Witchcrafts of Color

Abstract

Abstract This essay argues that the anticolonial efforts of Martinican intellectuals like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon often established a strict dichotomy between a violated, abject, and feminized Martinique and a masculine and authoritative France. In this way, they reify and perpetuate a tradition of colonial literature that establishes Martinican women of color, like the island itself, as both sexually available to the colonizer and resigned to exploitation and abandonment. Through an analysis of two French West Indian women writers—Mayotte Capécia and Suzanne Césaire, both writing during the Vichy occupation of Martinique in the 1940s—the essay suggests that the seemingly monolithic trope of the sexually inviting Martinican woman contains a loophole that could lead to its own dismantling. More specifically, I argue that the element of the supernatural that is often imbedded in the colonial lore of female shapeshifters and sorceresses provides a counterreading to the beautiful and subservient woman of color of colonial fantasies. By situating West Indian femininity in a genealogy of supernatural camouflage, subterfuge, and transformation, Capécia and Césaire undermine misogynist colonial fantasies by revealing teeth, fangs, and venomous hearts beneath the seemingly obliging flesh of the Martinican woman of color.