dad is described as a coward at times), leadership advocacies (the instructor for instance), personal and professional challenges and the neighbouring dynamics of everyday life. The events of 1967 are portrayed in their inhumanity without taking away from what makes the people a “Restive People” (within their singularity). The creation of the collective voice is achieved in the direct and diametrical opposite to Pineau, for Dambury empowers every single character of the novel with participating agencies. Each individual seems to contribute to a chain of solidarity, which fills the text with harmonious stands. The collective voice is not buried under structural violence,

78

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

because structural violence is not the sole condition lived by locals. We understand that Les rétifs presents an original space of in-between; it is rather un désordre non-subordonné, a resisting-body that is unified within its differences and challenges. The author finds the term “rétifs” (restive) to be very representative. For Dambury, the term “restive,” used to describe a horse that refuses to move forward, is testament to the animality found during slavery. Unlike Pineau’s text, structural violence is not subject but object; pain is not inflated, the restive people are placed right at the centre of the circle, they are the core of the transcultural space of the quadrille, they are non-homogeneous people creating resistance. Guadeloupe is a hybrid place caught between tradition and modernization, overpowered by France and its képis rouges. Indeed, we observe the difficult position of the subaltern between alienation and affiliation, the notion of départenance—wanting to belong, to affiliate with the representation of power. They evolve in a third space of separation. To paraphrase Bhabha, the third space remains a space of differentiation (Bhabha 1990, 207). Pineau’s novel is almost a Manichean mythology in which there are no rules. La Ravine claire is the metaphoric savage space (re) presenting the practices of globalization. Gina’s family watches violent “series policières” as they are trapped between mimicry and mockery. This metatextual presentation is quite powerful, since the Guadeloupean family watches its mimetic condition on TV. The difficult vision of mimicry between resemblance and menace is observed, as is the locals’ identity between assimilation and alienation. This process is similar to the “nero complex” introduced in postcolonial studies by Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1991). Memmi compares the relationship between Nero and Britaniccus to the one between the colonizers and the colonized subjects. He explains that the more the usurpers violate and torture the usurped, the more they suppress the moral and bodily politics of the one they oppress (53). In this manner, the colonialists deny their victims’ existence and dehumanize them: [Like the colonizer] Nero, the exemplary figure of the usurper, is thus led [in an attempt to justify his illegimate status] to persecute Britaniccus outrageously… But the greater the harm he does him, the more he comes to embody this atrocious role [of the usurper] that he has chosen for himself. And the more deeply he sinks into injustice, the more he hates Britaniccus and tries to get at him. (Memmi 77)

Similar to Bhabha’s argument, the body in pain is textualized as a (de-) constructed zone, a zone of passage between death and life; a zone of (re-) birth:

Gladys M. Francis

79

[…] identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality […] the image […] marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split—it makes present something that is absent—and temporally deferred: it is the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition. (Bhabha 2005, 73)

The body in pain passes through l’autre in order to “be” itself and repasses back through itself in order to be “other” than itself. This process reveals the suffering body as a rhizome. The third space is a rhizomatic space in which the body in pain seeks identity. It is through the pain, the utterance of violence, that the contact between “moi” and l’autre becomes possible. Therefore, the suffering body is more than a zone of passage; it is most importantly a zone of contact. Given this characteristic, it transgresses the norms of the mainstream to maintain “it” within boundaries and to separate “it,” and alienate “it.” The origin root of the rhizomatic suffering body is itself a process similar to Sankofa, and conditions the in-between characteristic of the body. The in-between is a point of origin. Consequently, the body in pain (re) presents and (con) textualizes rhizomatic strategies and procedures within the end and the beginning (which is the characteristic of the origin). To paraphrase Daniel Sibony in Entre-deux, there is more than one origin in a same origin, and identity is a state of shared origin (19). Hence, within the irrationality of the rhizome is to be found rationality: “une identité qui pèse reflète une origine dont la pulsion est devenue une compulsion” (56– 57). Following this rhizomatic distinctiveness, the voicing of Dambury and Pineau uses transgression, and the pain is not hidden; psychological, physical and societal sufferings are also expressed in the reality of their violence. The voicing of the rebellious rhizomatic body becomes a transgressional (con)text. Such writing is a mirror of the continuous negotiations of the body in pain.

Conclusion In Les rétifs, class, race, gender and age do not count in the face of solidarity and oppression within the social dynamics operating among the local people (descendants of slaves). The modest, overworked and underpaid employee is also a hero (it is Guy Albert who brings his boss’ daughter back home through the mix of bullets and chaos). If Dambury’s “innovation” is to find a dominant voice for the story that is to be told, similar to a quadrille au commandement (12), all voices become a unique dominant lead. In both novels, the island of Guadeloupe is not

80

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

conceptualized as a feminized terrain (Said 1978). Opinions and beliefs surrounding silenced portions of history are exposed, dissected and clarified for and by the collective within their singularities (which is why the capitalized “Nous” voiced in Dambury’s cour is highly symbolic). There is a sense of solidarity in the construction of history. The inscription of the femmes-conteurs defies the phallogocentric conteur/marqueur de parole discourse and theories presented by the creolists, Édouard Glissant or the Négritude’s authors. Indeed, the music lead is no longer male centred in Dambury’s novel, Nono contradicts the norms by playing the accordion (a role tradition to men) (27). By decentralizing the woman’s desire from that of men, Pineau’s main character is a mother who does not seek to be a man’s lover, nor is she defeminized; she is not in the masculine. When Dambury gives voice to Hilaire, a gay man, he does not fit the lampooned, male-less, crossdressing makoumè figure found in various works of the creolists. The makoumè is renamed “ma-commère” (67) meaning my gossiping neighbour, which reinstates the marginalized homosexual into the collective space. Indeed, Hilaire is not passive, nor invisible, but has his own share of dissidence. The texts are resistance; they incorporate the voices of the silenced (the women, the homosexual, the children…) to a historiography that has tended to be exclusively masculine and heteronormative. If the cartographies of bodily pain are visible in both texts, the testimony of their resistance is much more predominant in Les rétifs. They have survived the womb of slave ships, the inhumanity of plantations, and now that they are faced with neocolonial traps and scourges it is necessary for the author to do an “innovation,” to displace and replace, call and recall—be A Restive People and resist. We have entered an anxious age of identity, in which the attempt to memorialize lost time, and to reclaim lost territories, creates a culture of disparate “interest groups” or social movements […] The importance of such retroaction lies in its ability to reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it, resignify it. More significant, it commits our understanding of the past, and our reinterpretation of the future, to an ethics of “survival” that allows us to work through the present. And such a working through, or working out, frees us from the determinism of historical inevitability repetition without a difference. (Bhabha 1996, 59–60).

Gladys M. Francis

81

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse in the Novel”, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981. Bernabé, Jean, et al., Eloge de la créolité, Paris, Gallimard, 1990. Bhabha, Homi, K. “The Third Space,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Jonathan Rutherford, ed., London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. —. “Culture’s In-Between,” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, London, SAGE Publications, 1996. —. (1994) The Location of Culture, NY, Routledge, 2005. Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York, Routledge, 1993. Condé, Maryse, La civilisation du bossale, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1978. Cyrille, Dominique, “Sa Ki Ta Nou (This belongs to us): Creole dances of the French Caribbean,” Caribbean dance from Abakuá to Zouk, Susanna Sloat, ed., Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2002, 221246. Dambury, Gerty, Les rétifs, Paris, Éd. du Manguier, 2012. Daniel, Yvonne, “Come with me: Let’s talk about Caribbean quadrilles.” Cariso! Quarterly Newsletter of the Alton Music Research Institute 6 (2006), 6-12. —. “An Ethnographic Comparison of Caribbean Quadrilles,” Black Music Research Journal 30. 2 (2010), 215-240. De Certeau, Michel, La prise de parole et autres écrits politiques, Paris, Seuil, 1994. Faivre, Antoine, L’ésotérisme, Paris, PUF, 2003 (1992). Francis, Gladys M., « Fonctions et enjeux de la danse et de la musique dans le texte francophone créole », Nouvelles Études Francophones 26. 1 (2011), 179-194. —. “Creolization on the Move in Francophone Caribbean Literature,” The Oxford Migration Diaspora Programme, Oxford, The University of Oxford 1 (2015), 1-15. Glissant, Édouard, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1989. —. Le Discours antillais, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1981. —. Poétique de la relation, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1990. —. « Le différé, la parole », Faulkner, Mississippi, Paris, Gallimard, « Folio/essais », 1998.

82

Guadeloupe's Ka-ribbean Bodies in Conflict

Larrier, Renée, « “Crier/Ecrire/Cahier”: Anagrammatic Configurations of Voice in Francophone Caribbean Narratives », The French Review 69. 2 (1995), 275-283. Leclaire, Leïla. « Les rétifs de Gerty Dambury », Africultures: Critique Théâtre (Octobre 2012). http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=11184/ 29 January 2013. Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston, Beacon Press, 1991. Nancy, Jean-Luc, La communauté désœuvrée, Paris, Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1986. Pineau, Gisèle, Cent vies et des poussières, Paris, Mercure de France, 2012. Riffard, Pierre, « Le penser ésotérique » et « Existe-t-il un ésotérisme négro-africain? », ARIES, Paris, Archè, 21 (1998), 1-28 et 197-203. Said, Edward, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1978. Sibony, Daniel, Entre-deux. L’origine en partage, Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 1990. Sissako, Abderrahmane, dir., Bamako, perf. Aissa Maiga, Tiécoura Traore, Hélène Diarra, Habib. Dembele, Les Films du Losange, 2006. DVD. Suk, Jeannie, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing. Césaire, Glissant, Condé, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001.

LA DYNAMIQUE DES CONFLITS DE LANGUES EN CARAÏBE: LES DEFIS IDENTITAIRES DE L’ERE POSTCOLONIALE

BRUCE JNO-BAPTISTE UNIVERSITE DES ANTILLES

Introduction Les expériences communes des divers peuples caribéens conduisent au développement de la conscience historique de l’émergence d’une civilisation. Durant ces cinq cents dernières années, des hommes de différents endroits de la planète se sont rencontrés, ont échangé des idées et partagé des activités ; ils ont, ce faisant, donné naissance à des cultures vibrantes et différentes dans la zone Caraïbe. L’interaction des cultures indigènes Taino et Caribes1 avec celles d’Europe, d’Afrique, et d’Asie n’a pas eu comme seule conséquence la création d’une région culturellement hétérogène, mais aussi la création d’espaces insulaires culturellement hétérogènes à l'intérieur de la même région. Aussi, le pluralisme et l’hybridité culturels sont davantage la norme que l’exception dans la Caraïbe. Nés de l’expansion européenne des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, les Etats de la Caraïbe connaissent des successions de vagues migratoires et font face à des conflits inhérents à leur historicité. La notion de conflit est ici significative de la dynamique identitaire dans la Caraïbe. Les mutations expérimentées dans la région parallèlement à l’évolution du monde occidental ont fréquemment généré des rapports conflictuels qui sont devenus les marques fondatrices des sociétés caribéennes. La destruction des populations indigènes par la guerre et la maladie qui aboutit à l’extermination de la majorité des populations précolombiennes, l’esclavage et les travailleurs sous contrat, la révolution cubaine de 1933, les crises sociales de 1934 à 1939 dans les colonies britanniques, 1

Peuples amérindiens originaires de l’Amérique du Sud.

84

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

l’évolution politique des îles françaises et néerlandaises au sein même des nations colonisatrices, l’accession à l’indépendance d’un bon nombre d’îles et de terres continentales anglophones, l’invasion de la Grenade en 1983, les relations internationales et la coopération régionale, les mutations sociales et la modification des structures démographiques, le phénomène de migration et de diaspora, sont autant de données conflictuelles mémorielles que le temps atténue ou renforce. Les petits Etats caribéens sont au cœur des grands débats internationaux qui portent sur la culture, l’ethnicité et la construction identitaire. Il est question par exemple, de préserver dans le contexte actuel de la mondialisation l’identité de ces états à l’intérieur des unions plus larges comme l’Union Européenne, l’Economic community of West African States, ou encore l’Association of South East Asian Nations. Une des préoccupations essentielles est d’apporter des réponses aux nombreuses questions soulevées par l’interculturel qui nourrit la conception de l’identité régionale, d’étudier les effets de la créolisation sur le contexte social et politique national, de mesurer l’impact sur l’Etat des mouvements artistiques et des valeurs esthétiques nouvelles et de trouver leur place dans le sport international qui rehausse le niveau de ces petits états. L’intérêt d’une relecture des conflits identitaires en Caraïbe à la lumière de la régénération de la variable culturelle qu’est la langue maternelle est de rendre compte des enjeux de civilisation dans une région façonnée dans le cadre exclusif et toujours opérant des valeurs européennes. Il s’agit pour les Caribéens de façonner à leur image l’espace civilisationnel occidental qui leur a longtemps servi de référent aux pensées et actions politiques. Dans son remarquable ouvrage, O. Nigel Bolland justifie la référence à un nouveau paradigme caribéen en s’adressant à cette Caraïbe émergeante, en ces termes : La naissance de la civilisation caribéenne, par conséquent, sous-entend l’affirmation selon laquelle l’expérience historique originale de la région a permis l’émergence d’une culture et d’une société différentes de toutes celles qui existent et d’une civilisation qui, comme les autres civilisations, reflète cette expérience originale et qui possède son propre style à travers ses idées politiques et sociales, sa littérature, sa musique et son art. 2 (Bolland ix)

2

« The birth of Caribbean civilisation, therefore, conveys a claim that the unique historical experience of the region is giving rise to a culture and society unlike any other, a civilisation that reflects this unique experience in its own way through its social and political ideas, literature, music and art, as is true of other civilisations ».

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

85

Dans la Caraïbe, le nœud de la question identitaire assemble les points essentiels que sont la langue, la littérature, 3 la religion, la famille, les arts et l’ethnicité. Ces points s’entremêlent de façon conflictuelle lorsqu’il s’agit de dire et de se dire le monde dans une langue relevant de sa propre identité. S’intéresser ici à la particularité du métissage culturel et linguistique dans la Caraïbe, c’est se demander en quoi elle est génératrice de conflits qui affaiblissent le principal pôle identitaire d’une nation à savoir l’Education.

L’appréhension des conflits dans la marche de la Caraïbe Dans la Caraïbe continentale et insulaire, les conflits se déclinent souvent en antagonismes identitaires comme pour exprimer une volonté historique de remodeler la civilisation occidentale imposée, jadis, par la violence. Il s’agit de remettre en cause l’inégalité des rapports entre ethnies, langues, cultures et religions que la colonisation a favorisée. La construction de la Caraïbe est soumise depuis toujours à un usage du terme « conflit ». Il sert à désigner les revendications de minorités ethniques ou culturelles, mais aussi les conflits identitaires générateurs de guerres en Europe ou en Afrique (en ex-Yougoslavie ou au Rwanda) ; toutefois dans l’espace américano-caraïbe, ce terme fait souvent référence aux crises des sociétés anciennement colonisées aux prises avec les cultures des excolonisateurs. Ralph Premdas (1995) nous présente le contexte multi-ethnique du Guyana et les conséquences politiques qui vont en découler notamment durant les années 1950 et 1960. Pour l’auteur, la construction multiethnique du Guyana qui correspond à un héritage colonial, va impacter le développement de cette nation après son accès à l’indépendance. Premdas considère d’ailleurs que le développement du Guyana a été rendu presque impossible à cause de cet héritage. En 2007, c’est le cas de Trinidad et Tobago qui est analysé par le même auteur. Là aussi, l’héritage colonial joue un rôle clé dans l’appréhension du développement postcolonial. Gordon K. Lewis (2004) nous propose une approche historique des conflits qui ont marqué l’accession à l’indépendance des nations caribéennes. Encore une fois, l’héritage colonial se retrouve au cœur des problématiques que doivent résoudre ces jeunes nations dans l’ère postcoloniale. Les cas de la Jamaïque, de Trinidad et Tobago, de la 3

Stefano Harney (1996) souligne bien le rôle de la littérature dans la question identitaire surtout lorsqu’elle est étudiée à partir des théories postcoloniales et le discours sur le nationalisme plus particulièrement.

86

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

Barbade et du Guyana y sont présentés. Le conflit prend alors un sens positif car il représente les forces en action qui ont contribué au développement ou encore à la formation des sociétés caribéennes. Dans le cas de la Jamaïque, ce sont une série d’évènements tels que la révolte des esclaves en 1831, la rébellion de Morant Bay en 1865 et les émeutes de Frome en 1937-1938, qui ont été les catalyseurs d’une nouvelle phase sociale et politique dans l’histoire du pays. À Trinidad et Tobago, les premières situations conflictuelles qui aboutissent à l’émergence d’un esprit national hors de l’expérience coloniale vont débuter avec le Captain Cipriani et le mouvement des travailleurs qu’il suscite après la première guerre mondiale. Parallèlement, les fondations d’une Barbade souveraine sont posées à la période de l’entre-deux guerres à travers des conflits sociaux et des leaders syndicaux tels que Grantley Adams qui luttent face à l’oligarchie en place. Dans la région caraïbe, la notion de conflit, qui traduit bien la dynamique des interactions civilisationnelles, nous semble intéressante pour rendre compte de l’œuvre culturelle réalisée depuis la période coloniale, par des peuples se forçant à dépasser des conflits historiques inscrits dans leur mémoire. En quoi donc l’appréhension généralement négative des conflits est-elle ici une donnée sémantique positive pour interroger en Caraïbe anglophone l’évolution des idées dans les principaux champs d’actions politiques, culturelles, éducatives et économiques ? Dans le cadre du présent article, l’accent est mis sur le conflit linguistique lié au culturel, notamment en contexte éducatif. Il porte un éclairage sur l’évolution de la représentation des langues européennes et créoles en contact depuis des siècles dans l’espace caribéen et sur la dimension identitaire de la communication interculturelle. Il est significatif des discours idéologiques coloniaux sur les langues de l’esclave, les créoles, langues largement adoptées par les immigrés volontaires, indiens et syriens. Le conflit linguistico-culturel, plutôt atténué, de nos jours, rend aussi bien compte de la dynamique des cultures à travers les nouveaux défis identitaires que le XXIe siècle a encouragés. Faut-il souligner ici combien la question du conflit linguistique et culturel concerne de plus en plus les peuples du monde entier dans le contexte actuel de la mondialisation culturelle, de la construction de l’Europe, tout particulièrement ? Les réponses apportées par la Caraïbe peuvent intéresser les nombreux « diasporisés », et tous ceux qui ont en commun une même identité politique exprimée en diverses langues, certaines dites hautes, d’autres basses. En Caraïbe, la quête identitaire des hommes devenus créoles soulève la question désormais mondialisée de l’exacerbation des identités

