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Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women's Writing from Guadeloupe
by Samantha Haigh BA MA
Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, October, 1995
Speak, you! Are you struck dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman, sacred lifegiver! James Joyce, mysses
Abstract This thesis is an attempt to contribute to the growing body of work on literature from the French departements d'outre-mer of Guadeloupe and Martinique. More particularly, it represents an attempt to contribute to the growing body of work on women writers from these islands - referred to here as the Antilles - and to situate recent women's writing in relation to the Antillean literary tradition as a whole. The development of this tradition is traced in the introduction to the thesis: from the French colonial writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to writing by white, Antillean-born 'creoles' (or bekes), and the early 'assimilationist' writing of mulattoes and black Antilleans; from the radical philosophical and poetic texts of negritude, to more sophisticated, recent attempts to find ways in which to imagine Antillean identity and history. It is in relation to the more recent, black Antillean literary tradition, a tradition which has typically excluded Antillean women and Antillean women's writing, that selected novels by Guadeloupean women are examined here. This thesis traces the ways in which these writers position themselves - explicitly and implicitly - vis-a.-vis the androcentric tradition which they have inherited. With reference to various feminist theoretical frameworks, it explores also the ways in which women writers disrupt the very tradition which they evoke, bringing questions of gender and sexuality to bear upon those of race. Chapter one examines three early examples of the way in which Antillean women writers interrogate the presuppositions of seminal Antillean texts, as Michele Lacrosil's Sapotille ou Ie serein d'argile (1960), her Cajou (1961), and Jacqueline Manicom's Mon Examen de blanc (1972) are set against Fanon's Peau noire. masques blancs. Similarly, the second chapter examines the frrst two novels of the most prolific Guade10upean woman writer, Maryse Conde: Heremakhonon (1976) and Une Saison a Rihata (1981). Here, Conde's interrogation of negritude is explored, as are her efforts to imagine a role for women within a discourse which can be seen to be premised upon the exclusion of 'woman'. Chapter three - in which Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ti Jean L'horizon (1979) and Conde's Les Derniers rois mages (1992) are explored - deals with the way in which the Antillean quest for self-definition centres upon issues oflegitirnacy and paternity. In this chapter, as in chapter four, the importance of rewriting colonial history via the medium of fiction is examined. In chapter four, aspects of Edouard Glissant's Le Discours antillais are set in relation to Lacrosil's Demain JabHerrna (1967) and Conde's Traversee de la mangrove (1989). Finally, Conde's Moi. Tituba, sorciere ... noire de Salem (1986) and Dany Bebel-Gisler's Leonora. L'histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe (1985) are examined as examples of the Antillean movement towards the creolite recently theorised by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, as well as towards the Creole language. What emerges throughout these chapters is a sense both of the way in which the Antillean literary tradition is developing and, more importantly, of the way in which Antillean women writers have come to playa crucial role in that development. What also emerges - and this is perfectly exemplified by Conde's very recent La Migration des coeurs (1995), which is discussed briefly in the afterword to this thesis - is the way in which the work of Antillean women writers has come to provide a vital mode of intervention into a tradition from which it had hitherto been excluded.
Acknowledgements
During the last four years I have been helped, in various ways, by a number of friends, colleagues and fellow postgraduates, all of whom I should like to thank here: in particular Phil Leonard, but also Stephanie Burrows, Jack Chapman, Rosemary Chapman, Julia Dobson, Marion Egan, Daniel Gercke, Kate Haigh, Nicki Hitchcott, Claire Whatling and Cathy Wright. I should also particularly like to thank Bridget Jones for her invaluable advice and encouragement. I am especially grateful, however, to my supervisors, Diana Knight and Judith Still, for all of their help and support throughout the time that it has taken to write this thesis.
