Mobility and Memory: Maritime Crossings of the Storyteller in Marie-Célie Agnant’sLe livre d’EmmaGabriella Ghermandi’sRegina di fiori e di perle

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of Marie-Célie Agnant’sLe livre d’Emmaand Gabriella Ghermandi’sRegina di fiori e di perle. Acknowledging the distinct geographical and temporal contexts of the Francophone Caribbean and the Mediterranean, I argue that the authors’ employment of frame narratives and (ch)orality as a mode of collective remembrance and cultural transmission can be read as interventions in the debates on maritime perspectives and the figuration of the sea in contemporary literary studies. This argument is grounded in the mobility, fluidity, and dynamism of oral storytelling and the frame narrative’s pre-novelistic transnational path historically and in the present works, examining the authors’ stylistic and thematic practices as linked to the sea. By putting Agnant and Ghermandi in conversation, this article explores a maritime practice of reading and its potential application to other texts.