Caribbean Connections: Comparing Modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Literature, 1950s - Present Angela Brüning Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Studies and French Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Religions University of Stirling May 2006 ii Acknowledgements and Declaration I am grateful to my supervisors Dr. David Murphy and Dr. James Procter for their detailed comments and critical insights in the revision of this thesis and for their unreserved faith in this project. I am grateful to both of them for their close co-operation in supervising this thesis and for having made me think about my work from different, new perspectives. My gratitude also to Prof Angela Smith for having been a mentor throughout the different stages of my research. Special thanks to Dr. Fiona Darroch, Dr. Corinne Fowler and Dr. Patricia Krus for their generosity with their time, for having shared their ideas with me and for having made me reflect on my argument. I am obliged to Dr. Dale Townshend for his critical advice and moral support and to Dr. Andreas Rahmatian for his encouragement. My thanks to my colleagues in the Department of English Studies and the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions for their understanding and for having contributed to a pleasant and stimulating postgraduate community and working atmosphere. Thanks also to the members of staff in these Departments for their help on the administrative side. I would like to thank Andrew Monteith and Oron Joffe for their technical support. I am grateful to Moira Stewart for her time and understanding. I wish to thank a number of treasured friends for their time we spent together as well as for their support of my project. Thanks, among others, to Beatriz Caballero Rodriguez, Valentina Colón, Dr. Maggie Magor, Dr. Isaac Tabner, Rikke Christoffersen, Binder Kaur, Dr. Mark Boydell, Dr. Fiona and Nat Chalamanda, Dr. Phia Steyn, Saumya Sharma-Meier as well as my friends in Germany and overseas. I am indebted to my family, especially to my sister and my parents, for their continuous and unfailing support and encouragement throughout my work on this thesis and for reminding me that there are more important things in life than writing a thesis. I am iii grateful to them for their patience during my emotional outbursts at the various frustrating moments of writing and for having always been only a phone call away from Stirling. iv Abstract In this thesis I investigate connections between modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction between the 1950s and the present. My study brings into focus literary representations of inter-related histories and cultures and problematises the fragmentation of Caribbean studies into separate academic disciplines. The disciplinary compartmentalisation of Caribbean studies into English studies on the one hand and French and Francophone studies on the other has contributed to a reading of Caribbean literature within separate linguistic spheres. This division is strikingly reflected in the scarcity of any sustained literary criticism that acknowledges cultural and literary interpenetration within the archipelago. My comparative study of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction allows me to account for the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies while, at the same time, foregrounding their inter-relatedness. Through a series of specific case studies the thesis illuminates ways in which theoretical concepts and literary tropes have travelled within the archipelago. Through a close reading of selected narrative fiction I will contextualise and analyse significant underlying linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between the various Caribbean societies which are largely based on the shared history of slavery, colonialism and decolonisation processes. The themes of migration, transformation and creolisation will be at the centre of my investigation. Chapter One establishes the historical and literary-critical framework for this thesis by engaging with key developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing from the 1920s until the present. My comparison of the most influential trends in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism from the discourse of négritude to postcolonial studies seeks to highlight connections between these two linguistically divided fields of study. The analysis of Caribbean fiction in Chapters Two to Four pursues such theoretical, stylistic and thematic links further. Chapter Two v challenges the conception of postwar Antillean and West Indian writing produced in the metropolis as distinct literary canons by drawing attention to thematic connections between the two traditions. Through the comparison of The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon and La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel it argues that these continuities represent a wider trend in ‘black European’ writing. Chapter Three examines concepts of cultural identity which have been central to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism during the last two decades. Specifically it focuses on the notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation which it discusses in relation to Robert Antoni’s novel Divina Trace and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco. The final chapter focuses on Shani Mootoo’s and Gisèle Pineau’s representations of specific female experiences of trauma which are related to reiterated colonial violence. Their fictional portrayal of suppressed memories can be read in light of recent critical debates about a collective remembrance of the history of slavery and colonialism. vi Contents Acknowledgements and Declaration ................................................................................ ii Abstract............................................................................................................................ iv Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One .................................................................................................................... 20 Comparison of Literary Discourses in the Anglophone and the Francophone Caribbean, 1920s until the Present ............................................................................. 20 Chapter Two ................................................................................................................... 75 ‘Black Metropolises’: Anglophone and Francophone Caribbeans in Mid-Twentieth Century London and Paris .......................................................................................... 75 Chapter Three ............................................................................................................... 135 The Representation of Creolisation in Divina Trace by Robert Antoni and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau .................................................................................................. 135 Chapter Four ................................................................................................................. 201 Uncovering Trauma in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam ............................................................................................. 201 vii Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 261 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 274 Primary Texts............................................................................................................ 274 Criticism.................................................................................................................... 281 Newspaper Articles................................................................................................... 312 Journals and Newspapers.......................................................................................... 313 Videos ....................................................................................................................... 315 Introduction This thesis examines connections between modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction between the 1950s and the present. Central to my interdisciplinary, comparative reading of Caribbean writing is the investigation of literary representations of overlapping histories and inter-related cultures which are arbitrarily separated by current academic subjects.1 The disciplinary compartmentalisation of Caribbean studies into English studies on the one hand and French and Francophone studies on the other has led to the absence of any sustained literary criticism that acknowledges cultural and literary interpenetration within the archipelago. My comparative approach allows me to account for the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies while, at the same time, highlighting their inter-relatedness. Throughout my thesis I will argue that a comparative reading of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature illuminates the extent to which theoretical concepts and literary tropes have travelled within the archipelago. A comparison of Anglophone and Francophone representations of dominant tropes such as migration, the re-writing of Caribbean history and creolisation will be at the centre of this thesis. In an examination of Caribbean writing produced in postwar Britain and France I will explore connections between these literary traditions and situate them within a wider trend of ‘black European’ writing. My discussion of concepts of cultural identity, specifically notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation on the one hand and exotisme/exoticism on the other, will draw attention to both overlaps between and limitations of these concepts. The comparison of contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literary representations of Caribbean history and violence concentrates on the connection between trauma, language and imagination, a connection that has frequently been 1 English and French/Francophone studies are rather heterogeneous disciplines that might better be classified as academic subjects. Introduction 2 overlooked in Caribbean criticism. Through this comparison I will also investigate the extent to which different colonising practices have influenced the collective consciousness of contemporary Caribbean societies. Unlike other existing comparative criticism on Caribbean literature my study is theme- based, and the individual chapters are arranged chronologically which allows me to trace major stages in Caribbean writing since the 1950s. As such it moves beyond historical and anthropological approaches towards Caribbean writing as adopted by critics such as A. James Arnold, Michael Dash and Colette Maximin. In Littératures caribéennes comparées (1996) Maximin compares Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature but largely restricts her literary analyses to texts written by male authors and to investigations of different forms of Caribbean folklore.2 In works such as Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double- Consciousness (1993), A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Volume One, Hispanic and Francophone Regions (1994) by A. James Arnold, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash, and J. Michael Dash’s The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998) Caribbean literature has been situated in relation to concepts of (post)modernity and (post)modernism.3 By contrast, my study focuses on major literary themes and theoretical concepts that emerged in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction and criticism since the second half of the twentieth century. In The Other America Dash assesses the impact that the history of colonialism, including the plantation system, has had on Caribbean societies and questions of self-definition. His 2 Colette Maximin, Littératures caribéennes comparées (Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe: Editions Jasor, and Paris: Karthala, 1996). 