Francophone Caribbean Literature Research Articles

Posture and Strategy: Rethinking the Writing of Cultural Identity in Francophone Caribbean Literature from a Post-colonial Perspective

Posture and Strategy: Rethinking the Writing of Cultural Identity in Francophone Caribbean Literature from a Post-colonial Perspective

Man up! Masculinity and (Homo)sexuality in René Depestre’s Transatlantic World

The question of homosexuality in Francophone Caribbean literature is often overlooked. However, the ways in which the Haitian René Depestre’s Le mât de cocagne (The Festival of the Greasy Pole, 1979) and “Blues pour une tasse de thé vert” (“Blues for a Cup of Green Tea”), a short story from the collection Eros dans un train chinois (Eros on a Chinese Train, 1990) portray homoeroticism and homosexuality begs further study. In these texts, the study of the violence that surrounds the representation of sexuality reveals the sociopolitical implications of erotic and racial images in a French transatlantic world. Hence, the proposed essay “Man up!” interrogates a (Black) hegemonic masculinity inherited from colonialism and the homophobia it generates. This masculinity prescribes normative traits that frequently appear toxic as it thrives on hypersexuality and brute force. When these two traits become associated with violence and homoeroticism, however, they threaten this very masculinity. Initially, Depestre valorizes “solar eroticism,” a French Caribbean expression of a Black sexuality, free and joyful, and “geolibertinage,” its transnational and global expression. Namely, his novel and short story sing a hegemonic and polyamorous heterosexuality, respectively, in a postcolonial milieu (Haiti) and a diasporic space (Paris). The misadventures of his male characters suggest that eroticism in transatlantic spaces has more to do with Thanatos (death) than Eros (sex). Though Depestre formally explores the construction of the other and the mechanisms of racism and oppression in essays, he also tackles these themes in his fictional work. Applying Caribbean feminist and gendered lenses to his fiction bring to light the intricate bonds between racism, sexism and homophobia. Such a framework reveals the many facets of patriarchy and its mechanism of control.

Reading Rhythm and Listening to Caribbean History in Fiction by Jacques Roumain and Joseph Zobel

This article argues that greater attention should be paid to aural elements of Caribbean literary texts. Taking rhythm as a recurring sonic element of Caribbean writing, it considers ways that rhythm has been used as a shifting, polyvalent marker of black Caribbean history and identity. Works by Jacques Roumain show how rhythm functions as a marker of resistance in the Africanist phase of Francophone Caribbean literature. Scenes in Joseph Zobel's La Rue Cases-Negres suggest how in the post-Negritude era rhythm continued to be an important component of Caribbean fiction. Zobel's work suggests that rhythm not be dismissed as an aspect of the more mystical strands of Caribbean black experience, but be refigured as a dynamic facet of everyday life, as well as a means of connecting the present to the unfinished past of slavery.

Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation by Nicole Simek (review)