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

87

particulières. Mais au nom de quoi ces identités particulières veulent-elles se faire entendre à tout prix ? Et pourquoi la quête identitaire est-elle généralement perçue dans l’histoire de l’humanité comme un besoin vital de se dire et de dire le monde dans son propre langage, à partir de ses propres références culturelles ? Il convient de souligner que les Caribéens forgent leur identité sur la base des traits culturels puissamment enracinés dans les langues créoles, même lorsqu’elles ne sont plus le parler maternel de la majorité de la population. Il est vrai que les langues maternelles, miroirs d’identités des peuples, restent chargées d’une puissante valeur de symbole. Les champs d’action sociale que sont la culture et la langue surtout lorsqu’elles sont mises en relation avec l’Education voire le développement, sont révélateurs de l’évolution des revendications identitaires au cœur des conflits historiques. Nous nous sommes intéressés au projet économique du petit Etat de la Dominique lorsqu’il prend en compte, à l’entrée du 3ème millénaire, l’interdépendance des pôles identitaires culturels, linguistiques et éducatifs. Le pragmatisme dont le gouvernement dominiquais fait preuve, relativise le conflit linguistique et culturel en Caraïbe, de nos jours. La dynamique des langues et la « caribéanisation » de la culture invitent les responsables politiques, culturels, économiques et éducatifs de l’île à atténuer la notion de conflits linguistiques et culturels lorsqu’ils sont appréhendés dans le contexte économique postcolonial. 4

La particularité des conflits de langues dans la Caraïbe La Caraïbe qui, depuis le XVIe siècle, a fondé sa quête identitaire sur la différence culturelle et linguistique, se doit de contribuer au débat sur les représentations culturelles des langues car il est question de promotion du bilinguisme, de valorisation, de tolérance linguistique. La question du rôle des représentations idéologiques des langues, qu’elles soient internationales, nationales ou régionales a toujours été au centre des préoccupations des hommes. Il faut dire que cette question détermine l’avenir des langues, interpelle les peuples qui ont à assumer leur héritage linguistique en dépit des images négatives produites par l’humanité dans sa marche historique. La question du plurilinguisme intéresse une Caraïbe appelée à assumer et dépasser les antagonismes entre les langues européennes et créoles. Confrontés à la différence linguistique, les hommes ont toujours eu 4

Cf. l’ouvrage de Jno-Baptiste, Bruce, 2008

88

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

tendance à rire des habitudes de l’autre, à considérer leur langue comme la plus belle, la plus efficace, la plus précise, bref à convertir la différence de l’autre en infériorité. Pourtant ce sont les facteurs politiques, économiques et culturels qui ont déterminé et continuent de déterminer la situation sociolinguistique dans le monde. Dans la Caraïbe, depuis les premiers temps de la colonisation, la situation sociolinguistique se caractérise non par un plurilinguisme valorisant les compétences culturelles de la population, mais par une diglossie qui hiérarchise les langues et surtout les locuteurs. Ici, les hommes se demandent si les langues européennes peuvent devenir un jour l’habitacle de leur identité culturelle dite authentique. La Caraïbe se préoccupe depuis des décennies de la question de la formation de la personnalité de l’homme caribéen, après avoir reconnu que les peuples caribéens ont intériorisé les représentations européennes de la langue créole en donnant à leur propre langue une valeur dépréciative. Sous la plume de Paula Burnett, 5 Derek Walcott porte l’éclairage sur la particularité du métissage culturel et linguistique dans la Caraïbe : Walcott décrit les Caribéens comme des gens ‘qui ont honte de leur parler’; comme des acteurs, ils ‘attendaient une langue’. Ils avaient en fait une abondance de langues, riches de registres divers, mais la langue du terroir était perçue comme indigne, et, en même temps, la langue dominante, la langue de la métropole, leur était étrangère et venait rappeler les humiliations historiques. Ce dont on avait besoin, c’était ‘d’inventer une langue qui aille au-delà de l’imitation servile, un dialecte qui ait la force d’une révélation du fait de sa capacité à inventer une nouvelle façon de nommer les choses’. Ce dont nous avions besoin, c’était de démontrer que le peuple possédait déjà une langue qui pouvait exprimer pleinement sa subjectivité – que le mépris qui les poussait à se sentir honteux de la partie créole de leur continuum linguistique n’était que racisme et préjugé 5

« Walcott describes Caribbean people as “ashamed of their speech”; like actors they “awaited a language”. They had, in fact language a plenty, multiple registers of language, but the domestic language was felt to be unworthy, and the hierarchized metropolitan language was alien and reinscribed historic humiliations. What was needed was “the forging of language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things”. What was needed was a demonstration that the people already had a language that could express the fullness of their subjectivity – that the centrist scorn which induced them to feel ashamed of the Creole end of their language continuum was just racism and class prejudice, and that the metropolitan language, which was alien and pejorative, could be used differently and was open to metamorphosis, the stiff case of its historic meanings shed so that the rainbow imago of its diverse global communities could unfold new wings to the sun ».

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

89

de classe, et que la langue de la métropole, qui était étrangère et péjorative, pouvait être utilisée différemment et était sujette à métamorphoses, on pouvait la libérer des rigidités de son sémantisme historique afin que l’imago arc-en-ciel des différentes communautés qui la parlaient dans le monde, puisse déployer ses ailes neuves au soleil […]. (Burnett 135)

Une question fondamentale s’impose ici aux Caribéens : celle du lien entre la langue et la culture6 surtout lorsque celles-ci sont identifiées comme valeurs centrales sur lesquelles se fonde l’idée de nation. La langue créole qui dans les petits Etats comme la Dominique et Sainte-Lucie semble être la valeur centrale de la culture ou le lieu de la vitalité ethnolinguistique n’est pas une source directe de développement. La culture artistique peut être véhiculée tout autant en langue anglaise sinon plus, surtout si l’on considère les compétences langagières de la nouvelle génération. La question des enjeux identitaires cryptés par l’apprentissage des langues reste posée, et mérite une analyse complémentaire pour un meilleur éclairage de l’interrelation entre identité, culture et développement. Dans la Caraïbe anglophone, certains affirment que ce sont essentiellement les langues créoles qui témoignent de la vie culturelle dans les différents groupes d’îles. Les langues créoles ne gouverneraient pas mais ce sont elles qui dirigent. En revendiquant pour les langues européennes et créoles des activités valorisantes, d'autant qu'elles partagent chacune un même pouvoir local, beaucoup défendent leur intégration sociale. Ils s'opposent au remplacement de l'une par l'autre, et ils prônent l'acceptation du pluralisme linguistique basée sur le respect de la légitimité et du fonctionnement propre des langues. Bon nombre de chercheurs Caribéens7 vont dans ce sens, mais ils se heurtent à la question de la représentation sociale des langues créoles peu 6

Qu’il existe un lien profond entre une langue et les traits caractéristiques d’une culture est une intuition qui s’inscrit dans une longue tradition. Le philosophe Alfred Fouillée ne disait-il pas que« la langue d’une nation est à son caractère ce que les traits du visage sont au caractère de l’individu ». Cette thèse est très ancienne puisqu’on la trouve déjà exposée par Rivarol dans son Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (1784). Ces quelques positions d’auteurs sur la question éclairent bien l’enjeu de la dynamique culturelle des langues, et leur représentation idéologique notamment dans les situations d’apprentissage scolaire: E. Sapir, C. Lévi-Strauss ont dégagé le rôle important joué par la langue dans et pour la transmission de la culture. Mais l’accent a été aussi porté sur l’intérêt de les distinguer. En effet, tout en reconnaissant que la langue et la culture forment un tout dans leur forme de transmission, certains anthropologues admettent cependant, pour des raisons pratiques, leur valeur distinctive.

90

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

favorable à leur enseignement en milieu scolaire, le lieu par excellence où elles peuvent gagner leurs lettres de noblesse. Les sociolinguistes comme le trinidadien Mervyn C. Alleyne reconnaissent que les peuples caribéens ont intériorisé les représentations européennes de la langue créole en donnant à leur propre langue une valeur dépréciative ; ils ne manquent pas de souligner que ce comportement persiste, alors que les îles de la colonisation européenne se sont libérées de leurs colonisateurs mais pas, il faut le croire, de leurs idéologies linguistiques et culturelles peu favorables à l’épanouissement de la personnalité antillaise. Ils y voient là, l’expression même du conflit linguistique historique et ses effets sur le psychisme des principaux concernés atteints de schizophrénie culturelle. La question de la représentation idéologique des langues interpelle aussi K. G Warner (1977). En établissant un rapport entre la langue créole et l'identité dans la Caraïbe, l'auteur se demande avec quelle langue un habitant de la Caraïbe doit s'identifier. Doit-il, en tant que locuteur d'une langue standard, s'identifier à elle et au pays européen qui lui correspond ? Ou doit-il, en tant que locuteur créolophone, s'identifier au créole, malgré toutes les difficultés que cela peut impliquer pour lui ? D’autres encore comme Hubert Devonish (1986) préfèrent rappeler que contrairement aux départements français d’Amérique, la question du choix de la langue comme langue d’enseignement ou encore comme langue d’une nation imaginée, n’a jamais été au centre des préoccupations dans le Commonwealth Caribbean de la part de ceux qui engageaient la lutte anti-coloniale. La dimension idéologique des langues, anglais et créole, est donnée par Hubert Devonish, qui situe le problème après l’indépendance :8 Après l’indépendance, l’anglais se maintint comme langue officielle des institutions politiques au sein de l’Etat. Ainsi, l’anglais demeura la langue 7

Cf. Les travaux de Alleyne Mervin (1985), L. D. Carrington (1980, 1990, 1993) ou Nettleford Rex (1993, 1999, 2003) 8 « After independence, English continued as the official language of the political institutions within the state. Thus, English remained the language of parliament and, as well, the language of government administration. In a more general sense, English remained the language of formal political life in these countries. However some modification in the area of language use did take place. With the existence of universal adult suffrage, politicians have found it necessary to court the Creole speaking populations via the use of some Creole in political speeches. Let us analyse what function this use of Creole actually performs in such speeches. Creole is used for sloganeering, telling jokes, abuse, and as an emotional rhetorical device. However, to the extent that many political speeches can be said to have any content, this content is expressed in English ».

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

91

du Parlement et de l’administration gouvernementale. Dans un sens plus général, dans ces pays l’anglais continue d’être la langue de la vie politique formelle. Toutefois, certaines évolutions dans le domaine des pratiques linguistiques se produisirent. Avec l’apparition du suffrage universel, les politiciens découvrirent la nécessité de courtiser l’électorat créolophone en utilisant des expressions créoles dans leur discours. Arrêtons-nous à la fonction du créole dans de tels discours. Le créole est utilisé pour lancer des slogans, raconter des blagues, insulter l’adversaire, et pour véhiculer une rhétorique de l’émotion. Mais, dès qu’un discours politique cherche à faire passer un message substantiel, on a recours à l’anglais. (Devonish, 99)

Dans les Etats anglophones des Caraïbes, l’accent est mis par L. D. Carrington (1980) sur le paradoxe de traumatismes psychologiques résultant d’une part du rejet de la langue maternelle, d’autre part de l’emploi de cette langue maternelle. Le linguiste trinidadien a analysé les évolutions et les tensions qui se sont manifestées à ce sujet dans les pays de la région caraïbe ayant l’anglais comme langue officielle. Dans toutes les îles, une langue créole est parlée et considérée comme la langue maternelle de la majorité de la population. Pour la plupart, elles ont un créole à base lexicale anglaise. La Dominique, Sainte-Lucie et une partie de la Grenade ont un créole dont le lexique est à dominante française. Cette distinction apparemment insignifiante n’est pas sous-estimée dans la sous-région ; elle renforce la rupture de communication entre les créolophones de la Caraïbe. D’autre part, les implications dans le domaine de l’éducation où l’anglais est la langue officielle et la langue de l’éducation9 ravivent la question de l’identité culturelle de ces hommes à la fois créoles et européens quant à leur forte adhésion aux valeurs occidentales. Selon D. R Craig (1980), dans tous ces territoires, la langue officielle est une forme d’anglais acceptable au niveau international, mais dans la vie courante, l’immense majorité de la population parle un créole anglais et français. La population, souligne-t-il, n’a jamais considéré le créole comme une véritable langue. Cela vient du fait que la Grande-Bretagne a traditionnellement feint d’ignorer les formes linguistiques indigènes, et considéré l’anglais comme la langue maternelle de tous les territoires britanniques. Une étude plus favorable au créole lui assurerait seulement de continuer son existence, et d’exprimer une identité caribéenne. Pierre Vérin souligne la représentation sociale négative du créole (vérin) : ce patois français corrompu fait l’objet d’une accusation difficile à réfuter, il est associé aux analphabètes. La scolarisation, élargie depuis à toutes les 9

Cf. Devonish, Proudfoot, ou A. Henriot-Van Zanten et Anderson-Lewwitt.

92

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

couches sociales, situe la rivalité entre les deux langues à d’autres niveaux de considération. L’étude de l’état de la question linguistique et culturelle dans les trois îles créolophones, Sainte-Lucie, Dominique, Trinidad, toutes trois indépendantes, respectivement depuis 1979, 1978, 1962, rend bien compte de la problématique identitaire dans la Caraïbe anglaise. La diversité des points de vue sur la représentation et le statut des langues, déplace le conflit essentiellement linguistique à un niveau politique, éducatif, culturel et économique, disons identitaire. Le conflit se manifeste car il y a cohabitation de deux langues qui honorent des fonctions sociales différentes. Or, leur haute fonction culturelle qui semble devoir réconcilier les langues historiquement en contact, ne parvient pas à pacifier le discours identitaire lorsque ce dernier s’appuie sur les origines de ces parlers remettant en scène les maîtres blancs et les esclaves noirs. Les conflits de langues de culture en Caraïbe anglophone sont significatifs des obstacles idéologiques à surmonter dans la pratique des langues qui doivent répondre aux défis identitaires de l’ère postcoloniale. À Sainte-Lucie, île occupée par les Français de 1650 à 1763, l’anglais reste la langue officielle, alors que la plupart des habitants parlent un créole à base lexicale française. Le patois est la langue de la révolte, de la préservation de la mémoire africaine, notamment des religions. Les mots voudou (Voodoo), tjenbwa ou kenbwa (sorcellerie), par exemple, étaient et sont identifiés au patwa (patois) plutôt qu’à l’anglais. Ces vestiges des religions africaines sont perçus avec crainte ; ils caractérisent tout ce qui est le diable ou blue-black à Sainte-Lucie. L’hostilité envers le patois renvoie comme dans toute la Caraïbe, sauf dans la Caraïbe néerlandaise, à la distinction des classes sociales. L’élite utilise le patois comme seconde langue, tandis que la masse populaire le parle la plupart du temps. Certains sociolinguistes envisagent la mort du patois en raison de l’aversion qu’éprouve l’élite à son égard. Pour A. Bentolila (1990) qui s’est intéressé aux problèmes de l’alphabétisation à Sainte-Lucie, il ne fait aucun doute que c’est la compétence linguistique des élèves qui est cause d’un fort taux d’échec scolaire. En effet, la langue maternelle d’un bon nombre d’enfants est le créole. Dans la plupart des cas, l’anglais est mal ou pas du tout maîtrisé. Cet état de fait entraîne des réactions souvent passionnelles, des prises de positions « péremptoires ». L’Ecole qui a souvent dénoncé les inégalités sociales et l’injuste sélection en faveur de ceux qui maîtrisent sa langue d’enseignement, vient ici, à travers le débat de l’échec scolaire, remettre en mémoire les causes et conséquences historiques du conflit linguistique en Caraïbe. Encore de nos jours, la non-réussite des élèves en contexte créolophone trouve sa justification dans la non-considération de la langue maternelle de l’élève lorsque celle-ci est le créole. Le non-

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

93

respect du patrimoine linguistique légué par les esclaves ravive la notion de conflit en Caraïbe. À l’insécurité linguistique des élèves, A. Bentolila ajoute le problème des contenus pédagogiques et la formation des maîtres aux valeurs non endogènes. Toutefois, la revendication linguistique du créole à SainteLucie s’inscrit dans celle plus large d’une quête identitaire dont le créole exprime la recherche de l’authenticité. Mais la déperdition du créole risque de faire évoluer les comportements culturels. Nous nous appuyons sur les travaux de L. D. Carrington (1990) qui reconsidère le pourcentage de créolophones recensés en 1946, soit 97 %, dont 43 % de monolingues. Selon le linguiste trinidadien, dans les années 90, la situation a beaucoup évolué. Le nombre de bilingues a considérablement augmenté. Comme en Guadeloupe ou en Martinique, îles voisines francophones et créolophones, la cause principale de cette évolution comportementale est due à la démocratisation de l’enseignement dans les années 1960. Le créole, toutefois, reste une préoccupation sociale. Dans le secteur public, fait remarquer L. D. Carrington, l’usage du créole est encouragé par le ministère de l’agriculture et de la santé afin de faciliter la communication professionnelle. L’instrumentalisation du Sainte-Lucien, entreprise par des linguistes guadeloupéens, jamaïcains, sainte-luciens et des enseignants intéressés, est jugée plus que nécessaire voire utile. D’autre part la parution de journaux bilingues, tel le Balata a permis la familiarisation des lecteurs avec le système graphique. De nombreux ouvrages en créole tels que la traduction de la bible et un dictionnaire par les linguistes sainteluciens, David Frank et Jones Mondésir, confirment l’intérêt porté à la langue. Cette reconnaissance sociale grandissante de la langue créole10 atténuera-t-elle pour autant les tensions conflictuelles qui caractérisent sa relation avec la langue de l’ancien colonisateur ?

Vers la résolution du conflit de langues en Caraïbe ? La démocratisation de l’enseignement favorise, sans nul doute, la mise en concurrence des langues créoles et européennes. La variable objective, langue maternelle, en faveur d’une européanisation de l’expression des créolophones peut annoncer une résolution pacifique du conflit linguistique en Caraïbe insulaire anglophone. Certes, cette dynamique de 10 La langue sera grandement fêtée dans le Symposium et Exposition Créoles, à la Dominique, du 22 au 24 octobre 20I3, dans le cadre du 30e Anniversaire de la Journée internationale créole. L’objectif principal du Symposium et de l'Exposition est de créer un espace culturel et économique et de renforcer la coopération entre les pays partageant un patrimoine commun créole.

94

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

l’identité culturelle qui se nourrit désormais de ses deux apports linguistiques nous semble être la cause principale de la nouvelle approche des langues ; cette approche beaucoup moins conflictuelle n’atténue cependant pas les notes dissonantes qui soulignent l’ambivalence des Caribéens à l’égard de leurs deux langues. La dissonance cognitive pourrait se comprendre en ces termes : notre culture est avant tout caribéenne. Elle se fonde sur un héritage linguistique qui rappelle la créativité culturelle d’une région. Si l’anglais est la langue du développement social, la langue créole reste celle du développement culturel. C’est elle qui inspire nos artistes, nos littéraires, nos politiques culturelles. C’est elle qui nous réunit annuellement bon nombre de caribéens autour d’événements culturels tels le Dominica’s World Creole Music Festival chaque mois d’octobre. Pour approfondir la question épineuse de la politique linguistique dans la Caraïbe, véritable source de conflits identitaires, nous nous sommes référé aux grandes lignes de la communication du linguiste haïtien Pierre Vernet (2004) qui rappelle que l’on peut comprendre la politique linguistique comme un processus permanent et continu d’élimination de barrières linguistiques entre des pôles différents, ou inversement comme un ensemble de tentatives visant la réduction de la distance communicationnelle, conçue globalement aux plans linguistique et sémiologique, entre des communautés différentes. Pierre Vernet soulève la problématique suivante : aborder l’espace Caraïbe dans une perspective de politique linguistique c’est donc l’aborder dans ses soubassements (ceux des différents peuples impliqués dans cette politique), dans ses objectifs et dans ses stratégies. Il s’agit de traiter principalement des fondations de ces peuples du point de vue de leur historicité, c’est-à-dire de leur construction dans les prolongements actuels. La langue est la synthèse de toutes les expériences humaines. Celle ou celui qui parle sa langue donne à voir son passé, son présent, son conscient, son inconscient, ses schèmes de pensée, sa vision du monde, etc. Quant aux stratégies, elles se définissent, selon Pierre Vernet, à partir des paramètres fondamentaux : soubassements, vision globale, objectifs en termes d’intérêts et de besoins, moyens dont on peut disposer. C’est dire qu’aborder l’espace Caraïbe dans une perspective de politique linguistique c’est fondamentalement poser la question incontournable de la politique tout court de la Caraïbe, c’est poser la question de cet espace dans sa dimension géopolitique. Une politique linguistique n’est pas viable en dehors d’une Politique. La première est tributaire de la deuxième et y est intégrée.