3 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James England Maraniss (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1992); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993); A. James Arnold, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash, eds, A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Volume One, Hispanic and Francophone Regions (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994); J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville and London, UP of Virginia, 1998). Introduction 3 investigation – like Benítez-Rojo’s – primarily concentrates on socio-cultural and economic factors, whereas my thesis analyses fictional texts against the backdrop of Caribbean histories and cultures. Benítez-Rojo largely limits his brief discussions of fiction to texts by Hispanophone writers like Las Casas, Guillén, Capentier, Ortiz, and Rodríguez-Juliá. By contrast, my comparison of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing interrogates the cultural and linguistic divide in the archipelago. Also, my thesis moves beyond the triangular relationship between Europe, Africa and the Americas on which Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is based. I focus more specifically on the Caribbean archipelago while, at the same time, relating Anglophone and Francophone writing from this region to literary trends worldwide. My study is restricted to the examination of a selection of Caribbean novels and to the juxtaposition of West Indian with Antillean literature. The term ‘Antilles’ is hereby limited to Martinique, Guadeloupe and the small surrounding islands of Marie Galante, les Saintes, Désirada and the Francophone part of St. Martin. Although French Guiana on the South American continent has the same political status as a French overseas department as these islands, I will exclude this region from my study. The history of French Guiana clearly differs from that of the French Antilles insofar as it was a penal colony between 1852 and 1936 rather than a plantation colony. This different type of colonisation has had demographic consequences and sets this region apart from the French Antilles. Its geographical location on the South American continent further reinforces its distinctness. Most importantly, however, the absence of any significant body of French Guianese literary production has led to my omission of this location. The second location that will not be considered in this research is Haiti. Once again, as with French Guiana, the distinct history of the island has led to its exclusion from this study. Haiti’s historical development is unique in the entire Caribbean archipelago insofar as it gained independence as early as 1804. Undoubtedly, the Haitian Revolution and its early independence have engendered distinct political, social and literary developments on this island. My thesis seeks to carry out a thorough examination of Introduction 4 specific Anglophone and Francophone islands. Future research, for which this project sets out the groundwork, will widen the focus to include Haiti and French Guiana.4 In order not to conflate the historical, socio-political and cultural differences within and between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean I will situate the close reading of the selected texts in the specific island contexts. I thus hope to account for the heterogeneity of the Caribbean despite using the general terms ‘Anglophone Caribbean’ and ‘West Indies’ as well as ‘Francophone Caribbean’ and ‘Antilles’. While I am aware of the colonial connotation of the term ‘West Indies’, I will use of this term specifically as a geographical marker.5 The term ‘Antilles’ (‘les Antilles’) is the commonly used French expression for the Caribbean. While it is sometimes applied to the Caribbean archipelago in general (just like ‘West Indies’), I will use ‘Antilles’ synonymously with ‘Francophone Caribbean’ and ‘West Indies’ as a substitute for ‘Anglophone Caribbean’. The terms ‘Anglophone’ and ‘Francophone’ will be deployed with a critical awareness of the loaded meanings that they carry. Both terms refer to a community of English or 4 The fact that the Haitian Revolution and the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture have become a touchstone for various Caribbean, and especially Antillean writers exemplifies the resonance that the Haitian space has found in Caribbean literature and criticism outside the island. See, for instance, C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); Maryse Condé, La Parole des femmes: essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979), p. 80; Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: la Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981); Aimé Césaire, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970); Régis Antoine, La Tragédie du roi Christophe de Aimé Césaire (Paris: Bordas, 1984). 5 As Low points out in an endnote, while the terms ‘West Indian’ and ‘Caribbean’ (referring to the Anglophone Caribbean only) were sometimes employed interchangeably, the former was commonly understood as denoting a ‘cultural entity over and above its political or economic ties’; Wendy Griswold, ‘The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies’, American Journal of Sociology, 92: 5 (1987), p. 1078, quoted in Gail Low, ‘Publishing Commonwealth: The Case of West Indian Writing, 1850-65’, EnterText, electronic edition, 2: 1 (2001), pp. 71-93 (p. 92). For further discussion of this term see also Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 32-50, esp. pp. 32-36 and p. 248; and Sandra Courtman, ed., Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. xiv-xv. Introduction 5 French-speaking regions worldwide which were colonised by Great Britain and France respectively. Not only do these expressions gloss over differences between the various former English and French-speaking colonies, but they also implicitly continue to posit the metropolises as the ‘centre’.6 ‘Anglophone’, just like ‘Francophone’, grants the colonial language (and with it the coloniser’s culture) a central role in the former British and French colonies.7 In the ‘Francophone’ context this questionable ‘centre’/‘periphery’ dichotomy is reinforced by the link between ‘Francophone’ and the concept of ‘Francophonie’. As Murphy outlines, ‘Francophonie’ was originally euphemistically applied to those regions worldwide that had been colonised by France during the nineteenth century.8 Unless ‘Francophonie’ and ‘Francophone’, just like ‘Anglophone’, are used with some critical problematisation of the fact that these terms occlude the French and British colonial history of military, political and psychological oppression of the colonised, the terms still imply some (neo-)colonial metropolitan domination over the formerly colonised French-speaking and English-speaking world.9 With regard to literary production these concepts are further problematised insofar as the exclusion of British, French, Belgian and Swiss literature from ‘Anglophone’ and 6 Murphy and Cailler both refer to the marginalization of ‘Francophone’ writers in relation to ‘French’ literature; David Murphy, ‘De-centring French studies: towards a postcolonial theory of Francophone cultures’, French Cultural Studies, 13:2 (June 2002), pp. 165-85; and Bernadette Cailler, ‘Creolization versus Francophonie: Language, Identiy and Culture in the Works of Edouard Glissant’, in L’Héritage de Caliban, ed. by Maryse Condé (Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe: Editions Jasor, 1992), pp. 49-62 (pp. 53-54). As Shohat emphasizes in her discussion of the term ‘post- colonial’, this concept, too, risks imposing the ‘centre’/‘periphery’ binary; Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, Social Text, 31-32 (1992), pp. 99-113 (p. 102). 7 See, for instance, Murphy, ‘De-centring French studies’, pp. 166-67; Irène Assiba d’Almeida, ‘A Necessary Uneasiness’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 25-28 (p. 26). 8 Murphy, ‘De-centring French Studies’, p. 166. See also Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, ‘Introduction: the case for Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 1- 14 (p. 3); Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, eds, Post-Colonial Cultures in France (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3-6. 9 For the Francophone context see Murphy, ‘De-centring French Studies’, p. 166. Introduction 6 ‘Francophone’ writing reinforces this binary between former coloniser and colonised.10 By signalling the inter-relatedness of metropolitan and Caribbean literatures, my thesis will interrogate this dualism and advocate a postcolonial and cross-cultural reading of Caribbean texts. In the absence of any appropriate alternative for ‘Anglophone’ and ‘Francophone’ I will use them in this study with a critical awareness of their problematic ideological connotations. Since the institutionalisation of ‘postcolonial studies’ in English departments at British, North American and Australian universities in the 1980s, the concept ‘postcolonial’ has aroused critical debates, especially in the context of Anglophone postcolonial studies. In fact, as several scholars (within Anglophone and, above all, in the field of Francophone studies) argue, ‘postcolonial studies’ has, since the onset, privileged Anglophone contexts and tacitly assumed its applicability to other cultural contexts.11 This rather exclusionary Anglophone bias towards postcolonial studies has, to an extent, been reciprocated by French and Francophone scholars, who have been sceptical about theories developed in the Anglo-American context.12 The general trend among the latter 10 Murphy expands on this problematic in his article ‘De-centring French Studies’, p. 173. 11 See, for instance, Jacqueline Bardolph, Etudes postcoloniales et littérature (Paris: Champion, 2001); Emily Apter, ‘French Colonial Studies and postcolonial theory’, Sub-Stance, 76-77 (1995), pp. 169- 80; Britton and Syrotinski underline that the publication of The Empire Writes Back (1989) with its sole focus on the Anglophone context largely triggered the ‘marking out [of] clear disciplinary boundaries’; Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski, ‘Introduction’, Paragraph, 24: 3 (2001), pp. 1-11 (p. 4); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Charles Forsdick, ‘Introduction’, in Travel and Exile: Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. by Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: ASCALF Critical Studies in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, 1, 2001), pp. v-ix (pp. vi-vii), and Forsdick and Murphy, ‘Introduction’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, p. 7; Harish Trivedi, ‘The Postcolonial or the Transcolonial? Location and Language’, Interventions, 1: 2 (1999), pp. 269-72 (p. 272). 