1 54Women in French Studies undergraduates as well. Mothers ofInvention is a groundbreaking work and will provide new paths for future scholars ofFrench and Québécois feminist writers. Juliette M. RogersUniversity of New Hampshire Simek, Nicole. Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Pp 235. ISBN: 978-90-420-23277 . Paperback. €47. Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics ofInterpretation by Nicole Simek proposes a critical, ethical approach to the creative writings of Maryse Condé while simultaneously refusing the paradigm of literature as moral code. Specifically, the book examines the way in which the global reader responds to and consumes each text while keeping in mind the problematic of exemplarity. One ofthe greatest strengths ofthe book is the variety and diversity of the subjects addressed within each chapter. Focusing on four main themes including history and globalization, intertextuality and reader reception, trauma and subjectivity, as well as community and ethics, this beautifully executed and meticulous study provides a detailed analysis of eight of Condé's well-known literary works spanning three decades. Maryse Condé is unique in that she writes from the perspective of the privileged bourgeoisie while other Francophone Caribbean writers tend to represent the socio-political plight of the lower classes. Condé is also exceptional for her refusal to subscribe to the literary movements Négritude, Créolité, Antillanité that have largely defined twentieth-century Francophone Caribbean literature. Furthermore, Condé is known for denouncing the notion that literary works possess the power to change the world. Her literary characters thus, do not typically represent models or archetypes of social excellence. The trademark of Condé's texts is their ability to weave intricate mosaics of language and cultural references that reach across geographic boundaries. Condé's numerous literary works thus create an artistic space that privileges the intersection of race, class, gender, and the unique position of Guadeloupean literature within a postcolonial context. Given the island's complex relationship to the Hexagon in the postcolonial era, Condé speaks ofthe artificiality ofGuadeloupe since the island's original inhabitants were exterminated centuries ago. Simek's informed investigation of both the production and reception of Condé's works is enhanced by the book's unique pairing of the author's creative works. The chapters are organized in such a way as to provide a platform for unprecedented comparison and scrutiny of the trajectory of Condé's rich literary career. In the introduction, Simek seamlessly outlines the role of exemplarity, literary texts, and the role of the reader/consumer ofthose texts as well as the way in which Condé has artistically and theoretically participated in such dialogues during the span of her career. Simek successfully demonstrates how, through her Book Reviews155 writing, Condé engages and agitates the reader and the reading process, thus prolonging and enhancing the consumption ofthe postcolonial text. Maryse Condé is known for her rich intertextuality as well as her re-staging of works that belong to the traditional European canon. Simek very successfully shows how this practice represents a way for the author to employ parody and irony to ruse with her readers. It is equally through her re-writing of well-known texts such as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that Condé destabilizes, consumes, and re-invents Western canonical texts. The arguments of this study are convincing, ground breaking, and extremely well-crafted. This book will no doubt serve as a springboard for further investigation and critical analysis of Maryse Condé's writings. Best suited for graduate work or scholarly research, this book makes a fundamental contribution to Condé studies and the field of Francophone Caribbean literature. Sarah E. MosherUniversity of North Dakota Staël, Madame de. Oeuvres critiques, tome 1 : Lettres sur Rousseau ; De l'influence des passions et autres essais moraux. Oeuvres complètes, série I. Ed. Florence Lotterie. Paris : Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp 423. ISBN 978-27453 -1642-4. €77 (Hardcover). In his general preface, Michel Delon sketches the publication history of Staël's Oeuvres complètes, beginning with its first appearance following her death, as a written monument to the combined works of Jacques Necker and Germaine...

Oeuvres critiques, tome 1: Lettres sur Rousseau ; De l'influence des passions et autres essais moraux by Madame de Staël (review)

