‘Cruautés et tendresses: vieilles mœurs coloniales françaises’, précédé de ‘Les Vies légères: évocations antillaises’ by Drasta Houël

Abstract

MLR, .,   our leaps to false empathy (or empathic inaccuracy) is arguably as important a use of literary reading as the cultivation of altruistic world citizens. H C S K ‘Cruautés et tendresses: vieilles mœurs coloniales françaises’, précédé de ‘Les Vies légères: évocations antillaises’. By D H. Ed. by R L with I G. (Autrement Mêmes) Paris: L’Harmattan. . xxxi+  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Martinican author Drasta Houël is known for two major works: a poetry collection, Les Vies légères: évocations antillaises (Paris: Les Œuvres Nouvelles, ), which is nostalgic, elegiac, but thematically and formally original and distinctive; and a historical novel about queasily proprietorial, interracial marital infidelity: Cruautés et tendresses: vieilles mœurs coloniales françaises (Paris: Payot, ). Both undeservedly neglected works are of considerable significance. Marie Philomène Julie Simplice Hurard was born in Saint-Pierre in . Having moved to Paris aer the Montagne Pelée’s eruption in , she lived and wrote there under a pseudonym derived from old family names. She thus belonged to the distinguished Antillean literary diaspora in France, which included the Césaires and the Nardal sisters. Her two works, long out of print, have been resurrected in a single volume in Roger Little’s ‘Autrement Mêmes’ collection, which already numbers about  volumes. e series recovers works concerning the French colonies and most especially concerning relationality around notions of race. ree recent additions, including the Houël volume edited by Little himself, belong to what he terms the tradition of ‘“mulâtritude” féminine’ (back cover). e other two works are novels: Suzanne Lacascade’s Claire-Solange, âme africaine and L’Île qui meurt by Suzanne’s cousin Renée Lacascade and André Péyre. e scarequotes around ‘mulâtritude’ are warranted . Compounded by the reference to the cross-species mule, the denigratory connotations of the suffix ‘-âtre’ mark the term ‘mulâtre’ as pejorative, in a way that its near-synonym ‘métis’ is not. While Little’s purpose is clearly to provoke debate, he is quite right to identify the theme of identification by pigmentation and miscegenation as central in much twentieth-century Caribbean writing in French: it is difficult to read works such as Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, Damas’s Pigments, or the works of Drasta Houël as illustrating an undifferentiated ‘négritude ’. However, whereas Césaire explicitly owns his ‘négritude’ (as in his book of conversations with Françoise Vergès, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai (Paris: Albin Michel, )), Houël does not overtly claim her putative ‘mulâtritude’. Perhaps Little’s cryptic point is precisely that ‘mulâtritude’ constitutes, within the Antillean context at least, the—revealingly—repressed (feminine) ‘other’ to (masculine) ‘négritude ’. is volume offers an informative introduction to the rather mysterious author and to her writing, along with a valuable bibliography and photographs both of the author and of the front covers of the original editions of her works. It also  Reviews includes contemporary reviews of the novel and a glossary of Creole expressions largely drawn up by Isabelle Gratiant. U C D M G Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French: Queering the Martyr. By J J H. London: Palgrave Macmillan. . xviii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. is book is a welcome addition to scholarship that makes use of queerness to analyse a diverse collection of texts, concepts, and cultures. Jason James Hartford cleverly locates and analyses the figure of the queer martyr as a leitmotif in modern fiction from France and Belgium and, in so doing, expands our understanding not only of this literature but also, and perhaps more excitingly, of the process of queering. Hartford goes to great lengths to prepare the ground for his readers, and this works well in a study that crosses disciplinary boundaries and that ought to attract scholars from a variety of different fields. If anything, the scrupulousness of Hartford ’s urge to clarify is on occasion a little overbearing—the paragraph on page  pointing out that lay literature can address religious questions without having to conform to doctrine could perhaps be a sentence—but overall...