12 See, for instance, Ieme van der Poel, ‘Albert Camus, ou la critique postcoloniale face au «rêve méditerranéen»’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2: 1 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 70-78 (pp. 70- 71), Alec G. Hargreaves, ‘Ships Passing in the Night? France, Postcolonialism and the Globalization of Literature’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 64-69 (p. 65); Mary Gallagher, ‘ASCALF R.I.P.: Some (Mischievous) Thoughts on Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 51-54 (p. 52); Jim House, Introduction 7 has been to foreground existing French theories and to develop more conventional, standard critical discourses.13 As Forsdick and Murphy discuss concisely, sustained Francophone engagement with ‘postcolonial studies’ and ‘postcolonial literature’ has, until the last decade, remained relatively isolated in the field of French and Francophone studies. In France it has, indeed, often been relegated to Comparative Literature departments.14 However, the last decade has witnessed the emergence of larger body of criticism on ‘postcolonial’ issues from the field of Francophone studies.15 As these critical engagements (by Anglophone and Francophone scholars) with ‘postcolonial’ concepts demonstrate, and as the variations in the spelling of this word signal, the term ‘postcolonial’ has been highly controversial. ‘Post-colonial’ is now commonly understood as focusing on the temporal aspect of this term and signifying the period after colonialism. ‘Postcolonial’, by contrast, accentuates and interrogates the wider political, social and cultural realities in the formerly colonised regions. The academic field of ‘postcolonial studies’ is invested in drawing parallels between specific colonial experiences. In her lucid and thorough analysis of the development of the concept, Shohat defines ‘post-colonial’, which has nowadays been replaced by the un- hyphenated version, as ‘designat[ing] […] critical discourses which thematize issues emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath, covering a long historical span ‘Francophone Postcolonial studies and New Historiographies of the Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 72-78 (p. 75). 13 Antoine Compagnon, ‘L’Exception française’, Textuel, 37 (2000), pp. 41-52 (esp. pp. 45-46, 49-50). Forsdick and Murphy revisit his idea in their ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 14 Forsdick and Murphy provide a thorough analysis of developments in French and Francophone departments both in the French- and English-speaking world in their ‘Introduction’, pp. 9-11. 15 For an overview of recent critical engagement with the ‘postcolonial’ see Forsdick and Murphy, ‘Introduction’, pp. 11-12. Arnold discusses France’s ambivalence towards its colonial history and, at the same time, points out that there has been a gradual opening of French studies towards ‘postcolonial’ problematics since the 1990s; A. James Arnold, ‘Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2: 1 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 7-10 (pp. 9-10). Some critical engagement with the ‘postcolonial’ in the field of Francophone studies – albeit primarily at British and North American universities – is also testified to by the contributions to the initial three volumes of the journal Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1-2: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003-2004). Introduction 8 (including the present)’.16 She emphasizes that the ‘post-colonial’ occludes spatial and temporal specifics.17 Thus the concept risks eliding geographical and cultural differences between the former colonised part of the world and to gloss over the distinct experiences of coloniser and colonised.18 Similarly, the term is temporally vague insofar as the various colonies gained independence at different points in time.19 This fact is particularly relevant in the context of the Francophone Caribbean which does not constitute a ‘post-colonial’ region, if we follow the merely temporal definition of the term. Having voted to become French overseas departments, the Antilles are an integral part of the French state and thus neither colonies nor independent islands. (This interstitial position of the Francophone Caribbean might have contributed to French and Francophone scholars’ reluctance to engage with the concept ‘postcolonial’.) In the juxtaposition of ‘postcolonial’ with ‘neo-colonial’, the former ‘comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations’ and seems to ignore contemporary social and political structures that reiterate colonial hegemonic structures.20 Despite 16 Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, p. 101. There is no shortage of material on discussions of ‘post-colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’. See, for instance, Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 2; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA; London : Harvard UP, 1999); Anne McClintock, ‘The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term “postcolonialism”’, in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996), pp. 253-66; Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, eds, Post-Colonial Cultures in France (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. pp. 14-17; Britton and Syrotinski offer a critical reading of postcolonial studies from a Francophone vantage point in ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-11. Also, the essays in Forsdick’s and Murphy’s book critically engage with notions of the ‘post-colonial’ and the ‘postcolonial’; Forsdick and Murphy, Francophone Postcolonial.Studies; H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey, eds, Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005); Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism, and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003); Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial Discourses: an Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Benita Parry, ‘Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies’, in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 66-81 (esp. pp. 72-78). 17 Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, pp. 103, 105. 18 Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, pp. 103-04. 19 Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, pp. 103-04. 20 Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, p. 105. Introduction 9 these conceptual problems implied in the term ‘postcolonial’ I would argue that this concept can still be usefully deployed in literary criticism, provided it is used critically and is situated in a specific ‘historical, geopolitical and cultural’ context.21 The combination of ‘Anglophone’ or ‘Francophone’, ‘Caribbean’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘literature’ throughout the thesis will help to account for such a distinct conceptual use of the term. While this study will only discuss Caribbean fiction written in English or French, excluding Creole writing, the problematics between the colonial and local languages will be addressed within the individual chapters. The emergence of a large-scale Caribbean literary production during the 1950s, which engaged with and contested colonial literary influences, constitutes the starting point of my investigation. The decision by Antilleans to become a French overseas department in 1946 officially ended the islands’ status as colonies. This means that the Antilles entered a new era and moved into what might be called a state of ‘postcoloniality’. With the large-scale (economic) emigration to Great Britain on the one hand and the emergence of independence movements on the other, the period of the 1950s and 1960s constituted a similarly important historical marker for West Indian societies. Pioneering texts by writers and intellectuals such as Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Joseph Zobel and Frantz Fanon can thus be regarded as having provided a literary and critical basis for Caribbean literature until the present. This thesis will provide particular case studies of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction that strikingly illustrate how productive an interdisciplinary, comparative approach can be. My study concentrates on three specific trends in Caribbean literature since the postwar period. The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris will be situated within the context of a Caribbean literary production in the metropolis which emerged during the 1950s; Divina Trace and Texaco are located in the 21 I here agree with Shohat, who advocates this clear contextualising of the term; Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, p. 111. Introduction 10 context of current debates about (Caribbean) cultural identities; and my comparison of Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam allows me to investigate key themes addressed in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing. The thesis consists of four chapters the first of which examines the development of literary discourses in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. It provides an historical and literary-critical foundation for the analyses of selected Caribbean fictional narratives in the following three chapters. My close reading of literary texts moves from the postwar period and the metropolitan setting portrayed in Caribbean fiction to the Caribbean as the principal source of the literary imagination. The thesis is thematically structured and investigates the topos of migrant experiences, notions of hybridity and creolisation as well as trauma and language. It aims to uncover cross-cultural connections between the Caribbean and the metropolises on the one hand as well as between the various Caribbean islands on the other. I chose specific case studies covering a period from the 1950s to the 1990s in order to examine changes from the colonial to the post-colonial period. Such changes are, for instance, a gradual move away from the metropolis and metropolitan literature as a crucial point of reference to a greater focus on connections between different cultures and islands within the Caribbean. This shift can be discerned when we compare novels such as Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Joseph Zobel’s La Fête à Paris (1953) on the one hand and Antoni’s Divina Trace and Chamoiseau’s Texaco on the other.22 As my comparison of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs (1995) in the Conclusion to the thesis show, concepts of ‘a’ Caribbean cultural identity also shifted from notions of a local to a regional cultural identity.23 In addition, novels such as La Migration des cœurs and Shani 22 Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Longman, 1956); Joseph Zobel, La Fête à Paris (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1953); Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992); Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press, 1992). 