Book Reviews155 writing, Condé engages and agitates the reader and the reading process, thus prolonging and enhancing the consumption ofthe postcolonial text. Maryse Condé is known for her rich intertextuality as well as her re-staging of works that belong to the traditional European canon. Simek very successfully shows how this practice represents a way for the author to employ parody and irony to ruse with her readers. It is equally through her re-writing of well-known texts such as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that Condé destabilizes, consumes, and re-invents Western canonical texts. The arguments of this study are convincing, ground breaking, and extremely well-crafted. This book will no doubt serve as a springboard for further investigation and critical analysis of Maryse Condé's writings. Best suited for graduate work or scholarly research, this book makes a fundamental contribution to Condé studies and the field of Francophone Caribbean literature. Sarah E. MosherUniversity of North Dakota Staël, Madame de. Oeuvres critiques, tome 1 : Lettres sur Rousseau ; De l'influence des passions et autres essais moraux. Oeuvres complètes, série I. Ed. Florence Lotterie. Paris : Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp 423. ISBN 978-27453 -1642-4. €77 (Hardcover). In his general preface, Michel Delon sketches the publication history of Staël's Oeuvres complètes, beginning with its first appearance following her death, as a written monument to the combined works of Jacques Necker and Germaine de Staël. He links its various subsequent publications to significant events in the tumultuous history of France. Arguing the importance of Staël's contribution to French history and literature, Delon draws a parallel between Staël and two notable male literary figures of the day, Jean Jacques Rousseau and François-René de Chateaubriand. These writers, caught up in the torments leading to and resulting from the Revolution, all reflected upon conflicts and tensions inherent in the roles of individual and society, of faith and reason, of tradition and progress. Unlike the situation of either Chateaubriand or Rousseau, however, it was not until almost 200 years later that interest in the writings of Madame de Staël revived to the point that a society for Staëlian studies was founded in 1930. The society continues today and meets regularly at the château de Coppet where Simone Balayé conceived and promoted the current series that aims at organizing all of Madame de Staël's texts together in a way that would prove especially useful to future researchers. The editors have chosen to systematize Staël's writing by putting her work in historical order within a three-dimensional thematic format that divides them into a series of three groups, each comprised of several volumes: Oeuvres critiques (the current volume), Oeuvres littéraires, and Oeuvres historiques. All essays in the collection are anchored to precise historical context and linked to 156Women in French Studies other contemporary texts through meticulously extensive annotation and crossreferencing . The editors have also modernized language and spelling in order to make Staël's writings accessible to as wide a public as possible. Each instance ofthis effort is carefully annotated in chapter-by-chapter lists of variantes. What this volume specifically does not include is any exhaustive presentation of interpretation, criticism, or commentary that her work may have subsequently provoked. Rather, the editors have provided a bibliography of Staëlian criticism that has accumulated over the years as interest in her work has grown. In this volume, Staël's work is divided into four sections: "Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de JJ. Rousseau;" "De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations;" "De l'éducation de l'âme par la vie;" and "Réflexions sur le suicide." Each section begins with an introduction and analysis written by a member of the editorial team. The goal of each introductory presentation is to explain the conditions under which the writing was inspired as well as its reception by particular individuals and by the general public. In the final pages, editors have included additional valuable and thoroughly researched information. Among these, a chronology traces major...

Translating Culture: Reading the Paratexts to Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

Translating Culture: Reading the Paratexts to Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal — This article is concerned not with the linguistic translation of a Caribbean text, but with its cultural translation. It presents the argument that the paratexts to the multiple editions of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal fonction principally as instruments of cultural translation. It also describes how the transfigurations of the Cahier's paratext over time and across cultures serve as markers for the changing epistemes of "Caribbean culture" and "Francophone Caribbean Literature."

