Mourning under Siege: The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters

Abstract

Mourning under Siege:The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters Regine Joseph (bio) « Heureux ceux qui écrivent sous la domination de l'âge dernier : leurs poèmes peuvent faire balles, et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts. » —Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, 19971 «When I wrote Bonjour et adieu à la négritude, one could perhaps read that as "Hello and Goodbye to Politics." If the notion of revolution itself has failed, it would be illusory for me to continue to sleep with a phantom: the great zombie of modernity, it is revolution, alas. The great zombie. » —René Depestre, Interview with Joan Dayan, 19902 Ruins of Dreams3 Patrick Chamoiseau might have articulated the most fundamental dilemma of French Caribbean writing when he claimed early in Ecrire en pays dominé that it was far better for a writer to write under colonialism—the political domination of "l'âge dernier"—than within the "domination silencieuse" of cultural assimilation. In Chamoiseau's view, colonial oppression provided a much more fertile ground to the writer's literary imagination because it offered a visible target against which his craft could "faire balles et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts." In removing the colonial enemy, cultural assimilation disarmed the "guerrier" within the writer, turning him into a mere observer of local reality, "un pauvre scribe, marqueur de paroles."4 This privileging of the writer-guerrier over the writer-scribe expresses Chamoiseau's nostalgia for the ideal of the committed writer—a nostalgia that can be likened to the modern belief in the visionary artist. In the French Caribbean, this (modern) ideal is embodied by figures such as Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and René Depestre whose writings often called for the end of colonial oppression through explosive solutions, radical political change and revolutionary action. Writing fifty years after the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles, Chamoiseau is drawn to the hope (l'espoir) that he imagines had been the explosive impact (faire balles) of that earlier writing. As he examines the livres endormis from the high days [End Page 13] of anti-colonial struggle, Chamoiseau asks a question to which we will return throughout this article: What is left for a writer to write once the glory days are gone? What seems to fascinate, yet trouble, Chamoiseau as a writer is the apocalyptic element (seemingly) inherent to the poetics and politics of this earlier literature. Aimé Césaire's call for decolonization, for instance, is indeed explosive. His Cahier d'un retour au pays natal employs metaphors of explosion in the poet's pathological analysis of the native land ('Les Antilles dynamités d'alcool')5 as well as in his vision of its future salvation ('les volcans éclateront, l'eau emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu'un bouillonnement tiède picoré d'oiseaux marins').6 In the poet's view, cataclysmic change conceived as 'l'apocalypse des monstres… chaude élection de cendres, de ruines et d'affaissements,' seems to hold the highest potential for stimulating 'l'affreuse inanité de notre raison d'être.' The Cahier's poetic thrust seems to arise as much out of an apocalypse—a movement toward an impending cataclysmic end ('La Fin du monde, parbleu')7—as an affirmation of the poet's Negritude.8 Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre provides another example from this l'âge dernier of an apocalyptic conception of revolutionary change. Fanon's ardent attraction to revolution partly stems from the transformative and purifying power of apocalyptic action. In his vision of the decolonizing process, "Tout est permis; en réalité, l'on ne se réunit que pour laisser la libido accumulée, l'aggressivité empêchée, sourdre volcaniquement. Mises à mort symboliques, chevauchées figuratives, meurtres multiples imaginaires, il faut que tout cela sorte. Les mauvaises humeurs s'écoulent, bruyantes telles des coulées de lave...''9 In Fanon's vision, violence (erupted volcanoes) is necessary ingredient that allows revolution to fulfill its destructive and reconstructive purpose; it brings about the end of decolonization by destroying all of its constitutive elements (colonial system, colonizer...