23 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. by Angela Smith (1966; London: Penguin, 1997); Maryse Condé, La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). Introduction 11 Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) suggest that there is a trend in Caribbean writing to address themes that challenge colonial, linguistic and cultural boundaries within the archipelago.24 Caribbean fiction has opened itself up towards literary themes that transcend the Caribbean while, at the same time, underscoring the specifics of this cultural context. Tracing these developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature during the second half of the 20th century allowed me to explore various themes and to trace both connections and differences between the individual texts and the specific literary traditions. My study is unique insofar as it has sustained this cross-cultural and cross-linguistic examination of Caribbean fiction from the 1950s to the present within each individual chapter. At the same time, however, I do not claim that any of the texts I have analysed are representative of Anglophone or Francophone Caribbean literature in general. Rather, they are specific case studies which reveal how productive a comparative reading of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing can be. In the thesis I emphasize that striking connections exist between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean representations of issues of migration, cultural identity and the uncovering of Caribbean histories. At the same time I account for text- and context- specific differences such as literary styles as well as distinct historical and cultural contexts. Chapter One provides the historical and literary-critical framework adopted throughout the thesis by examining the most significant developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction and criticism since the 1920s. The starting point of this period signals the inception of the Francophone movement of négritude, the first major literary discourse in the Antilles. Négritude has become a touchstone for the more recent, prominent Francophone discourses of antillanité and créolité. While most of the following Francophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals, notably Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant and the Creolists, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, have engaged with the discourse of négritude, its influence on literary-critical developments in the Anglophone Caribbean has, until the last decade, rarely been 24 Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996). Introduction 12 acknowledged by critics of ‘postcolonial studies’. However, problematics discussed by the négritude writers such as questions of black people’s ethnic and cultural identity in the context of colonialism were central to Caribbean writing across the linguistic divide.25 The impact that the history of slavery, colonial oppression and cross-cultural encounters has had on Caribbean identities has been of central concern to Caribbean writers and critics ever since. By comparing the most influential trends in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism from the discourse of négritude to postcolonial studies, I aim to draw attention to connections between these two linguistically divided fields of study. An examination of such links is pursued further in Chapters Two to Four. Chapter Two interrogates the positing of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature produced in the metropolis as neat literary canons and argues that these literary traditions have to be considered within the wider framework of a ‘black presence’ and ‘black writing’ in Western Europe. Specifically, the chapter seeks to explore thematic connections between specific fictional texts produced in the metropolises by West Indian and Antillean writers respectively. By focusing on the landmark novels The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon and La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel I will juxtapose ‘black British’ writing with what could be called ‘black French’ literature. Chapters Three and Four will focus on writing that explores the Caribbean space. Chapter Three investigates contemporary discussions about Caribbean cultural identity, specifically the notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation. Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1992) and Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace (1992) will underscore the ambivalences implied in cross-cultural encounters and portray different strands of creolisation. While retracing the extent to which these concepts have travelled between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, the chapter nuances and problematises these notions. As the juxtaposition of the concepts of créolité/creoleness 25 The terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ will be used with an awareness of their problematic status in the thesis. Introduction 13 and exotisme/exoticism suggests, the latter can serve as a strategic assertion of the opacity of certain cultural groups, especially marginalized cultures. In the final chapter I will analyse two novels by women writers, namely Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam (1995), and I will explore the interrelation between different forms of individual, collective and historical trauma that has been caused by the reiteration of male, colonial violence.26 In so doing I will investigate the extent to which contemporary women’s writing reveals issues that seem to move beyond linguistic and colonial boundaries between different Caribbean societies. Both writers undermine the taboo of domestic violence and portray attempts to uncover occluded (hi)stories of female suffering. The novels can thus be related to recent attempts in politics and the arts at a collective memory of the history of slavery and colonialism. While the individual chapters discuss specific literary themes and are conclusive in themselves, taken as a whole they reveal historical and literary connections between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. In the thesis I aim to bring to light connections that become explicit if one has a greater literary and historical awareness of the shared legacy of slavery and colonialism and the resulting ambiguous relationship between the Caribbean and the British and French metropolises. The close links between the West Indies and Great Britain on the one hand and the Antilles and France on the other constitute the backdrop for Chapter Two and Caribbeans’ attraction to the metropolises. While this chapter primarily problematises the conception of the ‘Windrush’ generation as a unique phenomenon, it also highlights continuities between the 1950s and the present. The commemorations of several decisive historical dates in the Caribbean, Great Britain and France since the 1990s as well as current debates about the legacy of colonialism in France and the Antilles seem to have reinforced the public awareness of this 26 Gisèle Pineau, L’Espérance-macadam (Paris: Stock, 1995). Introduction 14 interrelation between past and present. The following case study will illustrate the relevance of my discussion of Caribbean histories and identities in contemporary public, political and intellectual debates about history. 1992 was the year of ‘Columbusiana’, as a reporter referred to it in The Guardian.27 The Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas on 12 October 1492 was commemorated in more than thirty countries, both in Europe and in the Americas.28 As O’Toole remarks, this anniversary ‘shows how the same event in history can be interpreted in different ways and for different reasons’.29 While the President of the Dominican Republic, Joaquin Balaguer, used the anniversary to build a personal [prestige] project’, a monumental mausoleum for Columbus called Faro, the Merseyside Development Corporation commercially exploited this historical date to market the city of Liverpool and ‘to show the world what Liverpool can do’.30 One of the main attractions in the Merseyside calendar of official events was the arrival of more than one hundred tall ships which had, in the form of a ‘transatlantic commemorative race’, reiterated Columbus’ voyage of ‘discovery’.31 Instead of returning to Spain, as Columbus’ small fleet had done, these tall ships sailed from Genoa, the port from which Columbus had set sail to the Caribbean, to Liverpool, one of the principal ports of the former slave trade. Rather than recalling the (near-)extinction of Amerindians in the Caribbean as well as the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery that followed Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean, this race re-enacted the exploitative colonial scramble for supremacy in the Americas. While many business and government related institutions seemed to pay honour to Columbus by celebrating his ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ as an accomplishment, many independent organisations launched demonstrations or counter-events which indicated the consequences of the European 27 David Sharrock, ‘Navigator Fails to Find a Quiet London Berth’, Guardian, 12 October 1992, p. 9. 28 See Gavin O’Toole, ‘Amerindians: When Two Worlds Collide’, Guardian, 7 September 1992, p. 3. 29 O’Toole, ‘Amerindians’, p. 3. 30 Edwin Charles, ‘Columbus Lights a Passing Cloud’, Guardian, 2 January 1992, p. 7 and Erlend Clouston, ‘Operatic Bash for Hero or Villain’, Guardian, 8 August 1992, p. 5. 31 O’Toole, ‘Amerindians: When Two Worlds Collide’, p. 3. Introduction 15 arrival in the Americas, notably colonial exploitation and the near extinction of indigenous people.32 The celebrations during Columbus year were not only immediate critical responses; they also constituted a catalyst for literary and literary-critical engagement with the issue of colonial history. As McCusker argues, and as the prolific literary output addressing the issues of history, memory and amnesia confirms, the period of the 1980s and 1990s was marked by a heightened preoccupation with the Caribbean past.33 McCusker points out that the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ in 1992 and, in 1998 in the French Caribbean the 150th anniversary of the official abolition of slavery, are considered highly problematic events by most contemporary Caribbean writers and critics. The Euro-centric representations of these dates as ‘discovery’ and ‘liberation’ constituted in fact ‘the dereliction of memory’ insofar as ‘the Caribbean’s history of forced transportation, slavery and oppression ha[s] obstructed any attempt to establish historical continuity in the present’.34 Most Caribbean writers and intellectuals have thus emphasized the traumatic effects that the history of European colonisation has had on this archipelago.35 This position is justified by the fact that the past of those cultures that constitute the different communities in the Caribbean is characterised by a double distance, a temporal and spatial displacement.36 32 See, for instance, O’Toole, ‘Amerindians: When Two Worlds Collide’, p. 3; and Clouston, ‘Operatic Bash for Hero or Villain’, p. 5. 