Paris Noir au féminin: Fabienne Kanor’s DOM-TOM Histories

Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between Caribbean women and the contemporary Parisian landscape in the work of Fabienne Kanor. In reviving the narratives of working-class migrants from the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, Kanor evokes an urban interaction strikingly different from that of interwar Black Paris. Born in Orléans to parents from Martinique, Kanor also marks a contrast with other Afro-Parisian women writers in that her novels are permeated with a disavowed history of slavery, forced migration, and cultural assimilation. Drawing on her parents’ narratives as ‘beneficiaries’ of the BUMIDOM, the state agency created in 1962 to foster migration from French Overseas Departments, Kanor’s 2004 novel D’Eaux douces cogently illuminates one of the shadow narratives of May ’68: that of DOM-TOM Parisians, whose determination to erase their racial and cultural history would leave a generation of black women to confront that absence in their everyday encounter with the French capital.