A Fugue for the Middle Passage? Suicidal Resistance Takes Flight in Fabienne Kanor's Humus (2006)

Abstract

In her fugue-like novel Humus (2006), Fabienne Kanor excavates a little-known episode of suicidal resistance during the Middle Passage: in 1774, fourteen enslaved African women threw themselves overboard from the French frigate Le Soleil shortly after it left the coast of Nigeria. Departing from a report of the women's leap made by the ship's captain, Louis Mosnier, Humus explodes a meagre archival trace into a polyphonic text: a requiem for the Middle Passage that gives voice to the anonymous women of the Soleil. In both premise and praxis, Humus powerfully engages historical memory related to French slavery in the present.