Contents
Introduction
1
1. Beyond 'Le Regard (du) Blanc'
20
2. The Return of Africa's Daughters: Negritude and the Gendering of Exile
72
3. The Continuing Quest for Origins - History as Filiation
123
4.History,Identrty, ~et~sage
172
5. Narratives of Enslavement and Liberation: Finding a 'Mothertongue'
235
Afterword
301
Bibliography
311
Introduction
In his introduction to A New History of French Literature, Denis Hollier discusses the way in
which the idea of a 'national literature' can no longer easily be linked - if, indeed, it ever could - to that of strictly defined national borders.) For Hollier, literature transcends borders both between and within nations: 'works of literature are not', he states, 'as tightly bound to place as are architectural ones, or to time as are political acts ...• [they are] less tightly anchored to local history and geography' (Hollier, p. xxi). In the context of French literature itself, borders have been expanded, in recent years, by what has come to be known as 'Francophone' writing - writing which is simultaneously 'French' and 'not French'. This writing. when considered as 'French'. proves the
veracity of Hollier's assertion, expanding as it does the way in which France may define its national literature. Yet when considered as francophone rather than French, this writing throws into crisis Hollier's very definitions both of literature and of borders. For example. in the case of the Antilles those islands of the francophone Caribbean2 which have never possessed a notion of 'national borders' but which nonetheless possess a rich and diverse literature - the idea of a 'national literature' is fraught with difficulty. While writing in French from the Antilles would no longer wish
) Denis Hollier, A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1994). p. xii and p. xxv. 2 Throughout this thesis my use of the term 'Antilles' will refer solely to the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, though both neighbouring French Guiana ('la Guyane'), situated on the South American coast, and Haiti. independent from France since 1804, are in many studies referred to as 'Antillean'. This is particularly true of French Guiana, because of its geographical proximity to Guadeloupe and Martinique and because of its shared colonial history. It was colonised at the same time as the Caribbean islands, for example. and has always been administered in the same way, first by the 'Compagnie des lIes d' Amerique' and then by the 'Compagnie des Indes Occidentales', before being reattached directly to the French Crown in 1674. Similarly, along with Reunion island in the Pacific, it was made a departement d' outre-mer (DOM) at the same time as were Guadeloupe and Martinique - in 1946.
1
to define itself exclusively as 'French', it is equally unable to define itself as a national literature in the way described by Hollier. Rather, as we shall see in the course of this thesis, Antillean literature continues to be intimately and vitally 'anchored' to place, to time, to local history and to geography. The Caribbean islands of Karukera and Madinina, though 'discovered' and renamed as Guadeloupe and Martinique by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and 1502 respectively, were not 3
colonised by the French until 1635. Up until this time, both islands were attacked continually by the Spanish until all resistance by the native Carib Indians was put down, and those who were not exterminated fled to neighbouring Dominica. From this point, the history of the Antilles is one of continued violence and colonial exploitation: from the replacement of French indentured labourers with the first slaves from Africa in 1680 to the introduction in 1685 of the 'Code Noir,;4 from slavery's first, and temporary, abolition in 1794 to its reinstatement in 1802;5 from slavery's definitive abolition in 1848 to the introduction of indentured labourers from India in 1853 and, finally, from the departmentalisation of the islands in 1946 to the present-day situation of mass unemployment and economic and social decline.6
3 Guadeloupe is, in fact, an archipelago of nine islands: Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre make up the main 'double island' ('Le Papillon', as it is often called) around which La Desirade, Les lles de la Petite Terre, Marie Galante, and Les Saintes are grouped. Two hundred kilometres further north are two more small dependencies, Saint-Barthelemy, and the French half of Saint-Martin. 4 The introduction of 'Ie Code Noir' by Louis XIV was intended to provide guidelines for plantation owners about the appropriate treatment of slaves. As Lucien-Rene Abenon explains: '[les esclaves] furent assimiles a des biens mobiliers dont Ie mai"tre pouvait disposer a sa guise ... Cependant, un mru.rre responsable n'avait guere interet 11. maltraiter ou 11. estropier des esclaves qui cot1taient cher... Les cruels chatiments etablis par Ie Code Noir n'etait pas appliques en toutes occasions a la lettre. Mais on y avait quelquefois recours, ne serait-ce pour effrayer les esclaves desormais numeriquement superieurs aux colons d'origine europeenne et pour les dissuader de revolter' (Lucien-Rene Abenon, Petite histoire de la Guadeloupe, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992, p. 51). On this, and other aspects of Guadeloupean history, see also Jacques Ziller, Les DOM-TOM (paris: Librairie Generale de Droit, 1991).
S This
period of Guadeloupean history will be dealt with in detail in chapter four.