33 Maeve McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”: Memory and Forgetting in French Caribbean Autobiography of the 1990s’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 11: 4 (October 2004), pp. 438- 50 (pp. 440-41). 34 McCusker, ‘ Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli »’, p. 440 35 Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: The Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 47; Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997), pp. 148-49. 36 This means that, in most cases, the origins of Caribbean people are said to lie elsewhere, outside the Caribbean space, namely in Africa, India, China, the Middle East, Europe or North America. Mary Gallagher thoroughly discusses the relationship between time and space in Francophone Caribbean literature. See Gallagher, Soundings, pp. 55-56. Introduction 16 Although the above-mentioned commemorative events were, in some cases, commercially exploited, the importance of an awareness of the colonial past among both the former colonised and the colonising powers is further testified to by public initiatives such as the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) and the inauguration of a slave trade memorial in Lancaster on 10 October 2005 as well as the foundation of the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage in France in the same year.37 These two projects demonstrate that Anglophone and Francophone writers and intellectuals alike feel the need to uncover and bring public attention to the history of slavery and, more generally, of colonialism. While each project constitutes a distinct local (the STAMP project) or national (initiatives undertaken by the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage) response to the dereliction of the memory of slavery, taken together they reveal the current preoccupation with the interrelation between colonial past and (postcolonial) present on the one hand and between the metropolis and the (Caribbean) colonies on the other. These projects can be related to the wider context of race relations in the metropolises and the Caribbean. Current debates in Great Britain and France about immigration and race relations foreground the need for an awareness of the history of slavery and colonialism and the resultant interrelation between the metropolis and the former colonies. As the recent local confrontations between white metropolitans and people of African and Asian descent in Great Britain as well as the large-scale riots in France in autumn 2005 indicate, the problematics of racial discrimination is as relevant today as it was during the period of mass immigration to the metropolises during the 1950s and 1960s. Although anti-colonial and anti-racist movements since the 1950s have helped gradually to implement ethnic equality legally and to change the terminology used in discussions about ethnicity, many ‘black’ people are still socially stigmatised in the metropolis because of the colour of their skin. In the British context anti-racist initiatives have also 37 ‘STAMP was inaugurated in September 2002 by representatives from local organisations who agreed that it was important for Lancaster to acknowledge its involvement in the eighteenth century Transatlantic Slave Trade’; http://www.actsofachievement.org.uk/2005/detail.php?EventID=91. Introduction 17 led to a wider and more visible representation of black people in British politics and the mass media. However, as riots such as those in Brixton in spring 1981 or, more recently, in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in spring and summer 2001 indicate, the problem of ethnic marginalization is still a major problem in contemporary British society. In the French context the consequences of the economic and social gap between black and white metropolitans became particularly evident in the riots that started in Parisians suburbs and then spread across France in October and November 2005. The marginalization of descendents of former African and especially Antillean immigrants starkly contrasts with the notion of cultural assimilation and the status of Antilleans as French citizens. By treating black people as personae non gratae, France and Great Britain alike seem to ignore the link between the ‘black’ presence in the metropolises and their history of colonialism. While this brief comparison is far from being comprehensive, it underlines the importance that the legacy of colonialism still has for the relationship between the former colonised and the colonising powers. An in-depth comparison of this ‘black presence’ in Europe could reveal interesting connections between different countries’ responses to the colonial heritage and the relationship between different ethnic and cultural groups in the metropolises.38 While social and ethnic marginalization as presently experienced by many Antilleans in France and by West Indians in Great Britain seems to have triggered the resurgence of the ethnic binary between black and white people, prominent contemporary identitarian discourses in the Caribbean such as antillanité and créolité have emphasized the fertility of cultural diversity and focused on hybridity and creolisation. This apparent discrepancy between socio-political reality and theoretical discourses is exemplified by the contradictions within the créolité movement and its manifesto. As McCusker stresses, the Creolists situate their discussion of cultural diversity almost exclusively 38 Some recent studies and colloquia reveal a growing critical interest in this ‘black European presence’. See, for instance, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., with a foreword by Paul Gilroy, Blackening Europe: The African Presence (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); ‘Latitude(s): Imaginaires nomades et espaces transnationaux en Europe’, Colloque annuel du Centre de Recherche Textes et Francophonies (Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France, 7-8 December 2005). Introduction 18 within the field of the arts and limit their analysis of the relationship between creoleness and politics to a two-page appendix.39 However, even though their praise of creoleness is restricted to the realm of literature and the arts, their exploration of cultural diversity as a basis for constructive cross-cultural encounters has become an important concept for the re-appraisal of Caribbean history. The Creolists have, indeed, contributed to contemporary intellectual debates about cultural identity and a wider (scholarly) engagement with the relationship between history, ethnicity and cross-cultural dialogues. Equally it has to be emphasized that the advocacy of hybridity and creolisation constitutes only one specific focus in critical debates and literary representations of Caribbean histories, identities and cultures. As the last chapter will demonstrate, contemporary women writers such as Pineau and Mootoo seek to uncover occluded (hi)stories through fictional evocations of traumatic experiences that can be related to the trauma of the Middle Passage and slavery. Knowledge of the Caribbean past implies not only an awareness of the interrelation between the archipelago and the metropolises but also of shared experiences and connections between the various Caribbean islands and cultures. A critical appreciation 39 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989), pp. 55-57/pp. 155-57; Maeve McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture miraculously forged”: the contradictions of “créolité”’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 112- 21 (pp. 119-20). Gallagher’s point is similar to McCusker’s; she asserts that ‘[t]heir [the Creolists’] essentially aesthetic response to the question of Caribbeanness is certainly appealing, stimulating, energetic and hopeful; it is also, however, rash and intellectually somewhat quixotic’; Mary Gallagher, ‘Whence and whither the French Caribbean “créolité” movement?’; ASCALF Bulletin, 9 (Autumn/Winter 1994), pp. 3-18 (p. 18). The cleavage between political action and theoretical discourses is not a purely Francophone Caribbean phenomenon. As Hallward notes, ‘postcolonial theory [,too], with its emphasis on the hybrid, blurred composition of cultural performances, downplays the possibility for inevitably divisive political action’; Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001), p. 130 [emphasis in original]. A potential extension of literary theory to the political realm does certainly not imply their conflation. Yet, I would agree with Compagnon’s argument that contemporary literary theory needs to focus not only on literary aesthetics but also encompass ‘une ambition politique’/[a political ambition]; Compagnon, ‘L’Exception française’, p. 52. Introduction 19 of historical, literary, linguistic and cultural intra-Caribbean connections is fundamental for an understanding of the diversity and specificities of Caribbean societies. As my study will emphasize, the shared trauma of slavery and colonialism has been revisited by both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers in their fictional representations of violence and suffering. In particular, recent fiction of women writers reveals links between the different island societies, links that interrogate colonial boundaries. These divisions between the individual islands – divisions that are both historical and cultural – have also been challenged by concepts of cultural identity which emerged during the last two decades. I will argue throughout my thesis that Caribbean cultural identities need to be explored not only in relation to the cultures of the former colonising powers but also in their interplay with each other in order to fully conceptualise their complexity. Chapter One Comparison of Literary Discourses in the Anglophone and the Francophone Caribbean, 1920s until the Present In ‘Western’ academia the study of Caribbean literatures and cultures has traditionally been divided according to individual institutional disciplines. Until the last decade Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literatures have thus been analysed primarily within the context of (Anglophone) postcolonial studies on the one hand and (French or) Francophone studies on the other. Undoubtedly, such academic specialisation has engendered lucid and necessary investigations of literature from a region which has been considerably influenced in culture and thought by the former colonising powers. Significantly, however, this focus on one linguistic and cultural area only has prevented intellectuals from acknowledging ways in which ideas and literary concepts have travelled back and forth between the islands of the Caribbean. I borrow the notion of ‘travelling theories’ from Said who discussed the concept of the ‘travelling of ideas’ in his two essays ‘Travelling Theory’ and ‘Travelling Theory Reconsidered’.1 According to Said, theories and literary themes are transformed as they travel and are adapted to the specific contexts.2 This focus on movement and ongoing transformation ‘suggests the possibility of actively different locales, sites, situations for theory [and literary tropes], without facile universalism or over-general totalizing’.3 The travelling of major sets of ideas from the Francophone discourse of négritude via antillanité to créolité 1 Edward W. Said, ‘Travelling Theory’, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 1: 3 (1982), pp. 41-67 and ‘Travelling Theory Reconsidered’, in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. by Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), pp. 251-65. 