C’est fort la France! by Paule Constant

Abstract

son mari dans la même guerre et élèvera seule leur fils.Florian,“expert en brigandagerie” à Saint-Pierre, trouve son métier de bijoutier créole à Fort-de-France.Ainsi, les enfants Saint-Aubert grandissent, se marient et ont leurs propres enfants dans le contexte des événements historiques des années 1900–1920. Ils vieilliront et verront leurs enfants continuer la saga des Saint-Aubert et de la Martinique, dont les maints rebondissements ne décevront pas le lecteur. Bob Jones University (SC) Jeremy Patterson Constant, Paule. C’est fort la France! Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-013931-6. Pp. 251. 17,90 a. Does a novelist write to tell the truth or to hide it? Or could it be“pour faire apparaître un univers plus cohérent [...] [et] pour rendre acceptable ce qui ne l’a pas été” (221)? The unnamed narrator of C’est fort published in her youth an autobiographical satire called Ouregano, which is also the name of Constant’s first novel (1980). Both the real and the fictional Ouregano are portraits of French colonial life in the 1950s seen partly through the eyes of a young girl whose father is the idealistic medical officer of an isolated French outpost in Africa. The narrator of C’est fort tells us that some 25 years after her book’s publication, the wife of the former colony’s administrator, whom she calls Mme Dubois, comes into her life to insist that the book inaccurately represents the people and events it is based on. Listening to Mme Dubois’s recollections, the narrator realizes that she misunderstood key situations and, to her present amazement, that she left out the most dramatic events she herself witnessed. She now asks herself, “Pourquoi écrit-on un roman en omettant la raison pour laquelle on l’a écrit?” (25). She realizes that the problem of truth is complicated by the fact that what you see is determined partly by where you stand; witnesses of the same events interpret them differently . Ironically, the narrator had been shocked earlier when she discovered that she did not appear at all in an autobiographical novel written by the man who had been her African playmate: “il y a pire que d’entrer à titre de personnage dans un univers romanesque, c’est de n’y pas entrer du tout” (220). Listening to Mme Dubois and re-examining her own memories, she develops a more balanced picture of French colonials; she now thinks they often were innocents trapped in a system they could not control and inadequately informed about the Africans they lived among. She also learns something about the problems they faced, which included inadequate medical supplies, a sleeping sickness epidemic, and tensions between different African clans. In a presentation on YouTube, Constant insists that C’est fort la France! is “parfaitement inventé”and not the“récit de [son] enfance,”but the very disclaimer makes one wonder which of its people and events might be drawn from life. Constant previously explored the relationship between reality and fiction in her Goncourt-winning Confidence pour confidence (1998), in which Aurore Amer, a novelist much like herself, is hosted by an 198 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 199 American academic who plans to plagiarize Amer’s signature novel based on an African childhood and pass it off as her own autobiography. In the present novel, Constant (now a member herself of the Académie Goncourt) continues to probe the subject of truth and fiction with thoughtfulness enlivened by a generous but sly humor. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Deitz, Ritt. Rêver local. Madison: Incidence, 2013. ISBN 978-1-481-03402-9. Pp. 120. $9.95. Deitz is executive director of the Professional French Masters Program at University of Wisconsin, Madison. His previous publication, La colonie, ou l’invasion québécoise (2010), was a theatrical script about the state of Wisconsin being liberated from English domination by the province of Quebec. This notion of a Francophone Wisconsin sets the stage for Deitz’s latest book in which the American narrator shares dreams he had in French. Dreaming in a foreign language is often...