6 With the decline of the sugar-cane industry, the rate of unemployment in Guadeloupe is high: in 1988 it was 30%, as opposed to 11 % in France. Of this 30%, 60-70% are under twenty-five years old and/or are first-time jobseekers. Despite the growth of the tourist industry, the absence of adequate French government funding for the development of other industries means that unemployment in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and mass emigration to
2
It is against this historical background - a background which will be examined in more detail throughout this thesis - that a tradition of literary and theoretical writing has developed in the Antilles. This is a tradition which began, of course, with French, colonial writing on and about the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Pere du Tertre's Histoire generale des Antilles habitees par les Fran~ais, published between 1667 and 1671, and pere Labat's Nouveaux voyages aux TIes d' Amerique, published in 1722, provide the first examples of such writing, writing which consisted largely of descriptions of the geography of the islands and of the newly-established and still developing planter society by temporary residents of the islands. 7 It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the Creoles, or bekes8 - the Antillean-born white population - began also to write. The white Guadeloupean Nicholas-Germain Leonard, who published three texts - La Nouvelle Clementine (1744), Idylles morales (1766) and Lettre sur un voyage aux Antilles (1787) became the first Antillean-born writer, though he, like the earlier French writers spent most of his life in France and based his texts on observations he made as a visitor to the islands. Other bekc5
France - emigration which began on a large scale in the 1960s with the establishment BUMIDOM, 'Le Bureau pour Ie Developpement des Migrations interessant les departements d'outre-mer' - will continue. Those 'new' industries which have been attempted - based around the production of fruit and vegetables for exportation - have failed because the goods could not be produced at prices sufficiently low to enable competition with those neighbouring countries producing similar products (on these, and related, issues see Jean-Luc Mathieu, Les DaM-TOM, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988; Auguste Armet, 'Guadeloupe et Martinique: des societes "kraze"?', Presence Africaine, 121-122, 1982, pp. 11-19; Robert Lambotte, 'Les DaM: Ie sous-developpement fran~ais', ~, 77, 1979. pp. 38-42; Emile Maurice, 'La decentralisation, pour Ie meiJIeur ou Ie pire', Bulletin d'jnfQrmation du CENNADOM. 76, 1984, pp. 95-97). 7 For further details on these texts, see Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Lettres creoles: Tracees antillaises et continentales de la Iinerature 1635-1975 (paris: Hatier, 1991), pp. 21-9 and Richard Burton's entry on the West Indies in Peter France, ed., The New Oxford CQmpanion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 852. Subsequent references to pre- and early twentieth-century Antillean texts have been taken both from Burton's article and from the 'petite chronologie' to be found at the end of Chamoiseau's and Confiant's ~
~.
8 ~ is a Creole term for 'blanc-pays': those white inhabitants of the Antilles who have been born there and whose ancestors, for the most part, are of the colonial class. Although it is a term usually related more specifically to the white inhabitants of Martinique - whose numbers are greater than those of Guadeloupe - it is nevertheless. as we shall see, a term also used in Guadeloupe and in Guadeloupean literature.
3
texts followed: notably Louis Maynard de Queillie's Outre-Mer (1835), Poire de Saint-Aurele's Les Veillees fran~aises (1826) and Jules Levilloux's Les Creoles. oll la vie aux Antilles (1835). Although the latter may have been a mulatto, and despite the acquisition by mulattoes of the right to full French citizenship in 1833, the mulatto population, and still less the black population, produced hardly any writing until the late nineteenth century. Instead, perceiving their power to be under threat, white Creole writers began to publish ever more bitterly racist texts, such as Rosemond de Beauvallon's Hier! Aujourd'hui! Demain!. ou les Agonies 'creoles (1885). As Richard Burton points out,. however, the rhost outstanding text of the late nineteenth century is, in fact, a novel by a Guyanese, and 'evidently non-white' writer. Atipa. roman guyanais, published in Creole in 1885 under the pseudonym of Alfred Parepou is a text which, according to Burton, 'offers a vivid and mordant picture of colonial society,.9 The early twentieth century saw the publication of several volumes of poetry by white Creole writers, most notably Daniel Thaly's Lucioles et cantharides (1900) and I.e Jardin des tropiques (1911) and Saint-John Perse's Anabase (1924). At the same time, mulatto poets such as Victor Duquesnay (Les Martiniquaises, 1903) and Orono Lara (Sous Ie ciel bleu de Guadeloupe, 1912) also began to write though, unsurprisingly, in a noticeably 'assimilated' style. That is, they wrote in a style derived from that of the white Creole writers, who themselves emulated the work of their 'metropolitan' contemporaries. It was not until the appearance of Rene Maran's novel Batouala (1921), Oruno Lara's Questions de couleur - noirs et blanches (1923), Suzanne Lacascade's Claire-Solange. arne africaine (1924) and Uon-Gontran Damas' collection of poetry,
9
Richard Burton, ibid., p. 852.
4
Pigments (1937), that a racially aware, Antillean form of writing began finally to develop among the mulatto and black populations of the colonies. 10 It was with the work of Damas, and particularly his association with the Martinican A.iJne Cesaire, that the black Antillean literary tradition continued to emerge in the form of negritude. This political, literary and philosophical movement, as we shall examine in more detail in a subsequent chapter, is usually seen to mark the birth of black Antillean resistance to colonialism and to the alienation - both collective and personal - which it entailed. On what might be termed the 'theoretical' side, this is a tradition, as we shall see, which extends from negritude in the 1930s and 1940s to the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s and 1960s, to the more recent theories of Edouard Glissant or of Eloge de la creolite by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant. 11 On the side of literature, the tradition extends also from negritude - this time from its poetry - to the 1950s and 1960s and the growth of the novel, with the work of figures such as Glissant (l& Uzarde l2 and I.e Quatrieme siecle13) and Joseph Zobel ~ Rue cases-negres
I4
).