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature Peter Hallward Nick Nesbitt . Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 258 pp. Most if not all work in postcolonial literary criticism seeks to combine principled political commitment (in a context marked by the eclipse of Marxism and the waning of anti-colonial struggle) and contemporary theoretical sophistication (in a context still mainly marked by the influence of Adorno and Foucault). Nick Nesbitt's book on francophone Caribbean literature is unusually successful on both counts. Wide-ranging and impressively documented, it revives a broadly dialectical conception of historical agency and artistic innovation in terms that [End Page 170] retain both a sharp political edge and a respect for contextual specificity and constraint. Nesbitt's point of departure is a pessimistic assessment of the cultural alienation and political dependency of contemporary Guadeloupe and Martinique. The directly anti-colonial promise once associated with revolutionary figures like Guadeloupe's Louis Delgrès has long since been incorporated into an ever more commodified local folklore (a process described in Nesbitt's first and perhaps most original chapter). Against the progressive consolidation of neo-colonialism in the Caribbean, Nesbitt presents Aimé Césaire in particular—and after him more recent writers like Edouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat—as struggling to recover a relational subjective autonomy through the "aesthetic construction of historical experience." The key philosophical inspiration behind this effort is Hegel, who as Nesbitt points out exerted a direct and lasting influence upon both Césaire and Glissant. As opposed to the more acontextual frameworks of both Kant and Heidegger, Hegel seeks to articulate the universal directly through the mediation of the particular. Nesbitt uses Hegel to explain how "self-consciousness arises from the specific experience of lived contradiction," and in particular from the concrete Caribbean experience of slavery and exploitation. This explanation is the basis, in turn, for the account that Nesbitt develops, as much from Glissant as from Adorno, of the process whereby this alienation is overcome through its conversion into a semi-autonomous aesthetic construction. Nesbitt's Hegel privileges recognition of the opacity or non-identity of the other (Adorno's "preponderance of the object") over the claims of an absolute subject who sees in its objects only the manifestation of its own creative consciousness (Kojève's "end of history"). Most of Nesbitt's book consists of detailed interpretations of the work of Césaire and more recent Caribbean writers as successive contributions to this broadly Hegelian and tendentially global project. Césaire figures here as a fundamentally ambivalent figure. Nesbitt acknowledges his early work, in particular his landmark Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, as the inaugural affirmation of an anticolonial subjectivity in the francophone world. But he sees his later work in particular (most notably the play that dramatizes the corruption of Haiti's Roi Christophe) as tempted if not compromised by leanings towards a Kojevian or absolutist Hegelianism. This sets the stage, in [End Page 171] duly dialectical fashion, for Glissant to emerge as the more consistently relational artist and thinker. Unlike most admirers of Glissant, Nesbitt recognizes that his recent writings are themselves susceptible to the lure of the immediate or absolute, albeit less in a Hegelian than in a Spinozist or Deleuzian vein. Nesbitt prefers, however, to privilege Glissant's concern for local specificity, artistic construction and political engagement. Although the present (and rather more skeptical) reviewer doesn't find it entirely persuasive, the result is a sympathetic portrayal of Glissant as the champion of an "aesthetic constructionism," i.e., of a painstaking effort to respect the "opacity" of the other, to secure the "autonomy of objects by passing through subjective experience, maximizing its determinations in a poetic quasi-logic rather than eliminating subjectivity in deference to an engulfing scientific positivism." Exactly who or what is threatened by such engulfing, however, isn't always clear. More substantial grounds for skepticism may be signaled by the fact that the period (mainly the late 1980s and 1990s) during which Glissant no doubt became the single most influential figure in francophone Caribbean literary studies was...

The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture by Gertrud Aub-Buscher , Beverley Ormerod Noakes (review)

