Au-delà de la réciprocité négative : la femme-gangster Madame St-Clair, reine de Harlem de Raphaël Confiant

Abstract

This article seeks to examine representations of the female gangster commonly known as “Madame Queen,” or simply “Queenie,” who was a formidable and ingenious figure in 1920s-40s New York. Confiant calls to mind the curiously ethical and troubled roots of this Antillaise activist and “miraculous survivor” who subverts the order of power by, more often than not, producing disorder in the form of negative reciprocity, that is to say vengeance. Her story will be determined by the First World War, the start of the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Depression and the Second World War. Queenie’s agency, or shall we say, with a knowing smile, her “social engagement,” will manifest itself in the projection of a life that is fully-thought out and which, mysteriously or instinctively, unites itself to one pole or another of calculated vengeance or indefinite and radical revenge. Out of what begins as a minefield, she very nearly reconciles these opposites by opening up a field of possibilities for future generations. Thus, this woman gangster gives herself the chance to consider anew the manifestations of violence and the knots of oppression that have been omnipresent in her life. From a political, economic, judicial and cultural perspective, marginalised communities live according to the survival of the fittest. Yet who can carry the standard of liberty, of peace and of dignity without a heightened awareness that allows us to define those human values? Raphael Confiant brings a critical examination of the gaze to a world of effervescence, to forces which have barely been linked let alone brought head to head in the past. From the revenge of laughter to the questioning of the link between positive and negative reciprocity, Confiant’s search for a path to liberation by means of creation is unwavering and also inexhaustible, for from it flows the future and the map of possibilities for “the damned of the earth.”