From there it
expands, first, to include the genre of theatre, which proliferated most especially during the 1970s, and then to the continued growth of the novel, which remains the dominant genre in the Antilles. From what Burton calls the 'pessimism' of Vincent Placoly's La Vie et la mort de Marcel
10 It must be noted that both Maran and Damas are of Guyanese parentage, just as 'Alfred Parepou', too, was Guyanese. Though therefore not strictly 'Antillean' in the sense in which I shall subsequently use the term, their enormous influence upon the development of the Antillean literary tradition has made their inclusion both conventional and vital.
11 Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Eloge de la creQIite (paris: Gallimard, 1993, originally published in 1989). 12 Edouard
13
Glissant, La Uzarde (paris: Seuil, 1958).
Edouard Glissant, Le Quatrieme siecle (paris: Seuil, 1964).
14 Joseph
Zobel, La Rue cases-negres (paris: Presence Africaine, 1950).
5
lS
Gonstran and Glissant's Malemort 16 to the experimentation of Daniel Maximin's L'Isole soleil, 17 Glissant's Mahogany18 and Confiant's Le Negre et l' Arniral, 19 recent Antillean fiction, like recent Antillean theory, has continued in its attempts to find ways in which to imagine an identity and a history for a people which has never managed to emerge, even nominally, from the colonial era
In this thesis, however, it is not the literary output of these authors with which we shall primarily be concerned, nor with the influence of Antillean theories of identity and history upon it. Rather, we shall be examining that part of the Antillean tradition which, while exploring broadly similar themes, has until quite recently occupied a somewhat marginal position in relation to the literary and theoretical writing outlined above. Women's writing has, of course, always existed in the Antilles - from the work of bekees like Rosemond de Beauvallon to that of pathbreakers like Suzanne Lacascade or 'assimilated' writers like Mayotte Cap6cia, whose work we shall study later. Nonetheless, the Antillean tradition has remained, on the whole, overwhelmingly androcentric stretching, like a paternal line of descent, from cesaire, to Fanon, to Glissant and the writers of Eloge de la creolite. 2o Over the last two decades, however, and especially in recent years, there has been what A. 1. Arnold calls '[une] irruption' of women writers into this 'heritage viril,.21 It is the
IS
Vincent Placoly, La Vie et la mort de Marcel Gonstran (paris: Denoel, 1971).
16 Edouard
Glissant, Malemort (paris: Seuil, 1975).
17 Daniel Maximin, L'XsoM soleil (paris: Seuil, 1981). 18 Edouard Glissant, Mahogany (paris: Seuil, 1987). 19 Raphael Confiant, Le Negre et I' Amiral (paris: Grasset, 1988). 20 In Eloge de la cr¢olite, the authors position themselves quite explicitly as the last in a line of literary fathers and sons which extends from Cesaire ('nous sommes k jamais fils de Cesaire' , ~,p. 18) to Fanon, to Glissant.
21 AJ. Arnold, 'Poetique forcee et identite dans la litterature des Antilles francophones', in Maryse Conde, ed., L'Heritage de Caliban (paris: Editions Jasor, 1992), pp. 19-28 (p. 21).
6
novels of several of these writers - all of whom are, in fact, Guadeloupean22
-
which will be
examined in the course of this thesis: from that of the older generation, Jacqueline Manicom and Michele Lacrosil; to that of the 1970s, of Maryse Conde and Simone Schwarz-Bart; to the later work of Conde and that of the linguist Dany Bebel-Gisler. This 'eruption' of Guadeloupean women writers onto the Antillean literary scene has been
accompanied by an ever-increasing amount of critical and theoretical interest, largely from North America, in women's writing from the francophone Caribbean. Indeed, though only very scattered articles exist on Manicom, Lacrosil and Bebel-Gisler, quite a corpus of material exists about the work of Schwarz-Bart and, even more, about that of Conde, the most prolific of Antillean women writers in general. Unfortunately, however - and as I shall point out at various stages throughout this thesis - a large proportion of this critical material has remained somewhat introductory, concerned simply with providing plot outlines or thematic summaries, rather than with the rigorous analysis either of the texts themselves or of the context of their production. Notable exceptions to this generalisation are to be found in the work of Fran