Disaster, Transgenerational Endurance and Duration in Béké Writing

Abstract

This article interrogates the preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and duration apparent in béké representations of “natural” disaster. It begins with a brief overview of the earliest literary texts to emerge from the French Caribbean islands: Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (1806), and Jules Levilloux’s Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835)—both of which feature catastrophes that claim the lives of plantation owners and pose a threat to their daughters, the bearers of béké culture. I then consider texts by béké women who lived in Martinique at the time of Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902, an unprecedented disaster which eradicated almost half of the island’s white population: Clémence Cassius de Linval’s Cœurs Martiniquais (1919) and Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s Le Sablier renversé (1912). In doing so, I trace a lineage of male and female béké authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of “natural” disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with the caste’s longevity. Such an approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing to promote, protect and preserve their culture. Anxieties around the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language consistently resurface in this intergenerational literary output which spans more than a century. As we shall see, some of these temporal concerns converge with Édouard Glissant’s observations on time and memory in the French Antilles, specifically his sedimentary poetics of duration.