A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium by Odile Ferly (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium by Odile Ferly Hanétha Vété-Congolo Ferly, Odile. A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp 207. ISBN 9780230120440. $90 (Hardover). This book proffers an iconoclastic and gendered approach to Glissant’s Relation theory. While Glissant grants but marginal attention to women, Ferly corrects this pitfall and shows how and why Caribbean women’s use of Glissant’s theory in their literary production process brings about a “liberatory poetics.” Notwithstanding this borrowing of Glissant’s theory, a shift is made from the rhizome single and masculinistic root to the mangrove, a more multidimensional space inclusive of all parts that make the whole harmonious. An ecological necessity, “synonymous with life,” (7) a “common creative matrix,” (7) the mangrove that also transcends geography, language and gender at once better symbolizes the region whose parts it binds together in its capacity to stretch “throughout the region” (153). It nurtures a dialogic relation as much as it highlights the inclusive system from which coherence and cultural balance are created. Just like a nurturing woman bears life, the mangrove is the primary [End Page 101] site for reproduction, creation and life. It is extremely important for the world’s ecosystems. Its concrete and symbolic characteristics are additionally complex. Therefore, the mangrove paradigm is highly appropriate to offer a womanist and complex expansion of the Glissantian Creolization and Relation theories. Ferly’s work is also pan-Caribbean and aims at challenging the fragmented vision generally held about the Caribbean based on linguistic and colonial parameters. It also proposes an unusual and rare comparative analysis of French-speaking and Spanish-speaking Caribbean women’s writings that shows that the writers take a step further in the Relation principle for they “inhabit” and “realize” Relation concretely instead of merely “conceiving” it theoretically (154). The demonstration then enlarges and strengthens the scope of Caribbean literature at large and more particularly Caribbean women’s writing. To restore the existence and diversity of the silenced feminine voice, Ferly puts under close comparative analysis the works of nine local and diasporic Caribbean women writers she calls “millennial women” such as Pineau, Dracius, Danticat, Condé, Schwartz-Bart, Warner-Vieyra, Santos Febres, Galzada and Alvarez. According to Ferly, mangrove aesthetics transcends gender and is the next phase in Caribbean writing. As the author sustains it, these women’s “[…] fiction resists the monolithic nature of many identity discourses that do not adequately capture the complexity of the region and its makeup and often marginalize the local female experience and that of other subalterns” (1). She interestingly concludes that women’s literature regenerates the heavily male dominated Caribbean literature and that, “[i]n fact, its irruption over the past three decades may well have been the major renovating force of Caribbean discourse” (152). In this light, Ferly’s work, which is a plea for “[a] shift from the rhizome to the mangrove as a paradigm […]” (153) offers the possibility of a new analytical and critical framework as well as a new and innovative perspective for Caribbean literary studies at large and for Caribbean women studies and French and francophone studies more specifically. Hanétha Vété-Congolo Bowdoin College Copyright © 2014 Women in French Studies