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

95

La situation linguistique et les expériences des différents pays présents à ces assises (Dominique, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Sainte-Lucie, Guyane française, Haïti), telles qu’elles ont été présentées par les différents représentants de ces derniers, témoignent, souligne le linguiste haïtien, de différences et d’une certaine valorisation de la diversité. Elles ont bien montré cependant, par-delà ces différences et cette diversité, qu’elles s’inscrivent toutes dans une démarche commune et convergente, la perspective d’une politique linguistique tournée vers : -

-

l’harmonisation des rapports entre les langues en présence (le créole, le français, l’anglais, etc. pour ne citer que les plus importantes et les plus communes aux pays concernés) ; l’élimination des barrières linguistiques.

La question de l’instrumentalisation des langues créoles est nécessairement soulevée par Pierre Vernet ainsi que celle de la fonctionnalisation du français et de l’anglais. Ces démarches appliquées et concrétisées, affirme-t-il, doivent avoir pour effet de réduire la distance entre les communautés sociolinguistiques et de casser la hiérarchisation manifestée actuellement dans les rapports entre ces langues au plan de leur statut dans les dimensions sociales, culturelles, politiques et financières. Cependant, cette politique, pour avoir quelque chance d’avancer, prend soin d’ajouter Pierre Vernet - ne peut être une simple « volonté politique » d’une équipe au pouvoir mais doit traduire un véritable projet de société recueillant l’adhésion de toutes les couches de la population du pays concerné et intégrant dans sa globalité et sa cohérence tous les secteurs de la vie nationale (agriculture, santé, tourisme, justice, etc). Dans les pays de la Caraïbe, en effet, nombreuses ont été, certaines plus importantes que d’autres, les démarches de Politique Linguistique. Malgré certaines avancées elles se sont toutes heurtées à un système global (socioéconomique et politique) contraignant voire franchement défavorable ou hostile. Le cas d’Haïti, pays de la Caraïbe ayant la plus forte population de locuteurs créolophones unilingues et ayant connu la plus grande avancée au plan formel dans les démarches de Politique Linguistique, illustre parfaitement cette démonstration. Après avoir décrit la situation sociolinguistique par le biais de la réforme éducative en Haïti, Pierre Vernet conclut sur cette idée fondamentale : la leçon à tirer est que toute démarche de politique linguistique qui ne s’appuie pas sur une volonté politique elle-même émanant d’un projet social cohérent et global soutenu par toutes les couches de la population, risque d’être voué à l’échec. La proposition du

96

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

linguiste est la suivante : dans le cadre des objectifs de nos présentes assises les démarches s’engagent à la fois sur deux plans : national, respectivement pour chacun de nos pays et régional c’est-à-dire dans un cadre de géopolitique.

Conclusion Tout conflit enregistré dans l’histoire s’inscrit dans le débat sur les valeurs qui expriment généralement le prix que les hommes attachent à ce qui participe de leur équilibre existentiel. En Caraïbe, le conflit linguistique pose la question de la hiérarchisation des langues dans un contexte colonial qui n’accorda de statut social ni aux esclaves ni à la langue créole, leur principal moyen de communication interculturelle. L’ère postcoloniale est, sans conteste, favorable à l’expression culturelle des langues créoles mais elle parvient difficilement à gommer les représentations négatives de ces dernières ancrées dans les idéologies coloniales, peu favorables à leur prise en compte et valorisation en milieu scolaire où l’estime de soi et la reconnaissance sociale s’acquièrent. Nul ne saurait ignorer les conditions plus ou moins pacifiques de la coexistence des langues créoles et européennes dans la région. Elles interfèrent au quotidien aux niveaux syntaxique, phonologique, lexical. Les écrivains de la créolité11 ont su en faire une langue très appréciée du métissage de la pensée littéraire, une écriture de l’oralitude. Les langues créoles et européennes ont favorisé diverses stratégies identitaires vouées à la réduction des conflits que leur proximité coloniale génère. Si dans les sociétés anglophones, le choix de la langue d’expression s’inscrit de moins en moins dans une problématique de conflit ce n’est point dû à une politique linguistique menée en ce sens, mais à l’effet direct de la dynamique sociale des langues créoles et européennes historiquement en contact, depuis la période coloniale. Les anglophones de la Caraïbe sont confrontés de moins en moins au dilemme identitaire générateur de conflits linguistiques. C’est la régénération de la langue maternelle désormais anglaise pour la grande majorité de la population qui atténue la charge idéologique inhérente à la langue du colonisateur. De plus, la politique éducative menée dans le contexte postcolonial conforte la première place de la langue de l’ancien colonisateur dans les programmes scolaires. La représentation de la langue anglaise dans le petit Etat du Commonwealth de la Dominique est 11 Pour en savoir plus sur le mouvement littéraire de la créolité, lire Condé et Cottenet-Hage.

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

97

clairement définie : l’anglais fait partie de l’héritage culturel de la Dominique et est la langue des échanges internationaux, comme celle des examens régionaux. Toutefois, il faut souligner le rôle attribué aux parlers locaux dont les locuteurs feront un usage approprié dans leur raisonnement. Ceci permettra d’avoir, selon les auteurs du document officiel12 qui éclaire les rapports de langue dans l’île, des individus créatifs, flexibles, conscients de leur environnement, capables de contribuer au développement de leur société. Les langues créoles dans le développement culturel des îles anglophones jouent leur atout culturel. Leur valeur artistique est souvent mise en avant dans les projets culturels. Il suffit de reprendre les objectifs spécifiques du Symposium et de l'Exposition organisés dans le cadre du 30ème Anniversaire de la Journée internationale créole dans l’île de la Dominique. Il est question de partager et réfléchir sur les expériences et actions en relation avec le développement, de mettre l’accent sur la promotion de la langue et culture créole et de souligner l'impact de telles actions sur les sociétés créoles. Il s’agit aussi de mener une réflexion sur les opportunités et les défis actuels et d’élaborer des stratégies de coopération comme voie à suivre. Il importe aux organisateurs de promouvoir des industries culturelles créoles et de renforcer les liens et forger des réseaux parmi les pays ayant en commun la langue et la culture créole. Les anglophones de la Caraïbe qui appellent depuis les années 90 à renoncer au ressentiment colonial pour s’inscrire essentiellement dans l’action sociale, ne seraient-ils plus prisonniers de l’opposition binaire langue créole-langue européenne, opposition qui ne serait aux yeux de Maryse Condé (1995) qu’un héritage de l’obsession coloniale entre vainqueur et victime ? Faussement révolutionnaire, précise-t-elle, cette dichotomie linguistique est en réalité passéiste et nie les découvertes fondamentales sur l’ordre et le pouvoir sociétal qui sont impliquées. Les sociétés humaines peuvent considérer les conflits qui les traversent comme de véritables points de repères historiques du niveau de conscience qu’elles ont du potentiel d’une nation. Tout conflit renvoie à sa propre dynamique. Sa lisibilité est porteuse d’informations sur le social, le culturel, le politique, l’économique et l’éducatif. Les jeunes Etats-nations caribéens, en ce sens, sont de véritables laboratoires d’observations des effets du progrès lorsqu’il est considéré comme moteur de l’Histoire. 12

Cf. Commonwealth of Dominica, Language Arts Curriculum Guide Grade 2. Produced by the Curriculum Unit, Ministry of Education, Sports and Youth Affairs with funding assistance from the Organization of American States, Dominica, 1996, p.3.

98

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

Notre lecture des conflits en contexte postcolonial rend compte de la dynamique identitaire en Caraïbe. Le nouveau paradigme caribéen a le mérite de prendre en compte le nouveau rééquilibrage des forces en jeu : elles sont économiques, culturelles, scientifiques, technologiques et citoyennes. Les défis identitaires de l’ère postcoloniale annoncent l’impossibilité d’imaginer l’émergence d’une langue caraïbe ou créole ou antillaise dans le contexte actuel de la mondialisation qui recommande à celui qui veut s’adapter efficacement au temps nouveau la maîtrise d’au moins trois langues : locale, nationale et internationale. Le prolongement de notre réflexion sur le langage des conflits en Caraïbe peut nous conduire à d’autres lectures des résolutions de conflits historiques dans les pays anglophones qui n’ont pas connu la colonisation et l’esclavage. Il nous importe aussi d’étudier le rapport des « diasporisés » aux conflits culturels qui caractérisent la Caraïbe : leur appréhension des méfaits de l’histoire coloniale est-elle proche de celle de ceux qui construisent la Caraïbe du dedans ? A partir de quel discours sur la culture, développent-ils les stratégies identitaires favorables à la fois à l’épanouissement de leur identité résidentielle et au développement de leur pays d’origine ? Certes, il n’est guère de progrès enregistré dans l’histoire de l’humanité qui n’a pas été suivi d’un cortège de maux ; ils sont l’expression des nouveaux conflits propres à chaque grand virage de l’histoire des peuples qui œuvrent pour leur mieux-être. D’autres leçons de vie d’une région caraïbe en pleine affirmation identitaire, ne manqueront pas de s’imposer, enrichissant ainsi la notion de conflit en Caraïbe voire dans le reste du monde.

Travaux Cités Alleyne, Mervin C., A linguistic Perspective on the Caribbean, Washington, DC, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1985. Bentolila, Alain, “Réflexions sur le problème de l’alphabétisation à SainteLucie,” Créole et éducation, Espace créole 7: GEREC, 9–30. Bolland, Nigel O., The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation. A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and Society, Kingston, Miami, Ian Randle Publishers, 2003. Burnett, Paula Derek Walcott Politics and Poetics Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Carrington, L. D., “Le conflit linguistique à l’école dans les Caraïbes,” Bulletin de Psychologie 34 (351) (1980), 669–677.

Bruce Jno-Baptiste

99

—. “The Instrumentalisation of St. Lucian,” International Journal of Sociology of Language 85 (1990), 71–80. —. “Creoles and Other Tongues in Caribbean Development,” Journal of pidgin and Creole languages 8 (1993), 125–133. Condé, Maryse, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, Penser la créolité, Paris: Karthala, 1995. Craig, D. R., “Models for Educational Policy in Creole Speaking Communities,” In Albert Valdman and R. Highfield, Eds., Theorical Orientations in Creole Studies, New York: Academic Press, 1980, 245-265. Devonish, Hubert, Language and Liberation. Creole language Politics in the Caribbean, London: Karia Press, 1986. Harney, Stefano, Nationalism and Identity Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora, London & New Jersey: University of the West Indies, Kingston, Zed books, 1996. Henriot-Van Zanten, K. Anderson-Lewwitt, “L’anthropologie de l’éducation aux Etats-Unis: méthode des théories et application d’une discipline en evolution,” Revue Française de Pédagogie 101: (oct-novdéc 1992), 79–104. Jno-Baptiste, Bruce, La dynamique identitaire de la Dominique. Quelles stratégies pour un petit Etat caribéen anglophone?, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Lewis, Gordon K., Growth of the Modern West Indies, Kingston, Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004. Nettleford, Rex, Inward Stretch Outward Reach. A Voice from the Caribbean, London: Macmillan Press, 1993. —. In Caribbean Cultural Identity. The Case of Jamaica. An Essay in Cultural Dynamics, Kingston, Miami, Princeton: Ian Randle Publishers, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1978, 2003. —. “Freedom of Expression and the Caribbean Media,” In Robert Martin, ed., Speaking Freely. Expression and the Law in the Commonwealth, Toronto, ON, Irwin Law, 1999, 41-58. Premdas, Ralph, Ethnic Conflict and Development: the Case of Guyana, Brookfield VT: Ashgate, 1995. —. Trinidad and Tobago: Ethnic Conflict, Inequality, and Public Sector Governance, Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Proudfoot, Mary, Britain and the United States in the Caribbean, London: Faber & Faber, 1954. Vérin, Pierre, “The Rivalry of Creole and English in the West Indies,” West-Indishe-Gids 38 (1958), 163–167.

100

La dynamique des conflits de langues en Caraïbe

Vernet, Pierre, “Politique linguistique dans les Caraïbes,” Réunion générale d’experts sur l’enseignement du français et les politiques linguistiques dans les pays francophones des Caraïbes, Agence Internationale de la Francophonie et le Ministère de l’Education de Sainte-Lucie, Castries, 22-24 Juin 2004 à Castries. Warner, K. G., “Creole Language and National Identity in the Caribbean” CLA Journal 20 (3):319–331.

“THE BUSINESS OF BECOMING A PEOPLE”: REBELLION AND REVOLUTION IN EARL LOVELACE’S IS JUST A MOVIE RITA KERESZTESI UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Scholarship on the 1970 Black Power revolution of Trinidad, written mostly by historians and social scientists, has been ambivalent about the naming of the events, and whether they amounted to a full-blown revolution or were merely isolated instances of rebellion enacted by fragmented groups of the military, trade unions, university students and political activists. This article examines the nature of political conflict, whether called rebellion or revolution, through the events that started in February 1970 in Port of Spain but spread to other parts of Trinidad and lasted for nearly a year. We shall examine their representation in fiction, specifically in the writings of Earl Lovelace. The events of 1970 are interchangeably called a rebellion or a revolution, based on the evaluators’ perspective and level of participation. Generally, the difference between these two forms of conflict is defined as such: a rebellion is resistance to or defiance of any authority, while a revolution is an actual overthrow of an established government or political system by the people. They are often viewed in chronological sequence in relation to each other: a rebellion as a means to a full-blown revolution that fundamentally changes the political system and its leadership. Harold Cruse, the African American historian of the era, defined the differences as such: “Social change in any society can be either revolutionary or evolutionary depending on what organizational methods are pursued and who directs the organizational methods” (2009, 100). Cruse adds: “a rebellion is not a revolutionary movement unless it changes the structural arrangements of the society or else is able to project programmatic ideas toward that end” (101–102). Political conflicts in the postcolonial Caribbean context have moved from binary confrontations between colonizers and the colonized, masters and the enslaved, to more opaque modes of competition between the

102

“The Business of Becoming a People”

dominant and the dominated, the privileged and the disenfranchised. While the lines of demarcation are quite clear globally with foreign financial and political institutions dictating the terms, often euphemized as “structural adjustments,” and dividing the world into those who lend and those who are permanently indebted, the internal divisions have become more complex and murkily layered. Besides, conflicts between social classes and ethnic groups who compete for economic, political, spiritual and cultural sustenance, conflicts within groups based on socio-economic status, and differences between visions for a collective future have also come to the fore. Such intra-group conflicts have taken precedent during the decades immediately following independence, culminating in military coups, rebellions or full-blown revolutions. The message of “Massa Day Gone,” Eric Williams’s famous Woodford Square speech delivered on March 22, 1961, may have declared the end of one kind of conflict, but it also signalled the beginning of new levels of social stratification and conflict. In his short fiction, novels and essays, the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace has consistently returned to themes of historical and political conflicts, and most recently in his novel Is Just a Movie (2011). The novel revisits the Black Power movement and the 1970 events that he had already addressed in previous writings, such as The Dragon Can’t Dance and his short story collection A Brief Conversion and Other Stories, as well as in short essays and newspaper articles re-published in the collection Growing in the Dark: Selected Essays (2003). In a conversation with B. C. Pires, soon after the launch of the novel Is Just a Movie, Lovelace sums up the key motive that drives the novel: “One of the things really at the heart of this book is the idea that, unless we acknowledge that some people here have been engaged in rebellion—that that has been their work, so to speak—we don’t understand them and don’t understand the society” (Pires). By highlighting the importance of the “work” of rebellion, Lovelace re-imagines and re-affirms Caribbean identity as born out of resistance in order to claim one’s self as an individual and as a member of a group and nation. Lovelace makes a point of calling efforts at resistance to colonial domination or against sustained inequalities after Independence “rebellions” in order to circumvent negative comparisons with more focused social movements or full-blown revolutions. Such an “evolutionary” approach to social change gives credit to the sustained and incremental efforts of everyday people whose actions did not always amount to revolutions but would facilitate lasting social change. The naming of the 1970 Black Power revolution is often contested depending on whether it is regarded as a failed rebellion by disjointed groups or an

Rita Keresztesi

103

organized revolution. Historians have taken issue with the leadership and sequence of key events, since at the time it was not immediately clear if the groups that surfaced during the events would have concerted their efforts, or if there was a serendipitous coincidence of timing and activism. For example, it is debated whether the mutiny of the army was connected to the trade unions’ massive strikes and the radicalization of the UWI St. Augustine campus, or to the agenda and activism of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC). 1 While “Caribbeanness” has been defined historically through the violence inflicted on the population by enslavement, colonization and indentured servitude, or through the processes of creolization, mixing and migration, there has also been a strong tradition of defining Caribbean identity through resistance and rebellion. As opposed to narratives of victimization, the story of the region has been retold from the perspective of resistance movements, such as slave rebellions, maroon societies, religious societies and spiritual practices, musical soundings and Blacknationalist movements. 2 Lovelace’s fiction and essays consistently define Caribbean identity through resistance, emphasizing the importance of rebellion, personal or collective, ill-defined or revolutionary, as the constitutive element to self- and nation-hood. His fictional heroes vie for more than becoming the sum total of their circumstances, therefore he gives credit and affords dignity to the lesser heroes of history, to the “badjohns,” the “spiritual Baptists” or the “stickfighters,” often labelled as “delinquents.” Lovelace views such characters as those who strive to be revolutionaries even though they lack the political sophistication of their more educated but often corrupt and self-serving counterparts, often represented as career politicians. In fact, he juxtaposes the fallibility and corruption of more likely leaders with the naïve but inspired selflessness of his “heroes,” who are often less clear on their goals and political ambitions but are more favourably depicted than his career politician characters. In the previously cited interview with Pires, Lovelace elaborates on the role of rebellion to resist collective forms of oppression: And now I jump back to Is Just a Movie, where, unless we acknowledge that people have been rebelling, unless we see that, we can’t see them. We 1 See discussions on the timing of events and the participants in Ryan &Stewart. NJAC was founded in February 1969. For NJAC’s own definition of what goals they aimed to achieve at the time, see postings on their website: http://www.njactt.org. 2 See, among others, Meeks.