794 Reviews well-known predecessor. Indeed, the paired reading of the texts functions mainly to illustrate the development ofthe autobiographical protagonist rather than to advance arguments over narrative form or social and political context. A corollary of this joint perspective is that less space is available to explore the 'contexts' central to Un sac de billes. With a short study of this type, it is inevitable that complex historical issues are presented in sweeping terms. However, a greater investigation of the situation of the Jews in France during the Second World War, particularly French State compli? city in the Holocaust, would have given student readers a better sense of the global mechanisms of extermination into which the two main protagonists are catapulted. As an introductory text, Simons's study provides a fairoverview ofthe two novels but certainly calls upon readers to look furtherafield for contextual sources and readings Cardiff University Claire Gorrara The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture. Ed. by Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes. Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago: University ofthe West Indies Press. 2003. xxiv+i9ipp. $25. ISBN 976-640-130-6. This collection of essays is dedicated to the memory of Bridget Jones, the pioneering researcher and teacher of francophone Caribbean literature. The broad scope of the essays?topics range from Creole linguistics, socio-political contexts, and Caribbean childhoods, to exile, film, theatre, and gender issues?reflects Bridget Jones's own diverse interests. The editors' intention is to give an overview of the current state of cultural and intellectual play in the francophone Caribbean; an aim which the con? tributors achieve with varying degrees of success. The firsttwo essays plod rather unspectacularly through the well-worn sociolinguistic terrain of Creole language and culture: the latter are seen as unquestionably 'good things' which must be preserved, though these essays never quite say how, or more importantly, why they should be. The intellectual frailties of these two essays are inadvertently laid bare in Michael Dash's searching piece, which cuts through the sociolinguists' nostalgic attachment to Creole language and culture, and probes fardeeper into the ambivalence expressed in recent French Caribbean thought (especially Glissant) to language as an essen? tial, 'apocalyptic' guarantor of authenticity of identity. Similar intellectual vigour is found in Mary Gallagher's comparative essay on representations of Caribbean child? hoods in Saint-John Perse's 'Eloges' and Chamoiseau's Antan d'enfance. Also, Carol Sanders writes incisively on polyphony in Maryse Conde's La Migration des coeurs, and her Bakhtinian analysis goes beyond the facile gender-conscious celebrations of much Conde criticism. One of the most positive aspects of the collection is the close attention paid to Haitian writing, which is so often sidelined in discussions of the francophone Caribbean. Sam Haigh, for example, writes on Dany Laferriere, and provides a solid contextualization for his work against recent re-evaluations of ex? ile and errance. Anthea Morrison deals with the representation of Haiti in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ton beau capitaine, though her essay veers rather excessively towards an empty celebratory vision of the Caribbean community as 'vibrant, resilient and creative?need I add Caribbean?' (p. 122). No, the addition was not needed, and only serves to perpetuate all too comforting myths of the suffering but joyously artistic Caribbean. Despite itself, and in an unforeseen way, perhaps this collection does achieve its aims, as it provides a snapshot of the 'creole continuum' of current crit? ical thinking on the francophone Caribbean: at one end persists the self-defeatingly nostalgic, unreflective celebrations of all things Caribbean; at the other, a few cutting- MLR, 99.3, 2004 795 edge researchers revitalize the area as they lay to rest the old myths; while the rest of us hover at various points in between. The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago Martin Munro Maryse Conde et le theatre antillais. By Melissa L. McKay. (Francophone Cul? tures and Literatures, 36) New York: Peter Lang. 2002. $48.95. xii + 142 pp. ISBN 0-8204-5262-9. Research in the area of Francophone and Creolophone theatres of the Caribbean is emerging in the English-speaking world, thanks to the ground-breaking work of Bridget Jones...

Sur les Traces de Maryse Condé

[C]reativity is a complex process which obeys no rules ... Creative imagination goes beyond the limits of reality and soars to areas of its own choice. (1) Maryse Conde and I entered the French at Department Columbia University at the same time in the fall of 1995. I came to her seminar, Exotisme et Discours Colonial, out of pure curiosity about the department's new hire, as I had initially planned to focus on the period of French literary history stretching from the fin-de-siecle through the period of the entre-deux-guerres for my graduate studies. Fascinated by the Surrealists and their aesthetic forbears, I sought out those places in literature where beauty and anger, fantasy and interrogation, laughter and revolt combined to initiate change--both aesthetic and socio-political. My authors were Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Breton, and Eluard. My only knowledge of francophone Caribbean literature consisted of a few commonplaces and catchphrases concerning Cesaire that I had been exposed to through the filters of Breton and Sartre. But the world--worlds--opened up for me in this first experience with Professor Conde. And by the end of my second seminar with her that spring, Filles, femmes memorables, I had discovered a chorus of new, powerful voices, not least of which was Conde's own. I had begun exploring previously unimagined spaces where beauty and anger, fantasy and interrogation, laughter and revolt combined to initiate change--both aesthetic and socio-political. It quickly became clear that I would have to let go of the banalities of postcolonial literary theory I had picked up and been espousing without challenging. In effect, the discours colonial that Conde evoked was not merely some foolishness fixed in the distant past to be analyzed and dissected. Rather, it is very present, and is something that Conde has exposed and disputed throughout her career--in her novels, in her scholarly writings and, of course, in her classrooms. It was in this last space that my personal connection to Maryse Conde was forged. There, for the first time, I found myself faced with the daunting task of expressing my ideas on texts written by authors I had never heard of before, from countries I had never before been asked to consider as producers of literature. But giving in to my insecurities and remaining silent in her class of relying on well-placed quotes culled from other theorists were not options. Professor Conde simply would not accept such passivity--such timidity--from me of from any of her other students. She forced me to be braver as a reader and as a scholar, surely as an individual as well. She helped me to resist the oft-exaggerated politics implicit in so much of Francophone Caribbean literature and its study. Indeed, perhaps the most important lesson I ever learned from Maryse Conde was not to be intimidated before any text. To be respectful, yes, but also to be unafraid--unafraid of my own voice. How honored was I, then, to have been called on to help organize Order, Disorder, and Freedom: an Homage to Maryse Conde, Columbia's celebration of Conde on the eve of her retirement as professor in the French Department and as chair of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. This gathering together of scholars of Conde's work and of her colleagues and collaborators, past and present, at this colloquium on Columbia's campus created an exceptional experience for participants and attendees alike. The subsequent task of editing this volume, however, proved to be a somewhat more tricky undertaking. Indeed, in my attempts to find an appropriate order in which to place these various testaments to Conde's life and work, the irony inherent in such an endeavor was by no means lost on me. According to what terms does one divide up and categorize responses to and reflections on a writer who herself defies categorization? How does one begin to separate the personal from the formal from the thematic, when all three and more are evoked in each and every individual contribution? …

Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism

Negritude, the claim of Africa as matrix, is an affirmation of identity that finds its full significance in the context of the black world. The rehabilitation of the Storyteller as ancestor of cultural practices in societies born out of the plantation situates Creolite in the heart of the Caribbean archipelago. Negritude and Creolite thus appear as the two essential components of an achipelagic consciousness that, at the level of literary criticism, is revealed through the exploration of intertextual linkages that weave together the literary Caribbean. Patrick Chamoiseau, in Ecrire en pays domine, meditates upon his own writing quest that remains attentive to the echoes of the “sentimentheque,” the collection of wellloved books and authors who have marked the author’s imaginary. Chamoiseau’s intertextual horizon is composed of, among others, readings of Breytenbach, Garcia Marquez, Lamartine, V. S. Naipaul, Glissant, Cesaire, the masters of the word whose Ancestor is the Storyteller on the Plantation. The transfiguration of well-loved books and well-loved authors into appreciable presences is the product of an intertextual networking that, with Chamoiseau as well as other writers of the Antilles, forms the basis of literary creation: “Et ces forces s’etaient imposees a moi avec l’autorite imperiale de leur monde qui effacait le mien. Elles m’avaient annihile en m’amplifiant. Et c’est avec ces mondes allogenes que mes ecrits fonctionnaient dans un deport total. J’exprimais ce que je n’etais pas. Je ne percevais du monde qu’une construction occidentale, deshabitee, et elle me semblait etre la seule qui vaille ” ‘These forces imposed themselves upon me with the imperial authority of their world, which obliterated mine. They had destroyed me while enlarging me. And it is with these foreign worlds that my writings operated in a complete alienation (deport). I expressed what I was not. I only perceived the world as a Western construct, uninhabited, and it seemed to me the only one that mattered’ (44). The expressions of anguish formulated by Chamoiseau as a response to the state of dependency in which Antillean literature emerges bears witness to a malaise that, beyond cultural practices, questions the very foundation of societies in the Caribbean archipelago: Colonized for more than five centuries, quintessentially Western, Caribbean peoples face the challenge of somehow recasting the modernist paradigm of progress, which is unashamedly triumphalist and Eurocentric. How at the same time to appropriate and subvert the central ideas associated with modernity? How to write in the colonizer’s language yet assert one’s own vision of the world? How to both represent and resist the march of History set in motion by Columbus? (Edmondson 125)

Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism

Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism