Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe éd. par Samia Kassab-Charfi et Mohamed Bahi

Abstract

Kassab-Charfi, Samia, et Mohamed Bahi, éd. Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe. Paris: Champion, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7453-2531-0. Pp. 327. 75 a. With its evocation of multiple artistic currents flowing between the Caribbean and the Maghreb, this essay collection offers new insights into the nature of the Francophone world. As the editors remark, their project was undertaken in the wake of celebrations honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frantz Fanon, the Antillean psychiatrist and writer who became the Francophone voice of Algerian independence. Dedicated to the memories of Fanon and Édouard Glissant, the collection is beautifully prefaced by authors from both cultures, a roster that includes Algerian Boualem Sansal and Martinicans Patrick Chamoiseau and Monchoachi. At the tomb of Aimé Césaire in Martinique,Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb finds references to the Maghreb, and particularly to a uniquely Moroccan countryside depicted in the work of Mohammed Khair-Eddine. A poem by Guadeloupean Ernest Pepin,“À tous les reconduits,” is dedicated to all the would-be immigrants on the seas of the world. Editors Kassab-Charfi (Tunisia) and Bahi (Morocco) present their collection as an attempt to open a new critical complexity, with contributors including scholars from both regions under discussion, as well as from France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. The book’s first section features essays on the “figures tutélaires,” originators of a cultural and identitary rhizome that extends beyond their own geographical region. Fittingly, the section begins with Fanon, and the phrase engraved on the memorial plaque in his native Martinique—“Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!”(33)—becomes the starting point for an exploration of his work by Jean Khalfa. Thomas Demulder finds points of contact between Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956), each of which played a leading role in developing “une langue scriptuaire propre: identitaire” (59).Adel Habbassi analyzes the inspiration found in the work of Césaire by Moroccan poet Mohammed Khair-Eddine at the moment of Maghrebian independence, while Catherine Delpech traces the similar trajectories of Martinican Édouard Glissant and Algerian KatebYacine as they intersected in Paris after World War II. The book’s second section traces different types of exchange, some nonliterary, between the Antilles and the Maghreb, such as the historical migration of the sugar trade from Morocco to the Antilles. The third section,“Histoire et mémoire,” looks at writing from each culture in a non-comparative perspective, and a fourth section, “Sémiotique,” opens the collection to the plastic arts. Kassab-Charfi concludes the volume by bringing together fascinating representations of human forms in works by island artists Ernest Breleur from Martinique and Tahar M’Guedmini from Djerba (Tunisia). The only regrettable omission from this collection is that of women writers, but this is probably an unintended result of the submission process rather than editorial policy, since one of the editors has herself published extensively on women writers of the Maghreb. Because of its comparative approach, the book offers new perspectives on well-known 260 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 261 works while bringing younger figures to our attention, contributing interesting specifics to the amorphous reality of francophonie. Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8166-7984-3. Pp. 304. $25. Ever since Columbus’s misapprehension of Cariba, the Carib Indians’s name for themselves, as cannibal, the West has associated the Caribbean region with this tabooed violence and with “its tamed counterpart, the Caribbean itself—its land, people, and language—all reduced to delectable objects” (vii). Drawing her title, in part, from Maryse Condé’s call to resist this ontological othering of Caribbean people by“biting back,” Loichot analyzes their relationship to food as material sustenance, cultural production, and metaphor (x). Her project is informed by the multivalent meaning of the“coups”of the title. She examines culinary coups that operate as a“strike or blow” circumscribing the Caribbean subject past and present and, conversely, ones that resist the identity prescribed by...