104

“The Business of Becoming a People” see them as delinquents and not as revolutionaries; and I use the word “revolutionaries” with great caution, because they’re not quite; but they’re certainly people rebelling against a certain set of circumstances and rebelling on behalf of something. (Pires)

Ultimately, dispersed acts of rebellion become tools to self-affirmation and self-recognition based on intrinsic characteristics, whether historical, cultural or imagined. In his fiction, the author bypasses the binary pattern of the master-slave dialectic, either externally imposed or internalized, that drives many of the activist texts of the Black Power era, such as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks or Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, among others. Lovelace instead situates rebellious self-affirmation and self-hood within local Afro-centric Caribbean cultural and spiritual traditions that may not yield to fully formed and politically mature acts of resistance, but which still form the kern and locus of a homegrown social movement. For example, Lovelace connects the spirit of rebellion with the spirit of playing mas during the Carnival season. In the conversation with Pires he states: “Carnival is still an occasion when we re-affirm what we are about… to show each other our better selves… Part of the business of becoming a people is to see how we can become ourselves.” Carnival, rebellion and revolution share a common drive for self-affirmation, also seen in the carnivalesque processions of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA parades and pageants during the early decades of the twentieth century. Ironically, the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Trinidad started on a Thursday, the day after the close of the 1970 Carnival celebrations, a detail not lost on any of the participants and historians. Earl Lovelace commented on and fictionalized the 1970 Black Power revolution numerous times. For him, the events epitomized the unfinished business of independence where many issues, such as reparations, land redistribution and inequality based on race, gained no satisfactory resolution. The 1970 events have figured heavily on the political and cultural imagination, as the calypso tune entitled “The Message of ‘70” by the Trinidadian kaiso singer Chalkdust attests: Sometimes I sit and wonder do Black people remember the message of dignity we got in 1970? Because that revolution changed the old Caribbean, in every town and village Black people got the message. The message showed us the beauty of Blackness. Yet some women, still in their White stupidness,

Rita Keresztesi

105

pressing up their hair [. . .] they ain’t get the message as yet! I am uncomfortable with our voice my people. [. . .] How long shall we continue to bear in them White value? Some men are prepared to die wearing English coat and tie. Tchaikovsky some them prefer, rather than dear Lord Kitchener! [. . .] To all these folks, my brother, let’s stretch our helping hand, so that one day they will see the message of 1970. (Chalkdust 1976)

In his 1976 retrospective calypso of the Black Power Revolution, Dr. Hollis Liverpool, whose stage sobriquet is “The Mighty Chalkdust” or “Chalkdust” or “Chalkie,” laments that the Black Power message was still relevant even then. Historically, as the Trinidadian scholar Selwyn Ryan argues: “Black Power was not an imported ideology. Indeed, the struggle for it constituted the warp and woof of Caribbean history” (Ryan & Stewart 1995, 26). Caribbeanness is the outcome of conflict and contested identities. Antagonism between groups based on cultural and spiritual practices, as well as contestation because of uneven access to resources and power, have led to various levels of conflict manifested in revolts and local struggles within and between communities. However, acts of resistance do bring individuals and collectives together, though not without clashes and friction, into what Edouard Glissant calls “rhizome-identities,” much like the coastal ecosystems of mangrove forests found in the Caribbean. Similarly, noting the importance of “rhizomatic” models of politics, Derek Walcott has said: In the Caribbean, we do not pretend to exercise power in the historical sense. I think that what our politicians define as power, the need for it, or the lack of it, should have another name; that like in America, what energizes our society is the spiritual force of a culture shaping itself, and it can do this without the formula of politics. (Walcott 51)

The rhizomatic model of Caribbean identity executed through the work of culture is also the essence of Earl Lovelace’s constant return to the themes of conflict and acts of rebellion in his fiction. Wilson Harris has criticized Caribbean historians for omitting the entire field of imagination from their research to make sense of collective events and activism

106

“The Business of Becoming a People”

(Meeks 2000, xiii). Viewing and revisiting events of conflict through the lens of literature is a kind of psychological “working through” trauma. Preceding and immediately preparing the activism and following violent conflicts of the Black Power movement in the English-speaking Caribbean were the two spectacles of banning activists from entering or returning to the islands from North America—Walter Rodney from returning to Jamaica in October 1968 and Stokely Carmichael from visiting his homeland, Trinidad, a year later. Reflecting on the frontlines that surfaced less than a decade after Independence, the historian Selwyn Ryan notes the dilemma of intra-group conflict: To many, it was ironic that countries which had been ruled by black governments for over a decade should nurture groups which would respond positively to slogans of the sort [of Black Power]. That black governments would ban books written by people like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad and H. Rap Brown or debar some of the leading advocates of black power in the Americas, including people like Carmichael, James Foreman and Walter Rodney, from entering the islands was perhaps even more confusing. (Ryan & Stewart 1995, 25)

The banning of Guyanese History Professor Walter Rodney from returning to his teaching post at the University of the West Indies at Mona by the Jamaican government in October 1968 set off a domino effect in the region. To the ruling Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), Rodney’s work with the “downpressed” and the Rastafari communities in the gullies and shantytowns of West Kingston raised fears of a generalized strike that would unite students and academics with workers, radicalized youth and Rastafarians, linking Uptown with Downtown. After attending the Black Writers Conference in Montreal, Canada, he was not allowed to return to Jamaica by the government of Hugh Shearer. The Minister of Home Affairs warned: “In my term of office, and in reading of the records of problems in this country, I never come across a man who offers a greater threat to the security of this land than does Walter Rodney” (Gonsalves 132). The news of the ban had reverberations not only on the streets of Kingston and the Mona campus, but also elsewhere in the Caribbean, England, the United States and Canada. The riots in Jamaica energized and radicalized the Black Power message, fuelling political and cultural activism across the Caribbean. There were similar unrests and revolts in Trinidad, Curaçao, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Aruba and Anguilla (Ryan & Stewart, 25). In Canada, at the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, on February 26, 1969, West Indian students rioted and seriously damaged the University’s computer system to confront the racially

Rita Keresztesi

107

discriminatory policies of the administration and show solidarity for Rodney (Belgrave) The second banning took place in 1969, when Stokely Carmichael— one of the leading figures of the United States Black Power movement, originally from Trinidad—was denied entry to the island of his birth by the Eric Williams government, amid fears that his visit would entice further political and racial tensions. Williams hoped to avoid adding fuel to the already escalating labour and political conflicts in Trinidad. This event was notably recorded in the calypso “The Letter” by Chalkdust: I see you are protecting our dear Nation from communists and subversion, so you ban Carmichael from our homeland. I’m not saying you are wrong, please understand, but I feel there are, Mr. Minister, more dangerous enemies here. 3

Regardless, the feared riots erupted in 1970, partially in response to the February anniversary of the Sir George Williams incident but, more generally, to vent disappointment with the accomplishments of the Eric Williams government. In Port of Spain, students and supporters, led by the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), staged a solidarity march for the West Indian students who were still under investigation both in Canada and back home in their respective islands. In addition to the mass demonstrations, a popular army revolt added to the general crisis of the government; in response, Prime Minister Eric Williams declared a state of emergency. 4 The banning of Carmichael and Williams’ response to the student and military revolts instigated a chain of events that culminated in the full-blown Black Power Revolution of 1970. In Is Just a Movie, Lovelace revisits the Black Power era, but this time from the perspective of the periphery. By focusing on the lives of the inhabitants of the imaginary village of “Cascadu,” and by making the various political figures only tangential to the plot, Lovelace offers an alternative vision of the past and new insights to the present—how to account for today’s Trinidad shaped by the Black Power Revolution that took place more than four decades ago. In the social sciences, the 3 This quote was sent to me through email by my friend and colleague Winthrop “Troppy” R. Holder, who is the author of Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless. 4 See Omawale. For a retrospective account of the timeline of events, see Meeks in Ryan & Stewart.

108

“The Business of Becoming a People”

evaluation of a rebellion ranks it below a revolution based on the political consciousness of the leaders and the clarity of the goals and methods to achieve them. Lovelace’s fiction re-covers the 1970 rebellion and elevates it in importance because of the conflicts’ impact on the formation and radicalization of the collective self in the Caribbean context. 5 The author returns to the events of the February Revolution of 1970 repeatedly in his writings, each time addressing it from a different perspective and with new insights. In The Dragon Can’t Dance, written shortly after the actual events and published nine years later, he approaches the revolution as farce, as a failure, led by a group of “badjohns” who had no clear understanding of workable goals and strategies for lasting social change. The rebellion in this account is a result of pent-up frustration that never goes beyond the immediacy of diffused anger, therefore it is doomed from the beginning. Its leaders lack vision and the power structure they rebel against never takes them seriously. Their joyride in the stolen police jeep is watched in mild amusement by both the masses, in whose name they rebel, and the police. Fittingly, their rebellion ends when they run out of fuel. The Nine, including Fisheye and Aldrick, are sent to prison where they spend most their time playing pingpong. Declaring Aldrick “crazy” for trying to make sense of the failed rebellion, the Nine disperse to their own corners. Aldrick spends his time in prison reading. As opposed to examples of prisoners gaining an education and a renewed activist consciousness through reading and writing in prison, like in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, none of the prisoners in the novel gain practical insights. Aldrick makes a dispirited assessment of their rebellion as follows: “Is like even when we acting we ain’t the actor” (Lovelace 1998, 188). After their prison sentence, the Nine return to a community that has not changed or improved. When Philo, the commercially successful calypsonian, is asked about “memories” by his young girlfriend Jo Ann, who is “twenty-three, pretty, polished, casual, elegant, Afro,” he claims that he has no memories because: “‘We kill them. ’ He was thinking of his calypsos. ‘We murder them’” (Lovelace 1998, 236). The memories would only remind him of his failure to become the Calypsonian of the Hill. Instead, he sold out as an artist: “‘Copy, invent, imitate. Me, I’m an imitator and an imaginator and a fabricator. That is how I live here’” (236). Taking stock of his life in midlife brings one resolution, the desire “to live,” the desire “to love” (237). It is the same conclusion Aldrick 5

In a similar move, the African American scholar Harold Cruse dedicated much of his scholarship to defining the right theoretical framework to address the activism and radicalism of the Black Power era.

Rita Keresztesi

109

arrives at after he is let out of prison. They both return to the Hill— Aldrick, disenchanted with being the Dragon, goes back to painting signs, while Philo finally gains entry into the aging Carnival Queen Miss Cleofilda’s bedroom. As if “the world was truly coming to an end,” the narrative and the farce of the revolution come to an end (240). In A Brief Conversion, Lovelace returns to the Black Power era, dedicating three of the stories to the character of Blues, who is a street performer, the “Fire Eater” (Lovelace 1988). In the story “The Coward,” Lovelace leads Blues from Cunaripo to Port of Spain, the centre of the Black Power revolution. Blues is only a bystander to the carnival-like procession of Black Power demonstrators through his new job as a security guard for the “Royal Bank”: And then Blues was standing in front of the bandstand among thousands where, surrounded by Nubian standard bearers, holding up flags of black, red and green, black leaders with necklaces of clenched black fists and dashikis covered with maps of Africa roared for freedom. (46–47).

The narrator of this story, Santo the journalist, is “covering the demonstrations for The Standard” (48). Blues and Santo are both passive bystanders to this public show of Black pride—while Santo records the tenor of the demands to be disseminated, Blues translates the Black Power movement’s positive collective demands for “rights,” “dignity” and “justice” into his own understanding, that of fear. Blues comments: “I listen to every speech and not one of them understand the price they asking. People will get kill” (49). The final story returns Blues to his previous identity as a street performer, the Fire Eater. He is killed anyway, but not because of the political demonstrations, he sets himself on fire by chance while performing his street circus act (58). Blues aims for fame and recognition based on external but misguided expectations, while he shies away from a collective affirmation of his identity during the Black Power demonstrations. Through Blues, Lovelace juxtaposes individual and collective forms of becoming one’s “best self.” Blues chooses the solo path of a circus performer, his act a borderline freak show, in the midst of a budding Black Nationalist movement. After a long hiatus, in Is Just a Movie Lovelace returns to the Black Power Revolution, but instead of re-living the events as aspiring actors (as in The Dragon Can’t Dance) or spectators (as in the “Fire Eater” stories), he now situates the novel during the aftermath of the Revolution in the remote village of “Cascadu.” He tells the story from the perspectives of three characters: King Kala, the deposed Calypso King who overstays his welcome in the calypso tent by insisting on singing revolution when

110

“The Business of Becoming a People”

people only want to dance; Sonnyboy the badjohn, who wants to be recognized as one of the Black Power revolutionaries, years after the events; and V. S. Rooplal the has-been Black Power militant, who now poses as a “motivational speaker” from Canada (333). Lovelace turns the well-known figures of history, like the Prime Minister Eric Williams, Stokely Carmichael, George Weeks and V. S. Naipaul (disguised as V. S. Rooplal), into minor characters but gives full attention to the local heroes of the village. In this, another re-evaluation of the meaning of the 1970 Revolution, Lovelace redeems those who were not fully conscious of the goals and consequences of the events. The extras become heroes and heroines and the everyday extraordinary. They may not be fully developed revolutionaries, but through their everyday rebellions they achieve what matters the most—to be acknowledged by your peers in your own community. Edouard Glissant defines a similar localized identity and collective in Poetics of Relation: “The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relations, in which every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (11). Just as Sonnyboy strives to be seen, really “seen,” for who he is as a badjohn and revolutionary, Lovelace “sees” the 1970 Revolution for what it was, as Selwyn Ryan has summed up as motivating the popular mobilization for the Black Power cause in his massive biography of Eric Williams: “… the bulk of its support came from people who wanted jobs, better economic and social opportunities for the dispossessed, and black dignity …” (Ryan 2009, 401). In Lovelace’s previous two fictionalized versions of the events, the 1970 Revolution is allegorized by carnival (as mentioned before, the Black Power Revolution started on a Thursday, right after the Ash Wednesday cool-down, on February 26, 1970), connecting playing mas with political activism. They both, potentially, allow for performing one’s “best self.” In his address entitled “Reclaiming Rebellion,” delivered for the Fifth Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture at the University of West Indies at Mona in November 2011, Lovelace discussed his views on the role of conflict, and rebellion in particular, as central to the Caribbean experience: Rebellion is the most valuable resource to have come out of the region… It is rebellion that has given us our heroes and affirmed our humanness, but our embrace of multiculturalism has left us with a state of confusion… We have been inspired by rebellion. But what have we done with what we have done? (TALLAWAH)

Rita Keresztesi

111

Beside his sceptical comments on the current state of social and cultural fragmentation along the lines of ethnicity and class, Lovelace also voices some hope for a collective action. He cautions, though, that “rebellions” are often viewed as acts of “delinquency” by badjohns, steelpan men, mas men and stick-fighters. In The Dragon Can’t Dance, Aldrick is either a “delinquent” or he is a career mas man, the Dragon, and a revolutionary. His “job” is to be the best Dragon on the Hill. In contrast, the novel Is Just a Movie warns that the spirit of the 1970 Revolution was hijacked by opportunist pseudo-revolutionaries and then coopted by the Williams government. The true actors were the extras, not those posing as the revolutionaries. The novel intentionally fictionalizes the historical events and starts when the 1970 Revolution ends: “the Black Power rebellion, after months of roaring, was whimpering to its end” (Lovelace 2011, 7). An American director comes to Trinidad to make a “jungle picture” with local talent as extras, their only job to die when shot by the American stars, an anecdote of the arrival of “foreign industry” (21). While most of the local actors go along with the plot, despite finding their assigned roles offensive, none of them resists until Sonnyboy’s elaborate “magnificent” death (27). Inspired by the performance, another extra, the calypsonian King Kala, follows with a slow death of his own. King Kala responds to the American director who threatens to cut their scene: “No matter what your plot, we are humans who would each like to leave our individual mark, our human signature, on our efforts, and it is as human as we must die” (28). He rallies his fellow actors to convince the director to change the script, but “the Trinidadian fellars, my countrymen, not giving me no support,” because “‘Is just a movie’” (29). Silenced, he sees but does not counter the fallacy in their argument—that they are all accomplished actors of fame and talent, the graduates of the Trinidad Theater Workshop and Strolling Players, or the winners of Best Village competitions who auditioned by reciting from Hamlet or the “Great Makak speech” from Derek Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain (21): “How to say it: Yes. Yes, because if … if indeed it was just a movie, did he, did they not consider that I was … we were just actors?” (33). Here, acting in an American movie filmed in Trinidad allegorizes the 1970 events, making them extras in their own story. The complex plotline follows the trajectory of turning movie extras into dramatic actors on the stage that truly matters, in the village away from the centre of political events that can be easily coopted and used for ulterior political gains. In the novel, Eric Williams is a tragic and lonely character who is “locked in his residence writing a letter of resignation he had begun in

112

“The Business of Becoming a People”

1970” (262). In Lovelace’s reconstruction of the prime minister’s last months in office, the politician is isolated and disillusioned: “he find himself alone” (265). At this point, he is a decade into his failing project of “all-inclusive nationalism” (267), with the economy in crisis and a political upheaval looming, his health deteriorating and, “the final straw,” his mistress leaving him: “make him want to resign in truth” (268). In Lovelace’s fictional retelling of the political crisis a decade after the 1970 revolution, only a miracle could save the prime minister. Lovelace’s amused but realist prose abruptly switches into magical realism, signalling that politics is so corrupt that only extraordinary events can redeem it, such as the death and “resurrection of Dorlene” (293). She becomes the cypher for change: “It was like a new spirit had found its way into the island, the feeling of miracle” (292). When coming into contact with her, hospital patients “found themselves healed of their illnesses” (293). Lovelace’s fictional Williams appropriates and exploits Dorlene’s miraculous resurrection and fuses her magical powers with the power of Carnival in order to coopt both to his project of building a nation of one out of the many: “[…] since the only occasion on which we celebrate together as a nation is Carnival, Cabinet has decided to make this a special Carnival at which we celebrate ourselves and Dorlene Cruickshank” (299). The prime minister uses the spirit of Carnival to his own political agenda: “[…] so that we may kill two birds with one stone,” and calls for “general elections on the Monday after Ash Wednesday […] to show the world the strength and transparency of our democracy” (299). Hoping to benefit from Dorlene’s supernatural powers, the PM orchestrates his own Phoenix-like re-emergence from the ashes by declaring her “a national treasure” to attract tourism and foreign investment to Trinidad. Dorlene becomes the cypher for his new platform to finally unite the nation and “set them on the road to the development of a modern civilisation, a road that has no ethnic association” (298). Carnival becomes a governmentsponsored event, its every aspect controlled and commodified: “Limbo dancing taught by the Julia Edwards School of Dance, King Sailor by Jeff Henry,” and “with sessions on how to wine” (306). It is hard to miss Lovelace’s biting satire and disillusionment in the top-down control of a populist cultural movement. In order to gain control of the nation on the verge of a coup d’état, Williams is pressured into the instauration of a “state of exception” and declares a state of emergency. With that gesture he becomes what the Jamaican poet Edward Baugh calls in his poem “You Ever Notice How” a

Rita Keresztesi

113

“maximum leader.” 6 In legal theory, the concept of a “state of exception,” as articulated by Carl Schmitt and developed in the works of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, is a version of a “state of emergency” but based on the sovereign’s ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public or common good. Thus, Williams enacts the role of a benevolent dictator but masquerades as a Black Power sympathizer and militant. Selwyn Ryan’s biography discusses the post-1970 reincarnation of Williams as “playing mas” in the borrowed costume of a Black nationalist (Ryan 2009, 411). 7 At this point of the plot, the narrative permanently crosses into magical realism that is fitting of the magical thinking of the PM. But the ghost of Carnivals past strikes back when a dark dust cloud forms over the village of Cascadu, embodying the Prime Minister’s new program for the nation. The Prime Minister counters the miracle of Cascadu with his own miracle, the “discovery of new gas and oil finds that would give us the means to take our place at the centre of the world […] and give us here everything they have there” (309). Turning extraordinary measures of repression into the new normal of daily life demands extraordinary performance from the government: They tilted the savannah to face the sea…They build a curtain of buildings to drape the waterfront so that the working population would not be distracted from their labours by sight of the sea. They hang buildings over the street to block out the sun so that we would have the gloom of the city of London. They had wanted fog, but they discovered that due to a clerical error it had not been budgeted for. But that would be a problem easy to correct, the contractors said, since once the paper work was done and the money allocated, it would be a simple matter to pipe in the vapours of sadness from the reservoir hanging over the slum settlement we knew as The Beetham. (311)

6

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=15041. With the recent celebrations of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, the question of leadership is still very relevant, as Lovelace noted in the Baugh lecture: “We can see from this story, the principal dream of Africans was freedom,” a message kept alive in the culture and spirituality of the enslaved. In tragic irony, history was repeated, as Karl Marx noted in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce. In fact, Trinidad saw a third “state of emergency” declared in August 2011 due to a sudden spike in killings and the discovery of weapons and ammunitions in shipping containers (Jones). This was a repetition of the Jamaat al Muslimeen’s attempted coup d’état against the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in July 1990, the second state of emergency twenty years after Eric Williams declared the first in fear of a military coup. 7

114

“The Business of Becoming a People”

As a reaction, a “wind of sadness” envelops the island snaking through the Shanty Towns and creeping into the countryside (312). It is the result of the manufactured consent of the “new Carnival” where, in the novel’s description: “Events traditionally held in the North would be put in the South. Those held downtown were now to be staged in the West. The whole place was turned upside down” (312). 8 The “wind of sadness whose origin John de John [the writer figure of the novel, possibly Lovelace’s alter-ego] had traced from the mad house in St. Ann’s” (312), now literally spreads deliberately through the Shanty Towns: From St. Ann’s, it had come over the Lady Young Road, passed over Laventille, through Morvant and down Caledonia. At the Eastern Main Road, one part of the wind turned left and swing up the Priority Bus Route, the other part turned right and headed for down town Port of Spain, via The Beetham. (312)

In its path there is tragedy: “eighteen-year-old Akeil Blackman” (312), who “to help mask his loneliness and confusion and poverty” lapses into violence with twelve young men lying dead from gunshots by the time the wind reaches Cascadu (314). While the novel opens with the make-believe deaths of the movie extras, by the end, due to the failures of “born-fidead” revolutions and corrupt governmental politics, the young men in the Shanty Towns are “dying real deaths in a movie that was unreal” (314). The government’s solution to crime is a cash-for-dreams program and the upping of police presence. To counteract the “embarrassment of crime,” the government adopts a new “programme to buy up useless dreams” that are the causes of delinquent acts and violence (316). Long lines of people gather to sell their dreams, and the only hold-out is “Our novelist John de John” who dreams of Reparations, the end of poverty, Caribbean unity, the return of cultural events to the people, and a “victorious West Indies cricket team” (317). With Carnival co-opted by the Government and its masqueraders outsourced to foreign tourists, the narrator King Kala ponders: Then what about the ordinary people who resisted the colonial pressure, whose resistance gave us a sense of self, whose artistry speaks for our humanity and whose struggle turned plantations into the battlefields for humanness? The stickfighters and the masquerade players, the dragon and 8

Here, Lovelace expresses his own frustration with the recent changes in Carnival—moving the Calypso Monarch events to San Fernando or the “new order” of procession and enclosed stages on the Savannah that made Carnival more “efficient” for the tourists but cordoned it off for the locals.

Rita Keresztesi

115

jab molassie, the Midnight Robbers, King Sailors and moko jumbie, all those maskers who come out of nowhere to speak for who we are, the caisonians and the creators of the steelpan, the dancers of Orisha and the Shouters? What have we done with what they have done? What have we made of their sacrifice, their inventions, their fight for freedom? (325)

To answer his own questions, King Kala points to the cause at core: “The party realize that it forget to invite the host” (325). It is the people who make a nation, as opposed to leaders who coopt the collective for their own ends. In the continued magical dimension of the story, the soldoff dreams linger on to haunt in the form of a “cloud of sadness” that contains “dust from the Sahara,” “the spirits of Amerindians,” and the spirit of rebellion. The unfinished processes of mental, spiritual and financial emancipation from the compound legacies of the Middle Passage, colonialism and now globalization slowly poison the community (328–9). The extras are the true actors, the true “hosts,” as opposed to the foreign director or the alienated and isolated political leader. The cure to the ills does not come from the government, a political party, or a “maximum leader,” but from grassroots, off-centre, the ordinary and the everyday—the performance of the extras and the celebrations of ordinary people, such as early Monday morning Jouvay, the people’s carnival as opposed to the pretty mas of Tuesday taken over by hordes of foreign tourists, or weddings and funerals. The novel closes with the spontaneous formation of a Jouvay with those who come: “sweeping a hand to include the few of us around him, ‘we are the people’” (340) and with Claude, Dorlene’s brother, to “mud them up” (341). Claude arrives fresh from a dream that had him sell the family house stuffed with newspapers piled up from over forty-five years, the records of all the political and cultural events from 1947 on. Released from the clutter of the past, he puts on his Jouvay costume to find his band. In a second ending, King Kala’s dry spell of writing and singing calypso is lifted on Carnival Tuesday, when he finally sings “about harbours we had found and harbours we must leave. Of the optimism we need not fear. Of the care we must take not to blight our adventure with cynicism, or devalue our experience with blindness … for the gathering that come into this grand cathedral of song and spirit to celebrate that self of themselves that they get a glimpse of on this occasion each year” (344). The novel finally closes with the politicians leaving and the village setting out to celebrate the wedding of the narrator’s aunt. Old friends re-unite, Sonnyboy and King Kala recall the story of their “magnificent dying” in the American “jungle picture” (351), but this time around to Sonnyboy’s protestation: “‘King, it is just a movie’,” the calypsonian responds:

116

“The Business of Becoming a People”

“‘Yes…But with you as the star’” (351). Even the dark dust clouds dissipate and leave “a clearer sky” (353). Regardless of the chicanery of politicians, in the end it is the everyday and the community that celebrate what matters together. Even though Ash Wednesday is followed by party elections with another victory for the prime minister (348), the novel itself ends with a private wedding, aunt Magenta marrying Clephus, her dress made of African cloth and the Shouters facilitating the celebrations “with drums and tambourines and bells” (349), with family and the community as witnesses. In the words of the poet Edward Baugh, recited by Earl Lovelace during his Lecture (2012): You ever notice how after the maximum leader has spoken the night’s last, great, self-same, expected speech, the faithful start to party […] but him can’t catch the beat, and is like the crowd don’t need him now […] (Baugh)

In the novel, the collective triumphs over the political elite. The village of Cascadu and its inhabitants are the spiritual inheritors of the aborted attempts at rebellion of the previous fiction. Through the novel’s plot, and with the hindsight of some forty years after the 1970 events, the conflict is redefined as a positive “rebellion” that is led by the common folk for the purpose of recovering one’s self and dignity, while the “revolution” is hijacked by career politicians for the maintenance of the status quo.

Works cited Baugh, Edward, “You Ever Notice How”, It was the Singing, Toronto, ON, Sandberry Press, 2000. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId =15041 May 24, 2013. Belgrave, Valerie, “The Sir George Williams Affair”, in Selvyn D. Ryan and Taimoon Stewart, eds., 119-131. Campbell, Horace, Rasta and Resistance: from Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, 1987. Chalkdust (Hollis Urban Lester Liverpool), The Answer For Black Power/Life Under Curfew, Tropico (T7-1109, 45 RPM, Barbados 1970)

Rita Keresztesi

117

—. “The Message of ‘70’”, LP Album: Teacher, Commoner and King (Strakers Recording, P. O. S Trinidad, 1976). Coombs, Orde, ed., Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, Garden City, NJ, Anchor Books, 1974. Cruse, Harold, Rebellion or Revolution, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Glissant, Èdouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Gonsalves, Ralph E., “The Rodney Affair and its Aftermath”, Caribbean Quartely 25. 31979, 1-24. Hamner, Robert D., ed., Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, Pueblo, CO, Passeggiata Press, 1993. Holder, Winthrop “Troppy” R. Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless, New York, Peter Lang, 2007. Jones, Mark T. “Dark Clouds Over Paradise”. http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleI D=11390October 20, 2013. Lovelace, Earl, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories, New York, Persea, 1988. —. The Dragon Can’t Dance, New York, Persea, 1998 (1979). —. Growing in the Dark: Selected Essays, Funso Aiyejina, ed., San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago, Lexicon Trinidad Ltd., 2003. —. Is Just a Movie, London, Faber and Faber, 2011. —. “Edward Baugh Lecture.” Repeating Islands. Our Blog. http://repeatingislands.com/2011/11/21/rebellion-against-rebellion-forearl-lovelace-makes-distinction-at-edward-baugh-lecture/ May 22, 2012. Meeks, Brian, Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean, Kingston, Jamaica, University of West Indies Press, 2000. —. “The 1970 Revolution: Chronology and Documentation”, Selvyn D. Ryan and Taimoon Stewart, eds., 135-75. Oxaal, Ivar, Black Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race and Class in Trinidad, Cambridge, Mass., Schenkman Books, Inc., 1982. Omawale, “New Introduction”, Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, London, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969, 1-4. Pires, B. C., “We Are on the Verge of Listening”, Caribbean Review of Books (January 2011). http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/25-january-2011/weare-on-the-verge-of-listening/October 20, 2013. Rohler, Gordon, My Strangled City and Other Essays, Port of Spain, Trinidad, Longman, 1992.

118

“The Business of Becoming a People”

Ryan, Selwyn D., Eric Williams: the Myth and the Man, Kingston, Jamaica, University of West Indies Press, 2009. —. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972. Ryan, Selwyn D., and Taimoon Stewart, eds., The Black Power Revolution of 1970: A Retrospective, St. Augustine, Trinidad, University of West Indies, 1995. TALLAWAH Magazine: Jamaican Culture www.tallawahmagazine.com/2011/11/earl-lovelace-at-uwi-iconicauthor. html May 18, 2012. Walcott, Derek, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16. 1 (1974), 3-13. Reprinted in Rober D. Hamner, ed., Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott.

BEYOND CONFLICTING BELONGINGS: CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN RAMABAI ESPINET’S THE SWINGING BRIDGE RODOLPHE SOLBIAC UNIVERSITÉ DES ANTILLES

In novels published by Indo-Trinidadian writers in the latter half of the twentieth century, belonging and citizenship appear as major issues of the Indo-Trinidadian experience. The publication of The Swinging Bridge in 2003 offers a new fictional approach inviting readers to investigate its representation of the Indo-Trinidadian experience of diaspora in order to disclose the way in which it deals with the conflicting aspects of belonging and citizenship and relates to the contemporary debate about cultural citizenship. This novel tells the story of Mona Singh, an Indo-TrinidadianCanadian woman inhabited by multifaceted internal conflict. Alienated, like her parents, from Afro-Trinidadian orientated nationalism, she can neither identify with a stigmatized Indo-Trinidadian tradition nor acknowledge her feeling of belonging to Montreal, the place she has been living in for several decades, first as a student, then as a free independent unmarried woman far away from the Indo-Trinidadian endogamous and patriarchal constraints. Her exploration of family memory from Canada and return to Trinidad to accomplish her brother’s dying request initiate a process of rebinding to her native land that turns into a reconstruction of her belonging to the Trinidadian nation. Belonging, defined as “a sense of ease or accord with who we are inourselves” and “a sense of accord with the various physical and social contexts in which our lives are lived out” (Miller 2003, 220), concerns the views that individuals or groups may have about the way they are perceived in society. As such, it relates to citizenship defined as “that set of practices (juridical, political, economic, and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society” (Turner 2) and which constitutes the legal frame of belonging. In the early years of Trinidad’s postcolonial history, belonging constitutes a problematic aspect of Indo-

120

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

Trinidadian experience that Patricia Mohammed studies in “The Asian Other in the Caribbean,” drawing the frame of a conflict with the Trinidadian Afro-orientated nation. Many Indo-Trinidadians “view themselves as an ethnicity under siege, occupying a second-class status in the society and having less claim to the state’s resources” (Mohammed 59). Their perception of this restricted citizenship underpins a cultural divide, a turn towards non-participation and an essentialist practice of Indian culture.1 A quick survey of themes in The Swinging Bridge discloses that, in addition to the protagonist’s internal conflict, the novel also considers such questions as Indo-Trinidadian political marginalization and migration to Canada, patriarchal domestic violence, the alleged backwardness of traditional Indian culture, the figure of the subjugated Indian woman, the agency of Indo-Trinidadian women as well as Canadian citizenship for Caribbean immigrants. This survey establishes that this novel stages characters who occupy subordinate social positions and are concerned with the representation of cultural difference in a context of conflict that deals with issues related to culture and citizenship in a transnational situation. It also invites us to relate the novel to the notion of cultural citizenship which emerges at the turn of the 21st century in a context of growing interest in globalized societies for the cultural dimension of citizenship, as “a right to communication and to the representation of cultural difference” (Miller 2001, 57). Therefore, these thematic features enable us to envisage that representations in The Swinging Bridge could meet the criteria for Renato Rosaldo’s definition, according to which cultural citizenship is concerned with “the aspirations of perceptions of people who occupy subordinate social positions” (38) as well as with acts that consist of “using cultural expression to claim public rights and recognition” (36). Such a prospect invites us to explore the way in which the novel articulates how an IndoTrinidadian conflicting sense of belonging can be related to cultural citizenship. In a context of interrogations about the scope of this form of citizenship, sometimes perceived as a stage in the quest for social justice and emancipation which needs to be complemented by political action, a reading of the issue of Indo-Trinidadian belonging in The Swinging Bridge from a “cultural citizenship perspective” presents an opportunity to discover what the fictional text may convey about the possibilities that this 1

Elements of religion and ritual aspects of culture that are practiced in private spaces—the home—has invested Indians with a compensatory sense of superiority: that they possess a culture that can trace its roots and its continuity to ancient origins despite colonialism’s disruptions (Mohammed 59).

Rodolphe Solbiac

121

form of citizenship may offer to diasporic postcolonial societies and subjects in this globalized world. Consequently, this study proposes to read The Swinging Bridge as a representation of the Indo-Trinidadian diasporic subject’s “aspirations of perceptions” and of acts of cultural citizenship showing that a possibility exists of moving away from cultural conflict and second-class citizenship to develop new belongings. It also argues for an approach of the writing of this novel as an act of cultural citizenship. Through an analysis of the novel’s treatment of history, memory, ethnicity, gender and place, this article reveals what the novel articulates about Indo-Trinidadian characters’ aspirations regarding their perceptions within the Trinidadian nation and the Canadian context. This study also analyses the novelist’s representations of acts of cultural citizenship to disclose the affiliations they create. For this, it studies the features of the characters’ quest for and promotion of Indian heritage to demonstrate that they match the criteria for acts of cultural citizenship. This reflection also establishes the novel’s status as an act of cultural citizenship though an interpretation of its diegetic features. This reading of the novelist’s representation of Indo-Trinidadian aspirations regarding the way they are perceived draws on Edward Said’s postcolonial concept of affiliation that enables the critic to “make visible, to give materiality back to the strands holding the text to society, author and culture” (Said 175). It argues that the writing of the novel creates a network of affiliations that highlights the idea of a national culture no longer perceived as fragmented but as a hybrid unit, the components of which are related to one another by the rhizomatic process of relation defined by Edouard Glissant in The Poetics of Relation, which can also be theorized through Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s notion of polyrhythm. In fact, this article proposes to recreate the novel’s “affiliative network” elaborated through the novelist’s representation of acts of cultural citizenship. This approach also provides an interpretation of the novel’s treatment of memory and history, which uses recent revisions of definitions of transnational and collective memories, establishing that they can promote nationalist memory and ideology (Amine, Beschea-Fache, 99). Through this, The Swinging Bridge narrates the construction of a Trinidadian national collective memory resulting from the merging of African, European and Indian experiences as well as from a reconnection to Amerindian history. This interpretation contends that this transnational collective memory stands as the basis for a refounding of belonging.

122

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

In this perspective its examination of the status of carnival in the novel demonstrates that The Swinging Bridge belongs to that category of contemporary Indo-Caribbean women’s texts in which carnival appears as the central symbolic element from which national and diasporic identities are being defined (Pirbhai 42). In addition, the investigation of this novel’s representation of Indo-Trinidadian women’s aspirations pleads for the inclusion of The Swinging Bridge in a new Indo-Caribbean feminist poetics defined through Indo-Caribbean feminine literature’s re-reading of indentureship from a gendered perspective, building on the genesis of female Indian indentures and criticizing traditional ethnocentric Indian patriarchy (Pirbhai and Mahabir 11). This investigation also relates The Swinging Bridge to the context of contemporary research about women’s citizenship in Caribbean literature which addresses the issue of the unachieved liberation of women. It compares the novel’s vision to Donette Francis’ enunciation of a specific feminist conquest of citizenship in Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.

Memory, History, Ethnicity, Gender and Place: Voicing Indo-Trinidadian Aspirations The protagonist’s attempts at establishing links between fragments of her family's past in Trinidad turn into an exploration of Indo-Trinidadian memory revisiting the genesis of Indian indentureship, the dilemma of Indian assimilation and cultural resistance, as well as the political marginalization of Indo-Trinidadians in post-colonial Trinidad. This retrieval of family memory and investigation of Indo-Trinidadian history can be read as constituting a survey of Indo-Trinidadian “aspirations of perception.” The Swinging Bridge alternately offers representations of a desire to be perceived as Indians in Trinidad refusing creolization and racial hybridity, an authentic ambition to be considered as full participants in the construction of the Trinidadian nation of the 1960s, as well as a position of non-participation that combines rejection of Trinidadian culture and a refusal of Indian tradition. The novel also represents the aspiration of Indo-Trinidadian women to be perceived as subjects with agency and the diasporic Indo-Trinidadian’s desire of belonging to Trinidad. Such a review first unveils the conflict dynamics that impaired belonging to the Trinidadian nation. It also provides an emancipatory representation of Indo-Trinidadian women’s “aspirations of perception” while legitimizing the Indo-Trinidadian cultural affiliation to carnival, a

Rodolphe Solbiac

123

central point for the development of a non-conflicting sense of belonging to this nation.

a. Cultural Conflict in Trinidad: the Impossibility of Belonging Mona's grandfather Jamesie embodies the East Indian dilemma in the Trinidadian society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Resisting the intercultural Creole process at work in this society, he bans calypso songs from his house while dedicating himself to the recovery of Indian memory by studying Sanskrit and encouraging the use of Indian instruments in worship (275). As a convert to Presbyterianism and a teacher, he promotes Anglo-Saxon culture which he perceives as “the Indian community’s key to social advancement” (Solbiac, 2013, 238). He navigates between such positions as assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture and Indian essentialism. His “aspirations of perception” exclude Creole culture as well as the cultural pattern of female Indian resistance to patriarchy, and favour a promotion of Indian culture through a questionable and selective patriarchal construction of memory that only reproduces desired roles of Indian women as good wives. Exploration of family memory in The Swinging Bridge equally documents the disappointed Indo-Trinidadian aspiration to be considered as full participants in the construction of the Trinidadian nation of the 1960s. In her quest for a better understanding of her father’s decision to sell his land and leave for Canada, the protagonist investigates the family archives in the attic of their house in Toronto. Her family story merges with history when she discovers the letters her father had sent to Trinidadian newspapers to criticize the Creole government of Trinidad (73). Those letters testify to an Indo-Trinidadian aspiration to be part of the development of the Trinidadian nation, but also to the disappointment resulting from corruption and political marginalization of IndoTrinidadians led by this government (72–76). The narration unveils the circumstances in which second-class citizenship developed in Trinidad, exposing the responsibility of Eric Williams’ government. The narrative of the protagonist's quest also depicts contemporary Indo-Trinidadians whose parents had chosen the way of assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture as suffering from their ambivalent position of rejection of Indian culture and fear of dilution of their Indian ethnicity in an African-orientated national culture. Belonging appears as a problematic issue as they neither accept their Indian heritage nor contribute to the Trinidadian national culture. Their aspiration of representation can better

124

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

be expressed in negative terms—non-participation. They want to be neither backward patriarchal essentialist Indo-Trinidadians nor Trinidadians of Creole culture. From the point of view of the character Bess, this San Fernandian Indian middle class is responsible for the unachieved establishment of Indian culture in Trinidadian society as they do not accept their Indian history and experience as legitimate and invaluable (285).

b. From Gender Conflict to Emancipation: Towards New Belongings The novel’s representation of the “aspirations of perception” of the contemporary Indo-Trinidadian woman takes the form a genealogical exploration of conflict between men and women. It results in a feminist revision of history and memory that contributes to the emancipation of the Indo-Trinidadian diasporic female subject. Girls of Indian descent are confronted with the dilemma of choosing between emancipation perceived as a Westernization that necessitates that they should abandon an Indian culture reduced to its patriarchal features, and Indian heritage with a patriarchal interpretation of Indian female identity. Mona attempts to emancipate herself from these cultural constraints by revisiting the fragmented stories of Indian women. Through her inquiries about the lives of her mother Muddie and her grandmother Grandma Lil, her exploration first reconstructs narratives of Indo-Trinidadian women in her close family. Then, an introspective revisiting of her teenage and young adult life introduces the reader to the female appreciation of the consequences on their romantic lives of patriarchal imposition of endogamy. Mona’s search subsequently becomes a revelation of the story of her ancestor Gainder, who rebelled against patriarchy in India by refusing to marry the man chosen for her, and made the journey to Trinidad as a free woman.

Acts of Cultural Citizenship: Creating New Affiliations According to Rosaldo, acts of cultural citizenship consist of “using cultural expression to claim public rights and recognition”. The representation of such acts in the novel raises the question of what they are claiming for. The novelist’s depiction of the characters’ quest for Indian heritage turns into a representation of acts of cultural citizenship that reveal, create or redefine affiliations to several traditions. The last part of the plot consists of an ethnographic search of fragments of Indian songs in Hindi, sung exclusively by Indian women and repressed by men. It

Rodolphe Solbiac

125

includes Bess and Mona’s contribution to an Indian heritage museum and preparations for an exhibition promoting Indian culture in Trinidad and Tobago. The development of the Indian heritage museum to which Mona and Bess contribute as members of a modern, urban Indo-Trinidadian middle class, collaborating with women of Indian descent from the less Westernized rural part of Caroni, presents the reader with a multifaceted act of cultural citizenship. Challenging patriarchy, it integrates IndoTrinidadian women into the public sphere. It also withdraws them from non-participation as it involves them in the promotion of IndianTrinidadian culture as a legitimate, valuable component of Trinidadian culture. If The Swinging Bridge belongs to the category of Caribbean feminine fictions, which, according to Donette Francis, are “antiromances” because they “reconceive master narratives, whether they be imperial, national, or diasporic, to imagine a different sense of belonging” (Francis 6), despite its treatment of patriarchal violence and sexual abuse against independent Indo-Trinidadian women such as Baboonie, and its criticizing of existing epistemologies that have excluded women’s voices, representations of citizenship are not relevant to what Francis calls the “centrality of sexual intimacy and the private sphere for conceptualizations and practices of citizenship” (1). Female characters’ acts of cultural citizenship in The Swinging Bridge correspond to a form of feminist cultural citizenship that seeks the emancipation of Indo-Trinidadian women through their integration with the Trinidadian nation. The plot is resolved when the women succeed in collecting and translating the scattered fragments of Gainder’s songs into English. Their Divali Night exhibit about Indian culture in Trinidad brings together the widest affiliations which the protagonist’s quest creates, as well as the values of the act of cultural citizenship it consists of (299). The exhibit thus affiliates Indo-Trinidadian women, respectively, with an Indian legacy of resistance, born in India and developed during the crossing, to an English tradition as well as a Caribbean hybrid culture. The side-by-side presentation of the English and Hindi versions of the rands’ songs on boards fabricated by Rajesh, Bess’ Rastafarian boyfriend, symbolizes the cultural hybridity the novel advocates while providing an alternative resolution to cultural conflicts. In addition, the choice of Iere, a former Amerindian village, as the place where the museum of Indian heritage will be built, extends this affiliation to include pre-colonial Trinidad. As it gathers all the traditions to which Indo-Trinidadians can connect, the museum becomes emblematic of the possibilities of a

126

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

refounding (282). Espinet’s focus on the promotion of Indian cultural elements should not however be confused with essentialism, as her novel calls for their introduction into Trinidadian national culture alongside English and Creole elements that stood as rival components of a split nation (Solbiac, 2013, 242). As a consequence, it becomes conceivable to celebrate one dimension of Trinidadian culture without detriment to the other aspects, in a process defined by Edouard Glissant as: “Poetics of Relation, in which every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 11). The novel’s re-affiliating of Indo-Trinidadians to Amerindian, Indian and Afro-Creole cultures frames a process of citizenship that takes them from marginalization and non-participation to full belonging to Trinidad as place and nation. Re-connections to place in The Swinging Bridge also concern Caroni and Canada. The novel’s depiction of characters’ explorations of Caroni, in search of objects for a museum of Indian Heritage in Trinidad, revises that region’s negative representation as a backward place and constructs it as a place which possesses cultural riches that constitute resources for Indo-Trinidadian women, whether they belong to this particular rural area, to urban San Fernando or to Canada, like Mona. The novel promotes the idea that, in the interaction between cultures, alternative modalities to competition and conflict exist. This is what the novelist figures through the metaphor of the Caroni dub. Enriched by her Caroni experience, the protagonist returns to Canada “furnished” with a rhythm that summarizes her hybrid Indo-Trinidadian culture. Borrowing from Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Caribbean forms, the Caroni dub federates several Trinidadian singing traditions into a new form, abrogating previous separations and hierarchies. It associates, on an equal standing, different traditions of the Trinidadian cultural continuum. It is a polyrhythm that symbolizes Caribbeanness as articulated by Antonio Benitez-Rojo: In any event, the notion of polyrhythm (rhythm cut through by other rhythms, which are cut by still other rhythms)—if it takes us to the point at which the central rhythm is displaced by other rhythms in such a way as to make it fix a center no longer, then to transcend into a state of flux—may fairly define the type of performance that characterizes the Caribbean cultural machine. (Benitez-Rojo 18)

This hybrid Caribbean beat also symbolizes Mona’s diasporic hybrid consciousness that enables her to resolve her internal conflict and develop a multi-locational belonging that does not require that she should choose

Rodolphe Solbiac

127

between Trinidad and Canada. Building upon this diasporic hybrid consciousness, she can therefore resume the process of constructing Canada as home. Drawing attention to the hybridity of Trinidadian culture, the novel’s representation of acts of cultural citizenship calls for an emancipation from the legacy of cultural conflict, and for a refounding of Trinidadian national culture through the integration of different cultural traditions. It articulates the conditions of a full and peaceful belonging to Trinidad and Canada.

The Writing of The Swinging Bridge as an Act of Cultural Citizenship Examination of The Swinging Bridge’s diegetic features reveals its dimension as an act of cultural citizenship. It argues that Espinet’s writing this novel consists of an act of cultural expression through which she voices a multifaceted claim. The novel’s exploration of history includes 19th century India, post-emancipation Trinidad, early post-independence Trinidad, as well as the Canadian and Trinidadian societies of the 1990s. The fictional text alternates with a chronicle, entitled “Kala Pani,” that relates the journey of the rands2—East Indian women travelling as autonomous agents from India to Trinidad under indentureship, mixing fiction and historical nonfiction writing to represent Indo-Trinidadian experience. As a response to a female Indo-Trinidadian aspiration to be perceived as people with agency belonging to the wider Trinidadian society, The Swinging Bridge redirects the male-orientated, IndoTrinidadian narrative of community and belonging, working “through, in the interstices of, on the fringes of, rather than in simple opposition, to history” (Ashcroft 102). This postcolonial method also contributes to the “new Indo-Caribbean feminist poetics” which, according to Mariam Pirbhai and Joy Mahabir: “emerges in a gender inclusive reading of indentureship, that is at once critical of the jahaji community’s traditional view of kinship in restrictive ethnocentric and patriarchal terms, as well as inspired by the histories of earlier generations of female indentureds” (Pirbhai and Mahabir 11). In this postcolonial perspective, The Swinging Bridge also renegotiates hierarchies between cultures and places as well as within gender relationships. Clues to the progress of action are to be found in texts or 2

“Rand” is a polysemic word that designates ‘widows’ who, after the outlawing of widow burnings in India, in 1829, lived as free women in towns and temples. This word also designates prostitutes (Solbiac, 2013, 229).

128

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

fragments of texts belonging to different traditions and cultures. In addition to the chronicle entitled Kala Pani written in Standard English, the reader of The Swinging Bridge is presented with written texts belonging to vernacular versions of English—calypso songs, wake’s songs (216), the letters written to Mona’s father, and Grandma Lil’s written story about Gainder (273). Non-oral and non-written narratives such as the protagonist’s dreams are also presented (266–267), and the reader can moreover read “oral texts” such as the female narratives of gossip, and songs in Hindi that the protagonist hears in several contexts. In this book, as in other works belonging to Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean women’s writing, orality is “employed to dismantle negative cultural mythologies and to re-imagine new modes of self-expression that resist imposed or dominant ones” (Pirbhai and Mahabir 5). All those texts convey overlooked cultural patterns and insufficiently explored moments in the history of the different peoples that constitute the Trinidadian society. This is symbolized by the fact that the unravelling of the plot necessitates the translation of texts written in Hindi (the rands’ songs) to reveal an underground cultural pattern. The narration appears as a form of mediation, providing access to the different Trinidadian traditions, translating the cultures and experiences of Trinidad for Trinidadians of various origins to create connections or reveal undisclosed or unacknowledged affiliations. The novelist therefore appears as an intercultural mediator acting to write a common history that integrates different cultures and genders. Espinet’s novel constitutes an act of cultural citizenship by an IndoTrinidadian diasporic writer who aspires to provide Indo-Trinidadians as well as all other Trinidadians with a new perception of Indo-Trinidadian culture. Its female Indo-Trinidadian diasporic subject speaks from a diasporic hybrid perspective that liberates her from cultural conflict and a conflicting sense of belonging. With The Swinging Bridge, Espinet writes about emancipation, aiming for the emancipation of the Caribbean subject—a stance that she shares with Afro-Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace, whose literary exploration of problems of citizenship in Trinidadian society is motivated by a will to contribute to the emancipation of the Afro-Trinidadian subject (Solbiac, 2011).

Conclusion The Swinging Bridge’s representation of memory, gender and race, as well as its disclosure of the variety of cultural affiliations contributing to Trinidad and Tobago’s national culture, reveal that it is possible to mediate

Rodolphe Solbiac

129

different levels or degrees of citizenship that can help to move beyond cultural conflicts and second-class citizenship and develop new feelings of belonging. The novel’s treatment of memory contributes to recent revisions of the view that, because they are heterogeneous, mobile, nonlinear, shifting and multidirectional, transnational memories may weaken nationalist memories and make place less relevant to memory cultures. Actually, The Swinging Bridge provides an example of transnational collective memory that seeks to strengthen Trinidadian nationalist memory. Beyond the feminist challenge of official discourses on nation and power, the novel re-imagines Trinidadian nationalism, refounding belonging on rhizomatic connections to the revisited cultures and traditions from which the Trinidadian nation emanates. The reading of The Swinging Bridge grants Indo-Trinidadians a new vision of their tradition, at the same time that it highlights the reality of their cultural hybridity, inviting them to abandon their position of nonparticipation in order to exert their agency in the construction of their belonging and the improvement of their political and social citizenship. Cultural citizenship appears to be the way towards belonging and agency. This novel gives a sound example of transnational cultural citizenship that contributes to national emancipation, bringing a positive literary answer to interrogations about the scope of this form of citizenship.

Works cited Amine Laila, and Caroline Beschea-Fache, “Crossroads of Memory: Contexts, Agents, and Processes in a Global Age”, Culture, Theory and Critique 53. 2(2012), 99-109. Ashcroft Bill, Post-Colonial Transformation, London and New York, Routledge, 2001. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1996. Francis, Donette, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Glissant, Edouard, Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997. Miller, Linn, “Belonging to Country–A Philosophical Anthropology”, Journal of Australian Studies 27. 76(2003), 215-223. Miller, Toby, “Introducing… Cultural Citizenship”, Social Text 69 (2001), 1-5.

130

Beyond Conflicting Belongings

Mohammed Patricia, “The Asian Other in the Caribbean”, Small Axe (June 2009), 57-71. Pirbhai, Mariam, “The Jahaji-Bhain Principle: A Critical Survey of the Indo-Caribbean Women’s Novel, 1990-2009”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45. 1(2010), 37-56. Pirbhai Mariam, and Joy Mahabir, “Introduction” in Joy Mahabir, Mariam Pirbhai, eds. Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, New York, Routledge, 2013, 1-21. Rosaldo, Renato, “Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism,” in William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, ed. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, Boston, Beacon Press, 1997, 27-38. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism. London:Chatto and Windus, 1993. Solbiac, Rodolphe, “La Révolution ‘Black Power’ et l’œuvre d’Earl Lovelace: écriture d’émancipation et écriture émancipatrice”, in Nicole Ollier, dir. Dynamiques d’émancipations caribéennes dans la littérature et les arts, Paris, Cahiers de Caraïbe Plurielle n°3; L’Harmattan, 2011. —, “Revising Female Indian Memory: Ramabai Espinet’s Construction of an Indo-Trinidadian Diaspora in The Swinging Bridge”, in Joy Mahabir, Mariam Pirbhai, eds., Critical Perspectives on IndoCaribbean Women’s Literature, New York, Routledge, 2013, 229-252. Turner, Bryan S., “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship”, in Citizenship and Social Theory, Bryan S. Turner, ed., London, Sage, 1993, 1-18.

WHEN ART RETHINKS THE CONFLICTS: THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF DIASPORA PATRICIA DONATIEN UNIVERSITE DES ANTILLES

Introduction Dealing with conflicts in terms of knowledge and management is a preoccupation which has largely invaded the social sphere. Indeed, although armed conflicts may still be central in the media, scholarly literature is essentially focused on the question of human conflicts in peaceful territories. A large body of excellent scholarship has investigated conflict theory since the 1970s and many solutions for the treatment of institutional, familial and even individual conflict have been proposed. In the postcolonial and diasporic context, this notion acquires a specific resonance. In the late twentieth century, a new pattern of conflict emerged in which ethnic, religious and cultural parameters played essential roles. In 1990, Edward Azar, in The Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory & Cases, was one of the first to claim that the identity group, which embodies communal needs and satisfaction in multicultural societies, was at the core of many contemporary conflicts “characterized by disarticulation between the state and society as a whole. With the state usually dominated by a single communal group or a coalition of a few communal groups that are unresponsive to the needs of other groups in the society” (Azar 7). In the same period, another important contribution in the psychological field was Dennis J. D. Sandole’s Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice, which is a pertinent analysis of the “cultural pathologies” at work in most social conflicts. In the development of the knowledge of social and armed conflict, a number of studies have established that art was a way “to deescalate destructive conflict and to use constructive conflicts” (Bartos and Wehr 7). Indeed, recent research on the subject has described the creator as able to not only perceive and scrutinize the organic and pathological dimensions

132

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

of war, but also to “transcend” the direct and abrupt reception of armed conflict, as Howard Zinn states, through metaphoric, deconstructive and even poetic processes: “[…] I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created” (Zinn 2). As a consequence, many artists in Europe and the Americas have clearly positioned themselves as non-violent activists in reaction to several historical armed conflicts in which their nation was involved, using their art to denounce and condemn the consequences of war. This was the case for Picasso, whose famous Guernica is one of the apexes of anti-conflict artistic expression. In the same way, many painters, photographers and filmmakers dedicated their work to the denunciation or resolution of armed conflicts during the Vietnam War and the Iraq war, as Violaine Roussel has demonstrated in her recent book Art vs War (Roussel). Amazingly, even though the themes of migration and diaspora and all the sociological, economic and psychological questions that are attached to those two notions have been largely debated in terms of impacts on the welcoming nations and integration of the transnational subjects, and despite the fact that the artistic reception of armed conflicts has been at the core of many scholarly approaches, the issue of the role of art in the analysis of the “cultural pathologies” at work in most social conflicts in those postcolonial societies, and particularly in the migrating Caribbean communities, has not received a great deal of attention. The subject of this article is thus to study how art plays a substantial role in the treatment and de-escalation of the ontological and social conflicts that Caribbean people experience in the contexts of interculturality following the colonial period and the great historical movements of migration which have intrinsically transformed American, British or Canadian societies along with the Caribbean self. This contribution will analyze art as a place of articulation and mediation of the ontological conflicts that the transnational subject develops in migration, but will also seek to illuminate how art can be a subversive influence within those conflicts. After a preliminary presentation of the historical and societal situation of the diasporic communities, which aims to situate the context of our discussion and to underline the psychological difficulty of being a Caribbean in a transnational environment, the question will be articulated in two parts. This will demonstrate how art can be a place where the artist as a person, but also as a social actor, can became a negotiator inside the diverse conflicts that oppose Caribbean people to their environment and image.

Patricia Donatien

133

These themes are echoed in the work of the three artists who will be at the core of this essay: Miguel Luciano, an American installation artist from Puerto Rico, Arthur Simms, a Jamaican-born artist living in the USA who expresses his art through many techniques (painting, drawing, sculpture and installations) and a range of cross-cultural thematic approaches, and Manuel Mathieu, a young Haitian-Canadian painter and visual artist. Through these three case studies, which present both similarities and differences, the article intends to examine how the artists of the Caribbean diaspora redefine space, using their canvases, their installations and other media as surfaces of reinvention and deterritorialization1 (Deleuze & 1975, 24) of the conflictual representations they may have of themselves, their communities or of the society they live in. So, as a central point, this contribution will seek to demonstrate how these creators conceive imaginary spaces for the resolution of the historical and cultural conflicts opposing the Caribbean subjects to societies ruled by what Derrida calls an “homohegemonic group” (Derrida 57) through the poetic concept of “the unfinished genesis of imagination” that the Guyanese writer and poet Wilson Harris describes as “an occult dimension within the life […] exclusive and re-visionary alignment […] with an invisible arch, an invisible text running from the ancient world into the originality of the future” (Harris 250).

Being a Caribbean Subject in the Diaspora— A Conflictual Perception of Space and Self Images Through the diverse historical episodes of deportation and exploitation that structure the history of the Caribbean, the human beings, victims of the inhumane institutions and philosophy at the root of the plantation 1

In their analysis of Kafka’s literature, and more specifically in the second chapter of Kafka, Pour une littérature mineure, Deleuze & Guattari present one of the clearest definitions of the concept of deterritorialization: “[Déterritorialiser], c’est précisément faire le mouvement, tracer la ligne de fuite dans toute sa positivité, franchir un seuil, atteindre à un continuum d’intensités qui ne valent plus que pour elles-mêmes, trouver un monde d’intensités pures, où toutes les formes se défont, toutes les significations aussi, […] au profit d’une matière non formée, de flux déterritorialisés, de signes asignifiants” (1975, 24). Translation: “[deterritorialization] precisely to make a movement, to draw a base line in all its positivity, to go beyond a boundary, to reach a continuum of intensities which exist for their own sake, to find a world of pure intensities, where all shapes are shapeless, all meanings meaningless as well, […] in the interest of amorphous matter, of deterritorialized flux, of signs with no particular function.”

134

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

system, suffered a negation of the self which made knowledge of the “pratiques de soi” (Foucault 51–57) particularly difficult. Indeed, the policies of objectification2 which characterize the colonial rules progressively structured the mind of the colonial subject, who, mentally dominated, accepted forsaking any pretence of self-knowledge, the research of a personal or collective identity being perceived, during those times, as a subversive activity. This long and forced disconnection with one’s own identity during the dark ages when the dominated subject was considered only as a “corps sans organe” (Deleuze &Guattari 1980, 199), a tool belonging to the capitalist machinery and subject to the harsh life conditions characterizing the plantation system up to the first half of the twentieth century, rendered most Caribbean post-colonial people oblivious to the self. Surviving and struggling to improve their existence was an occupation that kept Caribbean people away from any existential concerns for a long time. Nevertheless, the outstanding works and innovating visions of Caribbean thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Edward Kamau Brathwaite or Edouard Glissant brought a drastically different perception of the Caribbean man, nations and peoples, thereby enhancing the importance of decolonizing culture and self-consciousness by deconstructing the predetermined patterns of the plantation society. However, in spite of the huge efforts accomplished by those philosophers and writers towards the founding of a new Caribbean thought, and even with the improvement of most Caribbean peoples’ levels of education and social belonging, the de-valorizing practices and segregating discourse of colonialism left stigmata in the form of “traumatic ambivalences” (Bhabha 15), able to activate a conflictual relationship with history, a complex connection with the colonizing nations, a problematical perception of space and a difficult understanding of the inner experience. In Caribbean societies, the artist is often the only social actor risking an exteriorization of the inner experience. He accomplishes “the arduous psychological work necessary to achieve the transformative depth of selfunderstanding” (Fulani 2), expressing his intimate reception of history and its consequence on the intellectual as well as the sensitive construction of beings. The migration movements that West Indians experienced from the 1950s onwards generated a Caribbean diaspora3 in several regions of the 2

Objectification must be understood as theadaptation of Césaire’s concept of “chosification” as stated in his Discours sur le colonialisme:“A mon tour de poser une equation: colonization = chosification” (Césaire 23). 3 The concept of diaspora used here refers to an exception developed by Christine Chivallon in her book La diaspora des Amériques noires. She considers this diaspora as a “community that is not centered on a common identity, but rather an

Patricia Donatien

135

world, and notably in the great metropolises of Great Britain, Canada and the United States. In these new spaces, often perceived as strange, upsetting and radically opposed to the familiar island environment, the Caribbean subjects were compelled to face a different reception in “societies of settlement”4 (Chivallon 220), where problems that seemed to have been clarified a long time ago were reactivated. Indeed, the inequalities that many West Indians (particularly those belonging to the migrating working class) experienced in terms of accommodation, education and employment, as well as the lack of consideration that this diasporic group suffered, created social conflicts with the reception groups5 where their cultural and spiritual aspirations and natural claims to acceptable living conditions met with a reticent and even aggressive reception. Indeed, the huge progress that the Caribbean people have registered in the last fifty years, both in their countries of origin and in migration, cannot eradicate the reticent reception of non-European populations coming from the previous colonies nor the difficulty of distanciation of those postcolonial subjects with historical issues and shared suffering. Even in the ranks of the Caribbean intellectual elites preoccupied by their social ascension, political involvement and professional achievement in a general movement of “performative assimilation” (Donatien-Yssa 31), the ontological exploration sometimes appears futile and oriented towards the past. In the intercultural contexts in which the members of the Caribbean Diasporas live, many political, societal and cultural concerns continue to marginalize West Indian people. Reducing their self-esteem and forgetting Caribbean characteristics thus appear as constituting the unique way to integration, the choice of the identity and self-definition often being imposed either as a cause of exclusion or as a key for successful insertion into the society of settlement. As a consequence, many citizens of Caribbean origin, who are submitted to a “self-ordeal” (Marin 109) where the “ordinary” aggressions of racism, ostracism, frustration, injustice and identity that escapes the constraints of a unitarian totality […] moved by an exigency of […] individual freedom which goes hand and hand with the absence of traditionalism and autochthony” (Chivallon 232; my translation). Original text: “une communauté acentrée [développant] une identité qui évite précisément les contraintes de la totalité unitaire.[… ] mue par cette exigence de […] liberté individuelle qui va de pair avec l’absence de traditionalisme et d’autochtonie.” 4 My translation of the “sociétés d’installation” notion used by Christine Chivallon. 5 By “reception group” I mean the group that has lived on the national territory for several generations and for which most management functions are reserved.

136

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

arrogance are frequent, initiate mental processes of either renunciation and assimilation or anger and resistance as the only alternatives to madness or addiction. In reality, the psychological ordeal experienced by those diasporic subjects confronted with doubts and a sense of anguish and ambiguity before the definition of themselves in a space where they are recurrently reduced to stereotypes, frequently tested, and compelled to a repeated reconsideration of their image and position, begins both an interpersonal and ontological conflict whose examination remains very limited and restricted to the scholarly and intellectual domains. In spite of all this, “the massive movement of Caribbean peoples to metropolitan centers has created another sphere of contestation in the construction of identity [and] Caribbean peoples insist that they are ‘Caribbean’ regardless of where they live…” (Premdas 812). In such a situation, the artistic field appears as a privileged and quite unique space to explore and examine the inner conflict that places the Caribbean subject in opposition to his very self and to the place where he lives. The inner debate to define one’s identity is often complex, entailing the conflict between the home culture and the culture of adoption, opposing languages, cultural behaviours, habitus, bodily characterizations, traditions and attachment to nations and landscapes. The only spaces of expression of these oppositions, i. e. popular music, fashion, hairstyles and slang, remain restricted and offer a rather superficial location for the articulation of painful renouncements and difficult experiences. The assimilated/resistant—or, even worse, victim/fighter—dialectic is central to the conflictual self-representation of the Caribbean subject, but the artist does not approach this issue as a social concern, which may seem in artistic terms rather sterilizing. “The possibility for learning more about conflict has motivated increasing numbers of people to develop personal conflict skills. Some use these professionally in law, public policy, family mediation, and the like” (Otomar &Wehr 6). However, the artist does not seek to achieve goals of mediation in terms of negotiation but rather in terms of challenge, “mediation through understanding”6 and poetic transformation. The spaces of expression then become locations for boundless choices of representation of the Caribbean being—images that do not fit the encoded representations attached to the West Indian either by others or by oneself. Workshops, canvasses, installations or even public places are poetically transformed by the artist into the surface of his 6

In their book Challenging Conflict: Mediation through understanding, Garry Friedman and Jack Himmelstein introduce the notion of mediation as a process of understanding of the conflict to be in connection with it, to exploit it in order to improve our lives.

Patricia Donatien

137

alternative visions which escape any predetermined discourse or aesthetic. Indeed, art, as an ontological location, authorizes the use of constructive conflicts and the exploitation of tension (in the perception of the place of living for instance) as a strategy of experimentation and redefinition of the self. Conflict is then perceived and received as a self-ordeal as well as a practice of the self. Moreover, the space offered by the visual arts is exploited to allow the expression of “deficiency, inconsistency, ontological nonfulfillment, and the feeling of being disconnected, marginal, wandering” (Marin 32, my translation), 7 but connecting and experimenting conflict in art also permits the access “to a self unveiled of all its artificial layers, of all the pseudo-identities imposed from outside” (Marin 33, my translation). 8 This “outside” is the main concern of Caribbean artists who work on the perception-reception-representation of this “place-space” which occupies the West Indian nostalgic imagination but also creates a very tense and conflictual dimension around it. Those creators then interrogate all the spaces that superpose themselves in thoughts as well as reality, through processes which deterritorialize objects, spaces, images and relations, metamorphosing the conflictual subjects into nourishment for the “unfinished genesis of imagination” (Harris 250).

Negotiating with Space— Imagination between Here and There Art impacts what it touches and what it translates; each artistic creation initiates and develops a universe of subtleties, particularities, improbable proportions and imaginative places. Art is a space of representation and creation, a matrix of energy, and as such it has the power to invent the world in which it is generated. Consequently, the artist is both the architect of his creative space and the receptor of real space. As a creator, he is consequently perceived as a connection between reality and creation through which imagination operates a transformative process. However, for the Caribbean artist who lives in an area singularly different from his native land, the question of the reception and representation of real space is complicated by its duality and the superposition of the antagonistic universes of the original and adoptive countries. Moreover, this duality is 7

My translation of « la déficience, la faille, l’incomplétude ontologique et le sentiment d’être en décalage, en marge, en errance » (Marin 32) 8 My translation of « un soi défait de toutes ses pelures artificielles, de toutes ses pseudo-identités imposées de l’extérieur » (Marin 33)

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

138

sometimes obscured by the nomadic dimension of multiple-migration that characterizes many Caribbean communities with an adaptable identity. As Wilson Harris states: “Fluid identity creates a number of windows into reality” (Harris 205). Consequently, the world of the Caribbean artist, the one that catalyzes his imaginative process by providing passages and flux from one spatial reality to another, often results in a complex and rhizomatic space. Among all the visions offered by those “windows into reality,” the mental picture of the island or land of origin—which is for Wilson Harris both the “womb of space” (Harris 69) and the “theater of memory” (Harris 40)—collides with the realistic visualization of the urban environment, along with a shared vision of the island often distorted by a colonial, exotic representation of the native space. Nevertheless, the “womb of space,” as a true emotional and spiritual matrix, creates a resonance in the solid and concrete dimension of the Western city and provokes “archetypal and troubling dreams” (Harris 42). This questions the certitudes of the world where the artist lives, and also confronts the antagonizing old view of the island that the diasporic West Indian communities often fancy. Two main processes intervene as solutions to the problematic and conflictual determination of the poetic space for the Caribbean artist: -

The reception of the environment—hybridity as an answer to conflict The imaginative transposition—a mythic place to escape the Third world/Western world dichotomy

When dealing with the process of creation, the issue of space is one of the first external elements that interferes in a positive or negative way in the production and capacity of creation of the artist. The workshop, along with its location—urban or rural—and the atmosphere that permeates it— peaceful or intense—and more generally, the area surrounding the artist with its lights, shadows, noises and silences, its accumulations of objects and beings and its voids, directly penetrate the sensitive world of the creator and thus the art. In his powerful book Au risque de l’art that deals with the condition and the meaning of creation, French psychiatrist Thierry Delcourt declares that: “some artists’ immediate perception searches for an aperture—as large as possible—to practice a form of eurythmy with the world through which the sensitive being may unfold”

Patricia Donatien

139

(Delcourt 190, my translation). 9 Meeting the artist’s aspiration to connect with the world, the environment in the creative process, far from being relegated to the mere function of background, develops into an active element of the aesthetic language. Wilson Harris, as an essayist and literary theorist, defines space as central: It seems to me that, for a long time, landscapes and riverscapes have been perceived as passive, as furniture, as areas to be manipulated; whereas, I sensed, over the years, as a surveyor, that the landscape possessed resonance. The landscape possessed a life, because, the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me. (Harris 40)

This perception of the landscape10 illustrated in Harris’ novels and poems, in which environment becomes a living body impacting people, is worthy of note when dealing with the definition of space as a complex issue for the artist as a transnational diasporic subject. It is all the more remarkable when it is opposed to the deep link that ties Arthur Simms’s and Miguel Luciano’s sculptures and objects to their environments. Indeed, for the Jamaican sculptor Arthur Simms, the reception of this living environment appears as undeniably essential in the determination of his artistic language; he gets inspiration from diverse sources but is particularly receptive to his urban surroundings. He creates from the urban presence, dense with materials, manufactured objects and artificial forms that constitute his poetic and imaginative horizon like a network of living organisms. The waste of New York City—the bicycles, the twisted pieces of metal, the carts, the glass bottles and the wheels—are marks of the impact of urbanity on his creation. Hugeness appears to be the imprint of the immensity of the town on his assemblages. Nevertheless, Simms is also deeply attached to his childhood environment—an island fundamentally opposed to the city space and atmosphere in terms of structure, colours, occupation and energy, and whose aerial and spiritual presence is also clearly perceptible in Simms’s artistic objects. Indeed, Simms’s assemblages are articulations of refuse with poetic and imaginary

9

My translation of: “ …la perception immédiate de certains artistes cherche une ouverture la plus large possible, tentant une forme d’eurythmie avec le monde où se dilate l’être sensible” (Delcourt 190). 10 Wilson Harris proposed this conception of landscape in “The Music of Living Landscapes,” the original typescript for the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of November 12, 1996.

140

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

forms suggested by an “anansian”11 evocation of mythic characters directly resurging from the moonless nights with their rope robes who define space as well as space defines them.

Fig. 8. 1. Arthur Simms, To Explain, Expound and Exhort, to See, Foresee and Prophesy, to the Few. Who Could or Would Listen (1995)

Through his anansian poetics he gives access to an imaginary world where mythology, dream and desire create a new aesthetic vocabulary disconnected from realistic contingencies. Indeed, the danger of the desire to connect the two conflicting visions of the native land and the surrounding environment or to re-establish a memory of the native space in a migration environment is an exoticism, the exacerbation of a “territorial mentality” (Amidon 103) that communities may develop in a 11

Anansi is a character of Afro-Caribbean tales; this very clever and wise spider was inherited directly from African fables and legends. The term “anansian” both refers to the fabulous dimension of the character and to the spider’s web structure, which is the basis of most of Simm’s assemblages.

Patricia Donatien

141

nostalgic attempt to keep the bygone visions and sensations alive. Simms escapes the dichotomy of an imaginative and deterritorialized problematic relationship with the insular as well as the metropolitan landscapes by articulating a space of creation “outside the framework that society has created” (Zinn 2). Miguel Luciano’s universe can be perceived similarly; indeed, his world is a space out of place, with a sociocultural content, but above all rich with sounds, colours, impressions and vibrations belonging to both the past and the present. Luciano’s astonishing objects, among which is his series of “Piragua-tricycles” (2008–2010), are complex hybrids resulting from pieces of Puerto Rican or more generally Caribbean cultural heritages combined with aspects of the sophisticated and fashionable accessories and electronic or hi-fi devices that young people use in the street. The artist’s imaginary arrangement articulates the Caribbean environmental and urban reality through a poetic spatial vocabulary as well as occupation.

Fig. 8. 2. Miguel Luciano, Pimp My Piragua (2008). Courtesy of the artist12

12

Pimp My Piragua is a mobile public art project that commemorates the innovations of Latino street vendors, transforming a traditional pushcart for selling shaved ice (Piraguas) into a hyper-modified pushcart-tricycle with a hi-fi sound

142

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

Diasporic Caribbean artists, like Luciano or Simms, are perpetually and irremediably drawn into a problematic conflicting duality of authenticity versus eccentricity concerning the construction of objects and installations that constitute their poetic and imaginary landscapes. That is to say, they are caught between the desire to belong to a place and the will and capacity to escape this link, to exist in true emotional and creative independence: “In each case, the individual perceives subjectively and emphatically, regardless of objective and empirical facts, that his or her relation to a territorial, linguistic, or cultural community is a unique link that confers a special sense of personal value, importance and collective meaning” (Premdas 813). The creators’ belonging to an urban context as well as their Caribbean origin both determine their perception and their reception of space and of the objects and elements that constitute it, this double relation establishing a new perspective where tradition is not received as an antagonistic alternative to globalization. With their sculptures and their dreaming objects which are the combination of creative emotions, immediate energy and waves coming from the past to nourish the present roots, these artists invent an in-between space “between traditional and contemporary, remapping of the art world [and solving] the dichotomy of international modernism and artistic localism” (Amidon 112). The artistic spaces developed by these creators in their workshop, installations and exhibitions are thus located in an imaginary and real hybrid dimension where the artists express their difference and the simplicity of their impacting presence. As Bhabha states: The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. (Bhabha 34– 35)

Art as a strategy and a cultural response to all the fidgeted discourses, among which are the colonial and exotic languages, is a place of collision, a place where the creator wilfully questions his certainties and endangers his own being and art as well as the expected discourses and images. Hybridity, as a “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha 209), is what allows Miguel Luciano to fabricate his astonishing pushcarts and to dream of the and video system. This project was commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art in 2008.

Patricia Donatien

143

sounds and savours of infancy with energies, materials and above all a capacity to think and to visualize the object, not as an alienated exotic artifact in a technological universe, but as a true creation resulting from the multiplicity of “windows on reality” that each one possesses. Thus, fighting against the representations of space that “centuries of anthropological studies and colonialism continue to infect…” (Amidon 106), Luciano, like Simms, allows himself a critical understanding of both his art and his culture. For both artists, their contemporary expressions and perspectives are “resourced by the power of tradition to be re-inscribed through the conditions and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are ‘in the minority’” (Bhabha 2). Consequently, in the exploration of the deterministic power of the places of life on the realization of their creative universe, these Caribbean artists do not experience the multiplicity and antagonism of the areas that shape their comprehensions and visualizations of space as an obstacle. On the contrary, this diversity and its paradoxical impacts engender a space of creation where imagination replaces geography and allows transformation; a hybrid space between here and there, between the “old insular spheres and the new metropolitan residences” (Premdas 813), which delineates a poetic environment that uses the conflictual influences as a creative impulse. So, Simms’s and Luciano’s sculptures are the result of the gathering of objects and materials whose significance, symbolic dimension and above all spatial dramatization are characteristic of the “crossroads of confluent forces” (Premdas 813) where the Caribbean and its people have always been situated.

Manuel Mathieu’s Self Re-Invention Deconstructing Conflictive and Negative Images in Imaginary Spaces In his work of exploration and experimentation, the artist does not try to escape the conflict; on the contrary, he uses it as a form of resistance to violence, to the social, political and environmental hostility that confines the Caribbean people to a limited definition of themselves. Through the materialization of excess and stigmatization, the artist portrays the inner conflict of the Caribbean subject with his very self—the theatrical staging of inner conflicts authorizing distanciation with reality and self-derision. Thus, through the deconstructive exhibition of the diverse stereotypes of the Caribbean—the “moi-déguisés” as Claire Marin calls them; the artist fulfils his quest for a true self, a true identity. He engages himself in an

144

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

inner experience: “a trial of delimitation which aims at smashing to pieces all the boundaries limiting one’s actions” (Marin 35). Manuel Mathieu’s universe is closely linked to that process. The young Haitian-Canadian painter and installation artist belongs to that generation that questions identity through innovative strategies, among which occurs the creation of strange creatures in mutation that reinvent themselves perpetually inside a deconstructed and organic universe that the artist refuses to define and delimit. His pictorial installations evoke a world of alteration and conflict where indefinable characters exhibit their organic disorder. Everywhere decay imposes a metamorphic dimension, as well as a critical vision of the Caribbean man and woman. His series, such as Premises-open ended (2012), Happy people (2011) and Birth of Nature (2010), always focus on a conflictual representation of the West Indian, and more precisely of the Haitian, which emancipates itself from stereotypes and expected images, such as Voodoo representations. For Mathieu, dismantling those incarcerating images of the Haitian opens the way for societal and ontological movements that promote intellectual as well as innovative aesthetic articulations and displacements. Indeed, more than any other Caribbean person, the Haitian must face the burden of a whole set of stereotypes developed by Hollywood movies, folkloric novels and the media. Struggling against those representations of the Haitian allows a genuine dialogue with himself, beginning with the elimination of that “cultural” veil which has been drawn over each actual individual identity. Yet, for Mathieu, conflict does not mean rejection. On the contrary, his experience as a transnational subject, in-between two countries and two cultures, has made him aware of his belonging to a special space and culture, and of the artistic richness brought by this culture. Mathieu (2013) says: I felt that the only way to unlock the treasures of my heritage was to be more aware of it, to be more conscious of my relation to it, and to consider my heritage as an artistic asset. Being creative and inventive with my heritage proved challenging, especially when it is so easy to succumb to elementary and arbitrary interpretations of culture.

His creation of the Spooky character perfectly illustrates his conflicting, critical and enriching relationship with his culture as well as his reception of the image of the Haitian recurrent in the “societies of settlement.” Spooky, a plastic doll with large eyes and scattered hair on a scary skull, escapes the spiritual dimension of the voodoo object but keeps the sombre and impressive aesthetic of the worship artifact.

Patricia Donatien

145

Fig. 8. 3. Manuel Mathieu, Spooky the Haitian Child (2013). Courtesy of the artist

Playing with the readymade aspect of the plastic doll, Manuel creates an in-between or hybrid creature, a representation of himself and an expression of his culture that the artist emancipates from any popular and reductive expectation. The young creator, perfectly conscious of the inevitability of the impact of such a rich culture as the Haitian one on his art, declares: I can’t avoid the fact that we perspire, at varying degrees, the heritage of the land that we come from. As soon as I understood that some people, both inside and outside of Haiti, have certain expectations towards Haitian art and culture, expectations that are influenced by numerous social, economic, and political factors, I wondered how this could inform my practice. (Ibid.)

By refusing to obey these expectations, Manuel Mathieu fights against those “moi-déguisés” which do not represent him, as they do not characterize the Haitian people. But this fight, beyond the process of

146

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

denunciation with which he has engaged himself since 2010, takes the form of an energetic transcending reinterpretation of the predetermined and grotesque perception of the Haitian. It is through the strategy of excess that Manuel chooses to conflict those limited visions: I recognized certain conventions and stereotypes that were perceived as aligning to Haitian culture, like the voodoo doll, for example, and resolved to approach them to redefine this commonplace. It is in this state of mind that Spooky came to me—a big iconographic voodoo doll head. I decided to play with culture like Yue Minjun did and exaggerate stereotypes and clichés, so much so that the initial perception becomes twisted or grotesque. (Ibid.)

In a strategy of reversal and exaggeration, Mathieu invites all the preconceived perceptions of the Haitian person in his construction of Spooky as well as in the elaboration of all his other characters. He first plays with the fear of the other often present in diasporic societies and at the heart of many social conflicts; he then integrates all the deformations and alterations that it generates in his aesthetic language. By doing so, the young artist creates “composite bod[ies] of tragedy” (Harris 73)—that is to say, characters whose unrealistic, ambiguous and sometimes ridiculous dimensions are a way of exorcising the degrading representations that have been integrated by his people and are still present in the sometimes conflictual reception of the Haitian communities. These creative processes are a means of taking a humorous distance from aggressive images which finally become his basis for artistic constructions. Mathieu exercises a liberty of language in which the power of imagination transforms the violent representations imposed by racism and the discourses inevitably uttered in moments of conflictual opposition into “a fecund and vibrant system of memorization” (Harris 199) and source of creative energy. Indeed, far from imprisoning and limiting the universe of the painter, those degrading and eccentric disfigurements of the Haitian are converted into the bases of his phantasmagoric theatre of creatures as “a re-imagined resource prolonged into art […a] potential for a new conceptual language” (Harris 199). For Manuel Mathieu, as for many Caribbean artists living in diaspora, art offers a space of metamorphosis in two ways. First, in the hold language has on oneself which becomes a deescalating dialogue between the representations generated from inside as well as from outside; second, of the way of receiving those images which, whatever their degree of de-valorization, cease to be damaging and instead become fertile. The artist can be perceived as an agent of de-formation, a regenerative power, and art as the possible incarnation of the other self. It then becomes an exploratory space.

Patricia Donatien

147

Fig. 8. 4. Manuel Mathieu, Will—The Angels (work in Progress). Courtesy of the artist

Conclusion The artists of the Caribbean diaspora are representative of the recent tendency which refuses both a nostalgic rooting and a full rejection of their origins. They articulate a sensitive relationship with their history, their identity and their community, even in their intricate and sometimes conflictual dimensions. Manuel Mathieu, Arthur Simms and Miguel Luciano elaborate creative works that explore the tensions, refusals, unbearable stereotypes and psychological pains caused by belonging to a multiple space scarred by human awfulness and misery and characterized by specific memories and emotions, among which is the “ressenti” of the human power of destruction but also of resistance and adaptability. Art does not obey any rational logic, but echoes the combination of reflexive, emotional and imaginative thoughts which, instead of opposing themselves in a destructive process, constitute a new creative metabolism which authorizes processes of investigation of the object and the space, such as “opacity” (Glissant 29), violence, intensity and delirium. In this metabolism of the space, the objects and the beings are located in an organic relationship with history and the society through systems of

148

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

representation based on the juxtaposition of dreams, memories, imaginations and instantaneous images. This space constitutes a new land where each creation becomes a “truly creative alchemical response to crisis and conflict and deprivation—a response that engages with formidable myth […]” in an infinite genesis “from apparently irrelevant imaginations and resources (Harris 1997). In this context of “in-betweenity,” art develops into a new territory that creates its own rules and escapes the predetermination of either one or the other space of belonging. Art is then deterritorialized; by deterritorializing his creations, the artist redefines the meaning of “belonging” as well as the significance of the attachment which links each individual to one or several territories; he also analyses the manifestation of these concerns in the aesthetic discourse as well as the reception and perception of the objects and places. One of the innovative consequences of this creative and intellectual posture is that the will to escape the insular territory, and consequently the familial and societal schemes (such as the colonial and postcolonial systems with their historical and structural weight), is no longer a finality for the Caribbean artist, as may have been the case for many in the 1990s. The deterritorialization movement, as conceived by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is a metamorphic movement which greatly impacts Caribbean art, particularly in the diaspora. Indeed, the desire for the obliteration of history and the traces of the Caribbean experience that animated many, particularly the diasporic artists in the 1990s, has been transformed by that process into a will of visibility—not of a Caribbean identity, but of the complexity and intensity of the human, historical and psychological experience developed in the very specific historical and geographical Caribbean context of recent centuries. Those artists give themselves the opportunity to explore the current relationship that Caribbean people—defined by Ralph Premdas as “Caribbean people [who] insist that they are ‘Caribbean’ regardless of where they live” (Premdas 812)—have with the questions of slavery, colonization, exoticism, domination, exile, skin colour, self de-valorization and insularity among other problematic aspects of self-representation. What is deterritorialized undergoes a profound metamorphosis which acquires full meaning and shape in the subsequent movement of reterritorialization. This second process, in the case of Mathieu, Luciano and Simms, begins the regeneration and new definition of words, images, objects, places and memories, and allows, above all, an “infinite genesis of imagination” where an innovative aesthetic approach of these elements is made possible.

Patricia Donatien

149

Works Cited Amidon, Catherine S. “From Jamaica to the Diaspora”. Small Axe 8 (2): (September 2004), 100–118. Audi, Paul. Où suis-je. Topique du corps et de l’esprit. La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2004. Azar, Edward. The Management of Protracted Social Conflict: Theory & Cases. Dartmouth: Aldershot, 1990. Azoulay, Vincent & Patrick Boucheron (dirs). Le mot qui tue. Une histoire des violences intellectuelles de l’Antiquité à nos jours. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2009. Bartos, Otomar J. & Paul Weh. Using Conflict Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence africaine, 1955. Chivallon, Christine. 2004. La diaspora noire des Amériques. Expérience et théories à partir de la Caraïbe. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004. Delcourt, Thierry. Au risque de l’art, Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques & Bernard Stiegler. Echographie de la télévision, entretiens filmés. Paris: Galilée INA, 1996. Donatien-Yssa, Patricia. L’exorcisme de la blès- Vaincre la souffrance dans Autobiographie de ma mère de Jamaica Kincaid. Paris : Le Manuscrit, 2006. Foucault, Michel. L’herméneutique du sujet. Paris: Éd. du Seuil/Gallimard, 2001. Friedman, Gary & Jack Himmelstein. Challenging Conflict: Mediation through Understanding. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008. Fulani, Ifeona. “Gender, Conflict, and Community in Gayl Jone’s Corregidora and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32. 2(2011), 1–30 Glissant, Edouard. Traité du Tout-Monde. Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

150

When Art Rethinks the Conflicts

Harris, Wilson. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris. The Unfinished Genesis of Imagination. Andrew Bundy, Ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2007 (1999). Marin, Claire, dir. L’épreuve de soi. Paris: Armand Colin, 2003. Mathieu, Manuel. 2013. Arc Magazine interview. February 4. http://arcthemagazie. com/arc/2013/02/spooky-the-haitian-child. Premdas, Ralph. Identity, Ethnicity and Culture in the Caribbean. London : Paperback, 1998 Roussel, Violaine. Art vs War. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. 2011. Sandole, Dennis J. D. & Hugo Van Der Merwe. Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice. New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Zinn, Howard. “Artists in Times of War.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9-1(March 2007) http://docs. lib. purdue. edu/clcweb/vol9/iss1/21

Table of Illustrations Fig. 8. 1. Arthur Simms, To Explain, Expound and Exhort, to See, Foresee and Prophesy, to the Few. Who Could or Would Listen. Rope, Wood, Glue, Knives, Plastic, Metal, Objects, 111" by 67" by 21" 1995, 2005. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 8. 2. Miguel Luciano, Pimp My Piragua, 2008. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 8. 3. Manuel Mathieu, Spooky the Haitian Child, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 8. 4. Manuel Mathieu, Will – The Angels- Work in Progress. Courtesy of the artist.

PRESENTATION OF THE ARTISTS

Miguel Luciano Born in San Juan Puerto Rico in 1972, Miguel Luciano received his MFA from the University of Florida. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris; The Ljubljana Biennial, Slovenia; The San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico; and Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, and nationally at The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; the Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Exit Art, NY; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., NY; The Chelsea Art Museum, NY; The Newark Museum, NJ; and the Jersey City Museum, NJ. Solo exhibitions include the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Real Art Ways, CT and Galeria Tinta Roja, Chicago, IL. Luciano has participated in the LMCC/Workspace 120 Broadway Artist Residency, the Bronx Museum of Art (AIM) program, and the Kitchen's Music Image Sound Text in Community (MISTIC) Residency. He has received an NYFA award for painting and two Artists and Communities Grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award Grant. His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Newark Museum. Manuel Mathieu Manuel Mathieu obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual and media art from UQAM (University of Quebec in Montreal) in December 2010. While today he expresses himself in a variety of media (installation, photography, video), his international recognition is above all a result of his work in painting. His work has been exhibited in Haiti, Montreal, the United States, and France and in several international fairs. In 2012, he had a large solo exhibition of his work, PRÉMICES/OPEN-ENDED at the MAI, and his first Monograph Abysse/Abyss came out. Also part of group shows this year, his work is currently showing at the Museum of the Americas in Washington and will also be showing at the Museum of Civilization in Quebec at the end of the year. Despite his young age, his work is found in several private collections. Manuel Mathieu was born in Port-au-Prince. He lives and works in Montreal.

152

Presentation of the Artists

Arthur Simms Arthur Simms is best known for his found-object sculptures composed of everyday objects such as bicycle wheels, bottles, stones, chairs, rope and wire. His work connects the disparate elements of the diasporic experience. Jamaican by birth, he was born in St Andrew but grew up in Kingston. Simms now resides in Brooklyn. His work has been presented at the Jamaica Pavilion at Venice Biennale, Venice Italy, as well as numerous museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum, the Clément foundation in FWI Martinique and the American Academy in Rome. Arthur was a 2007 recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, as well as the Prix de Rome, among other important grants. Arthur Simms is an assistant professor at La Guardia Community College, his work as a scholar fed his creation which examines the crosscultural dialogue between Jamaica and the United States.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dominique Aurélia is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Université des Antilles, Martinique, where she teaches Caribbean and American literature, with a special focus on Middle Passage narratives written by women. She has published essays on Caribbean literature, postcolonial theory, transatlantic studies, and Caribbean art in edited collections, and in journals Macomère, Cercles, Transatlantica and Small Axe. Jacqueline Couti is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies/Gender and Women Studies at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in Francophone Caribbean, African, and New World literatures and cultures. Her first book project Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourse from 1806 to 1897 considers the ways in which white and black French Caribbean writers represent sexed female bodies and sexual difference to advance their political ideologies. Her second manuscript Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourse from 1924 to 1948 offers a re-reading of the relevance of the ways in which black authors sexualize female bodies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jacqueline Couti has published articles on women writers, on questions of diasporic identities, memory, and exile as well as on issues of nationhood, sexuality, gender, and violence. Recent publications include "Le Bourreau et la victime: Politiques du corps et des rapports sociaux des sexes dans l'œuvre de Gisèle Pineau. " Nouvelles Études Francophones 27. 2 (2013): 74-89; « Topographie de la masculinité abjecte: la maison et le corps féminin chez Tahar Ben Jelloun et Patrick Chamoiseau », Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe, Paris : Edition Honoré Champion, 2013. Anny Dominique Curtius is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies and co-director of the Caribbean, Diaspora, and Atlantic Studies Program at the University of Iowa, USA. Her research lies at the crossroads of several areas of scholarship including Francophone Literatures of the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean, Postcolonial Theory, Comparative Caribbean Cultural studies, and West African cinema.

154

Contributors

She is the author of Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraïbe (2006), and several articles on postcolonial and Caribbean critical theory, Sub-Saharan African cinema, as well as on the intricacies of race, memory, migrations, citizenship, transcoloniality and practices of creolization. She is currently working on a second book entitled Unveiling the Camouflage: Suzanne Césaire's Caribbean Ecopoetics. Patricia Donatien is Associate Professor with tenure at Université des Antilles Martinique. Her research mainly focuses on the interfaces between Caribbean literature, spirituality and genre. She is also a specialist of Caribbean visual art. She is the author of a book entitled L’exorcisme de la blès – Vaincre la souffrance dans autobiographie de ma mère de Jamaica Kincaid, which was rewarded with the Caribbean Philosophical Association Frantz Fanon Prize in 2008. She edited the book, Images de soi dans les societies postcoloniales and a special issue of the journal Cercles entitled Art et spiritualité dans la Caraïbe et les Amériques, and published numerous articles in scholarly collections. She is also a visual artist, and has exhibited extensively in the Caribbean and in Europe. Dr. Gladys M. Francis (Ph. D., Purdue University; Francophone, French, Theory and Cultural Studies) is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgia State University. Her research involves Diaspora, Transnational, Post/Colonial, Visual Arts, Women, and Gender Studies (in the regions of the French Caribbean, the Maghreb, and SubSaharan Africa). She is the recipient of national and international awards and fellowships (e. g., the Juliette S. Benhamou Francophone Studies Fellowship, two Endowed Weber Chairs in the Humanities, and two Outstanding Teaching Awards). Dr. Francis has given invited lectures in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the U. S. and is the author of several articles and book chapters published in Europe, the Indian Ocean Region and North America. She is completing two books: one on gender violence in Francophone women’s writing, and the second one on elements of human rights, democracy, and sustainable development in French Caribbean artistic productions. Bruce Jno-Baptiste is a specialist of Caribbean civilization. He is currently Associate Professor at the Université des Antilles. He is the author of La dynamique identitaire de la Dominique. Quelles stratégies pour un petit Etat caribéen anglophone? (L'Harmattan, 2008). He has contributed to many collective books and has participated to international

Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries

155

and regional conferences questioning the problem of the revision of the Britannic civilizational space in the Caribbean. Rita Keresztesi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, USA. She teaches courses on ethnic American modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts/Black Power, as well as theory and cultural studies. Her interdisciplinary interests include Afro-Caribbean and West African culture and politics in film and music. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Anglophone Studies, University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa, from September 2010 to July 2011. She is the author of Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (Nebraska UP, 2005 and 2009). Her recent publications include "Hurston in Haiti: Neocolonialism and Zombification" in Race, Oppression and the Zombie, ed. Christopher Moreman (McFarland, 2011); “Ethnic Modernism” in Blackwell’s Companion to the Modern American Novel, ed. John Matthews (Blackwell, 2009); “George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931)” in Teaching the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Michael Soto (Peter Lang, 2008). Rodolphe Solbiac is Associate-Professor at the Université des Antilles Schoelcher, Martinique. His field of research is Caribbean literature in English with a specific focus on Caribbean-Canadian writers. He is the author of three books, Neil Bissoondath : Migration et Multiculturalisme dans l’Œuvre, (Paris; l’Harmattan, 2009), Filiations, émergences et diaspora : aspects de l’écriture caribéenne anglophone des années 1980 et 1990, (Presses de l'Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, 2011) and Emergence d’une identité caribéenne canadienne anglophone, (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015). He is also the co-editor of L’esclavage de l’Africain du 16e au 19e siècle (Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2011), and has published several articles on Caribbean literature in English. His recent publications include “Revising Female Indian Memory: Ramabai Espinet’s Construction of an Indo-Trinidadian Diaspora in The Swinging Bridge” in Joy Mahabir, Mariam Pirbhai, eds., Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, New York, Routledge, 2013.