2 Said, ‘Travelling Theory’, p. 53. 3 Said, ‘Travelling Theory Reconsidered’, p. 265. Literary Discourses 21 indicates the relevance of Said’s concept for the understanding of Caribbean criticism and fiction. In addition, my thesis makes literary themes travel between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean contexts insofar as it juxtaposes writing from both linguistic fields and scrutinises connections as well as text- and context-specific differences. For instance, in Chapter Three I demonstrate that notions of cultural identity and cross-cultural mixing developed by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant can elucidate the understanding of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean fiction like Divina Trace (1992) which represents forms of linguistic, religious and cultural creolisation Corpus Christi/Trinidad.4 My study moves beyond Said’s approach insofar as it does not only trace ways in which theoretical concepts have travelled between different contexts but also actively transfers sets of ideas between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. As such it stands out among the scarce existing literary criticism on Caribbean literature that incorporates writing from different linguistic regions. During the 1920s and 1930s pan-Africanist movements clearly attested to the fact that Anglophone and Francophone writers and intellectuals were not only aware of each other across the linguistic divide but also met and engaged with each other’s ideas at the various conferences that took place at that time. It seems that such cross-cultural and cross-linguistic connections have become rarer. However, there have been important, albeit isolated cases where writers and critics have shown their awareness of each other across the linguistic divide. As I mention in Chapter Two, the First World Congress of Writers organised by Présence Africaine in 1956 and the Caribbean Artists Movement conferences during the 1960s brought together scholars from different areas of the Caribbean. Derek Walcott wrote a ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’ after Texaco had won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 in which he praised the novel. This letter is thus another piece of work that testifies to an awareness of some Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers of each other’s work. Further, Eloge de la créolité was published in a bilingual French/English edition. Also, the Creolists perceive their concept of créolité as global, 4 Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press, 1992). Literary Discourses 22 hence as reaching beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries within the Caribbean. In addition to these specific connections between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers and their texts a gradually increasing awareness of the need for interdisciplinary interpretations of Caribbean literature and criticism is attested to by publications by scholars such as Caryl Phillips, John McLeod, Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, and by the renaming of the ‘Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French’ (ASCALF) as the ‘Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies’ (SFPS) in 2002.5 McLeod, for instance, highlights the necessary consideration within Anglophone postcolonial studies of Caribbean texts written not only in English and local languages but also in other European and ‘European-derived languages’.6 Following Phillips’ assertion that ‘it makes sense to conceive of Caribbean literature as rising above national or linguistic boundaries’, McLeod argues that ‘it is time for English speakers not only to acknowledge [these boundaries], but to look beyond them and learn’.7 Against the backdrop of the widespread scepticism of scholars in French and Francophone studies towards the (Anglophone) notion of postcolonialism, Murphy reinforces this need for ‘a genuine dialogue between’ these two academic fields.8 It is my contention that such an interdisciplinary dialogue could stimulate productive 5 In ‘Choosing a Framework: The Limits of French Studies/Francophone Studies/Postcolonial Studies’, David Murphy explains the significance of the renaming of ASCALF as SFPS; Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 72-80 (p. 72). For further discussions of interdisciplinary influences between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and thought see, for instance, John McLeod, ‘Contesting contexts: Francophone thought and Anglophone postcolonialism’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 192-201 (esp. pp. 192, 201); Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999); Jean-Marc Moura and Jean Bessière, eds, Littératures postcoloniales et francophonie. Conférence du séminaire de Littérature compare de l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). 6 John McLeod, ‘Reading the Archipelago’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 55-59 (p. 58). 7 Caryl Phillips, ‘So let’s just leave out the ones everyone’s heard of’, The Observer, 5 January 1997, p. 16; and McLeod, ‘Reading the Archipelago’, p. 59. 8 Murphy, ‘Choosing a Framework’, p. 73. Literary Discourses 23 research in Caribbean literatures and cultures within the wider context of the Caribbean archipelago rather than reiterating the divisions between the different cultural and linguistic regions that were imposed by the former colonising powers. As I argue throughout my thesis, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary in order to examine the complex underlying connections between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean studies without over-generalising or seeking a reductive synthesis. I would suggest that literature from a region as diverse as the Caribbean calls for a research that encompasses different theoretical and literary traditions and hence reflects more of its stylistic and thematic complexity. By comparing the development of literary movements in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean respectively, I will investigate connections and overlaps between fiction and theories from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. My primary focus will be on links between movements such as pan-Africanism and négritude as well as antillanité, créolité and postcolonial studies. My comparison of the concepts of hybridity and creolisation will exemplify some of the connections that can be established between the Francophone Caribbean discourse of créolité and Anglophone postcolonial criticism. In order to investigate the extent to which critical thought and literary tropes have travelled within Caribbean literature and criticism I will analyse the specific socio-historical and literary contexts in which the literary concepts have emerged. A comparison of the main differences between the French and the British colonial systems and practices in the Caribbean constitutes the basis for my subsequent investigation of distinct literary movements that have influenced Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean writing. Knowledge about different forms of colonialism is essential for a contextualisation of the development of Caribbean writing, literary theory and criticism since the 1920s and 1930s. Through my comparison of specific trends in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism I hope to avoid some of the slippages and generalisations about the Caribbean archipelago as a whole that exist in contemporary (Anglophone and Francophone) postcolonial criticism. In this chapter I will trace the particularities of the different colonising methods that have marked Caribbean societies and literature and then scrutinise specific literary Literary Discourses 24 discourses from the Caribbean that have had an impact on literary discussions in the 20th century. My comparison of Anglophone and Francophone theories will shed new light on historical and, above all, literary connections that have been neglected in literary criticism until the last few years. As such, my thesis acts as an intervention in the fields of Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial studies through a specific cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigation of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing. Slavery and colonialism which marked the Caribbean archipelago between the sixteenth and nineteenth century represent a crucial historical marker of the entire Caribbean. Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the archipelago in 1492 constituted, in fact, the onset of geographical and cultural displacement and oppression for most ethnic and cultural groups (notably Africans and, after the abolition of slavery, East Indians) that were subsequently brought to the Caribbean.9 This experience of uprooting has influenced the relation of its inhabitants to the place, their history as well as their self-image. Thus the legacy of slavery and colonialism is still a major touchstone in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction and criticism.10 For Spain, Great Britain and France, Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the Caribbean implied the chance to open new markets overseas, hence to secure new trading posts. The majority of the local Amerindian population had deliberately been killed or had died in battles against the colonisers or had been considerably decimated by foreign diseases within a few decades of colonisation.11 Those few Amerindian groups that had survived the first encounters with Europeans underwent some forced geographical displacement insofar as they were driven away from almost all Caribbean islands to the coastal areas of the Middle and 9 I will discuss the significance that the date of Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean has for contemporary Caribbean societies and their relationship to their own histories in Chapter Three. 10 While the legacy of slavery and colonialism is certainly not the sole focus in contemporary Caribbean literature, most writers still address the impact that this heritage has had on Caribbean identities. 11 Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), p. 13. See also David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 32, 178-79,182. Literary Discourses 25 South American continent.12 The need of the European colonisers for cheap labour that would allow them to make their Caribbean possessions economically profitable constituted the principal catalyst for the slave trade. Between the beginning of the sixteenth century until the abolition of slavery in 1834 and 1848 in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean respectively, African slaves, mainly from different ethnic groups of West Africa, had been brought to the Caribbean by force where they were confronted not only with unfamiliar surroundings and living conditions but, above all, with European colonial practices.13 In the eyes of most slave holders Africans were ‘goods’, which implies that they were denied all human rights.14 (Fanon and Glissant, amongst other intellectuals, argue that black Caribbeans internalised this dehumanisation so that they lacked pride in their race until at least the late 1970s. As will be discussed later in this chapter, Fanon speaks of the inferiority complex of black people, and Glissant relates Caribbeans’ lack of pride in their culture and history to this uprootedness and dehumanisation.) 12 The largest Amerindian communities in the Caribbean live on the South American continent, particularly in the Guianas; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 182. Lowenthal provides us with some details about Guianese indigenous people: ‘In the Guianas the 10,000 coastal Arawaks, Warraus, and Galibis, long under mission influence, have intermixed with Creoles and lost much of their own culture and language, particularly in north-western Guyana. The Amerindians of the interior follow more traditional ways of life, but European agricultural technology augments their tropical forest economy. In Guyana an airstrip network, anti-malarial campaigns, and mechanical wells and wind-pumps have dramatically increased tribal populations: the Wapishana of the Rupununi savanna, who numbered 1,700 in 1945, were estimated at 4,000 in 1963. But modernization also subjects them to mission and plantation exploitation’, Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 182. Only few indigenous people, who mainly live in reserves as is the case in Dominica, have remained on the islands. By contrast, the Amerindians in the mainland Caribbean constituted in the 1960s approximately three per cent of the population and thus have a much more palpable presence; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 179. 13 I will discuss the significance of the fact that African slaves came from different places and belonged to different ethnic groups in my analysis of specific forms of creolisation in Chapter Three. 14 For a further discussion of the treatment of slaves as goods rather than human beings see John F. Campbell ‘Textualising Slavery: From “Slave” to “Enslaved People” in Caribbean Historiography’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. by Sandra Courtman (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. 34-45 (p. 34). I will return to this aspect in Chapter Four. Literary Discourses 26 The linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity that characterises the Caribbean has its origins in the slave trade and the colonial need for cheap labour. After the formal end of slavery, differences between the Caribbean islands were increased by the varieties in the colonial administration systems. Compared to British West Indian colonies the French Caribbean was then governed by centralised legal and administrative systems. While Great Britain sought to administer her colonies by association, France’s official colonial policy was that of assimilation. This means that the French colonies in the Caribbean were governed centrally from the metropolis, whereas the British colonies ‘had their own legislative bodies’ which tended not to be rigorously supervised by the ‘mother country’.15 With the British administrative practice of association governors in the British Caribbean had greater scope for individual decisions for the respective islands than was the case in the French colonies, even though British officials, too, were ultimately accountable to the metropolis. France, by contrast, produced a coherent set of norms and regulations by which the colonies were governed from Paris. In addition, the Caribbean colonies under British rule varied considerably in size, covered a larger area than the French Caribbean and were characterised by a larger ethnic diversity than Martinique, Guadeloupe and (French) Guiana. While Trinidad and Guyana, for instance, are home to a large East Indian population, many other islands such as Grenada, St. Lucia or Antigua have a majority of Caribbeans of African descent. In the Francophone Caribbean, by contrast, Antilleans of African origin constitute the vast majority. In the French Caribbean the central and hence uniform colonial administration of the territories conquered during the early seventeenth century laid the basis for a gallicisation of its Caribbean colonies. (This practice implied that the French colonisers tried to make the Antilles resemble the metropolis by imposing their administration system, language and culture on these colonies. In fact, the colonies were regarded as integral parts of the French ‘hexagone’.16 As I will develop below, this attempt to 15 Colin C. Eldridge, British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1984), p. 41. 16 Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 10. Literary Discourses 27 ‘gallicise’ the colonised was a central motif behind France’s policy of assimilation, a concept that was deployed to justify nineteenth-century colonialism and imperialism.) As a result of the different British and French policies of colonisation, the Anglophone Caribbean has a long tradition of separate development, as opposed to centralisation which characterised the Antilles. This crucial difference has influenced the relationship between Caribbeans and the metropolises until the present. As I will show in this chapter, a link can be established between French centralised colonisation, the practice of (cultural) assimilation and the fact that the Antilles are, as French overseas departments, still officially part of France. Similarly, the independence of the Anglophone Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century can, to an extent, be related to the co-existence of centralisation and local self-government during the colonial period. While slavery was central to the first wave of European colonisation of the Caribbean between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, the second wave was based on ideological motivations rather than chiefly on economic motives. The notion of the ‘civilising mission’ was a major driving force behind nineteenth-century colonialism. Following Robert Young’s analysis, the ideology behind nineteenth-century colonisation will be referred to as imperialism, whereas colonialism will be used to denote colonising practices.17 Nineteenth-century colonialism was also characterised by Britain’s and France’s territorial expansion and an increase in their political and economic power. These developments did not affect existing colonies such as the Caribbean, though. From the beginning of colonial expansion the idea of the ‘civilising mission’ served as a crucial argument to justify the imposition of the respective colonial language and cultural values on colonised peoples. Under Napoleon III the notion of a mission civilisatrice provided a justification for the invasion of and imperial expansion in West Africa and Indochina.18 Subsequently this argument was taken up by all European 17 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 16- 17. 18 Young, Postcolonialism, p. 88. Literary Discourses 28 colonial powers and adapted to their specific colonial ideologies. In both British and French imperialism it was seen as a duty to spread ‘civilisation’ to places that were regarded as inhabited by ‘savages’ or ‘heathens’. Until the Enlightenment and the French Revolution it was argued by both colonising powers that the ‘civilisation’ of colonised peoples was a moral Christian obligation. The ‘civilising mission’ was related to Christian missionary practices and the belief that one crucial element in ‘civilising’ allegedly ‘primitive’ colonised peoples was their evangelisation. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the predominantly Roman-Catholic colonial powers Spain, Portugal and France sent a large number of missionaries into their colonies.19 During the nineteenth century, predominantly Protestant colonising nations increased their missionary projects, justifying colonisation with the spread of ‘civilisation’. After the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789 the reasoning behind France’s idea of a mission civilisatrice became largely a secular one, although France still had a missionary presence in her colonies. From this period onwards the French ‘hexagone’ emphasized the association of France and the French language with rationality. The assumed superiority of the white person over black people was now primarily based on the achievements of French philosophers and scientists and the assumption that Western rational thinking was progressive. Reason, ‘civilisation’ and the French language were regarded as inextricably linked. In contrast to the French Caribbean, the main justification for the concept of the ‘civilising mission’ among British colonisers was the belief that ‘civilising’ local Caribbeans was a ‘moral duty’.20 In the British Caribbean the Church played a significant role not only in disseminating the Christian faith but also in transmitting European cultural values and norms of social interaction.21 19 One of the numerous fictional accounts of attempting to evangelise and hence ‘civilise’ the ‘noble savage’ is François René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801; Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964). 20 For a comparison of ideals related to the ‘civilising mission’ among the British and French colonising powers see Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890-1914 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 30-31. 21 The influence of the Church in the British Caribbean as an institution that represents the metropolis is referred to in various fictional texts from the late twentieth century. Many writers represent and interrogate the British colonial presence in the Caribbean through the figure of the Christian Literary Discourses 29 France’s policy of assimilation did not, in fact, mean that the colonised were treated according to the same principles as white Europeans. As Curtin argues, both British and French colonisers ‘doubted that the values and standards of Western civilisation were universally applicable’.22 Displaying the contradictions within the doctrine of assimilation, Young argues that on the one hand this ideology was based on the assumption of ‘fundamental equality of all human beings’.23 However, on the other hand, this very assumption implied that the colonisers, especially the French, sought to make the colonised ‘equal’, not in terms of status and rights but with regard to their languages and cultures.24 This assimilation policy resulted, in fact, in the neglect of local Caribbean cultural traditions and, ironically, a lack of acceptance of people from the Caribbean in mainland France. Since the French Revolution, both French language and culture were considered to be as universal as the Republican ideals engrained in the notion of assimilation.25 The connection between the French language, rationality and Republicanism accounts for the centrality accorded to French. In the Francophone context the idea that the colonised could be assimilated to the colonisers through linguistic and cultural assimilation ‘occupied a dominant position in [French] colonial thought during the republican regimes which were yet to follow’ [sic], that is those from missionary who is responsible for evangelising the locals and, in most cases, for simultaneously teaching them European cultural values. In such novels emphasis is put on the alienating effect that this ‘civilising mission’ and Christianisation have on the colonised. See, for instance, Joan Riley, The Unbelonging (London: The Women’s Press, 1985); Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996); Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). Since the Enlightenment and the secularisation of the French state in the eighteenth century, Christian missionaries figured less frequently in Francophone Caribbean texts, and references to the French school system are usually represented by Antilleans who are educated in the French metropolis. 22 Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1971), p. xxiii. For further discussion see also David Murphy, ‘De-centring French studies: towards a postcolonial theory of Francophone cultures’, French Cultural Studies, 13:2 (June 2002), pp. 165-85 (p. 184). 23 Young, Postcolonialism, p. 32. 24 Young calls this French attempt to make all that is different the same the ‘paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism’; Young, Postcolonialism, p. 32. 25 Murphy emphasizes the centrality that this notion of ‘the universality of French language and culture’ has had in French (colonial) discourses; Murphy, ‘De-centring French studies’, p. 184. Literary Discourses 30 the French Revolution until the present.26 By contrast, the positions adopted by the British during the nineteenth century varied to a greater extent. While Trollope and Carlyle, for instance, believed that black people were inferior and should be dealt with as such, others such as John Stuart Mill were convinced that human beings regardless of their ethnicity could be improved through education.27 Mill’s position thus largely resembled that which was assumed by French philosophers, governors and intellectuals such as Schœlcher, who emphasized the benefits of cultural assimilation. However, unlike their Francophone contemporaries, Anglophone promoters of the concept of cultural assimilation were convinced that educated and assimilated black people could gain a certain extent of autonomy from the colonisers. This focus on autonomy as well as the greater heterogeneity of the British approach towards cultural assimilation meant that the British tended to eradicate local cultural traditions and languages less drastically and systematically than the French colonisers. As Patterson explains in the Jamaican context, two cultural developments co-existed in post-emancipation West Indian society, namely ‘the Afro-Jamaican cultural system, which was largely a consolidation and revitalization of patterns developed during slavery [and] […] the European oriented cultural system, which was the revival of British civilization’.28 As I will discuss below, non-European languages and cultural traditions re-gained greater significance during the independence movements between the 1950s and early 1970s as a means of cultural resistance. The idea of assimilating Antilleans to French culture and of introducing the ideology of Republicanism, which was assumed to have universal value, to the French Antilles was put into practice with the help of colonial education.29 Like the colonial administration, 26 Betts, Assimilation, p. 16. 27 Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859; London: Frank Cass and Co., 1968), pp. 55-57. 28 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967), p. 287. 29 For both the Anglophone and the Francophone Caribbean context see Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 118-23. Literary Discourses 31 the education system in the French Caribbean was characterised by its centralisation. In both the British and the French Caribbean education was made accessible to the locals from the first decades of the twentieth century. Previously, only a small elite was eligible for basic schooling.30 In the metropolis and in the colonies ‘most schools were elite institutions. At first they catered for whites alone; middle-class coloured children later gained admission. Higher education remained an elite process, based on European models rather than local conditions and designed to turn out gentlemen and administrators’.31 From the early nineteenth century on schools and colleges were built in the Caribbean, and scholarship schemes enabled some locals to profit from further education in the metropolises.32 However, neither Britain nor France adapted their education systems to the needs of the locals in the Caribbean. On the contrary, their teaching methods and curricula were simply transferred to the colonies.33 This means that school children learnt about British or French rather than about local history, biology or society. As I will discuss later, attempts to establish a local literary tradition and to address local cultural traditions were not made by many writers until the middle of the 20th century. 30 As I explain in Chapter Three, mulattoes constituted the first non-white educated elite during the period of slavery. Even after the abolition of slavery, few non-white people (mulattoes and some black people) gained access to education. See, for instance, Aldrich, Greater France, pp. 22, 161. Lowenthal refers to the education of white and a small percentage of free black children from the early nineteenth century on; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 35-37. However, the majority of non-white West Indians did not receive any schooling; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 66-67. Lowenthal points out that the white elite was educated in the metropolis and that the colonies were therefore ‘left with scarcely the rudiments of a school system’; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 67. 31 Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 67 as well as pp. 118-23. 32 Frantz Fanon, for instance, could leave Martinique to study in Paris due to a scholarship granted to him by the Conseil Général. See David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta, 2000), p. 109. 33 In the Francophone context Macey points out that the French tradition ‘has never been tolerant of diversity or particularisms’; Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 61. For historical references on the education system, including curricula, of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean see Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 118-23. Literary Discourses 32 Irrespective of the differences between colonial systems the suffering from violence and oppression during slavery was a shared experience across the Caribbean. Consequently, resistance in the form of escape from slavery, disobedience and slave revolts occurred throughout the Caribbean from the beginning of slavery.34 Major uprisings against the colonisers took place, for instance, in Guadeloupe in 1801, Jamaica in 1655, 1673, 1760, 1765, 1831-1832 and 1865 (Morant Bay rebellion), in Guyana in 1763 as well as in Barbados where six revolts occurred between 1649 and 1701.35 Undoubtedly, however, the most famous revolt is the revolution in St. Domingue, as the whole island of Haiti was called at that epoch, which led to the island’s independence in 1804.36 In contrast to this form of direct resistance to slavery, maroons (or runaway slaves as they are also called in English) used ruse and wit, in most cases jointly with an acquired knowledge of the local environment, to escape slavery rather than openly opposing their 34 For detailed analyses of slave rebellions and other forms of anti-colonial resistance see, for instance, Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988). 35 Patterson provides a succinct analysis of the development of collective resistance to slavery; Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 267-73. Matthews discusses different historical accounts of the slave revolts in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1831-1832). He compares documents from both planters and slaves and highlights the revolutionary nature of slave resistance which has often been occluded in pro-slavery documentation; Gelien Matthews, ‘The Other Side of Slave Revolts’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies, ed. by Sandra Courtman (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. 49-70. Lowenthal relates the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion to the wider context of British colonial ruling; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 64. 36 In the context of slave revolts, the abolition of slavery and independence, Haiti is an exceptional case because the abolition of slavery was achieved on the initiative of slaves rather than by white abolitionists. It was the only grassroots movement that successfully used both the impetus and the military and political instability during and after the French Revolution to abolish slavery as early as 1794. For a discussion of the reasons for the abolition of slavery see Franklin W. Knight, General History of the Caribbean, Vol. III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan/UNESCO Publishing, 1997), pp. 339-40. St. Domingue was the first and only country that applied the principles of the French Revolution, namely the call for liberty, equality and fraternity, to the Caribbean and to black slaves. Because of its early independence, Haiti developed differently from the both the other French and from British colonies in the Caribbean. It is, however, outside the scope of my thesis to analyse the specific case of Haiti in detail. Literary Discourses 33 colonial masters. Compared to larger islands such as Jamaica, maroons did not figure in great numbers in many of the smaller Eastern Caribbean islands. Nevertheless they played an important role in the consciousness and daily lives of slave communities as they seemed to constitute the only conceivable form of resistance to the planters and to slavery in general.37 While Haiti was the only Caribbean colony where a major slave revolt led to independence, anti-colonial resistance was certainly an important factor that contributed to the abolition of slavery in the archipelago in the mid-nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries African-Caribbeans’ resistance against slavery was supported in the metropolises by abolitionist movements that opposed slavery for moral reasons.38 In the context of the British Empire Walvin explains that despite the profitability of slavery, abolitionist tendencies became widespread between 1787 and 1838, when the British Parliament was confronted with petitions to end slavery.39 During the eighteenth century Great Britain and France saw very similar developments with regard to anti-slavery and anti-slave trade activities. As Jennings points out, ‘Enlightenment thought and the growth of evangelicalism’ initiated these developments at that period.40 Similarly, ‘[t]he formation of a British abolitionist organization in the late 1780s was imitated in France, where the process accelerated because of the Revolution of 1789 and especially the slave revolt in Saint Domingue’.41 The impact 37 Jamaica had an exceptionally large maroon population, whereas Martinique lacked the hiding places for runaway slaves and thus only counted a small number of maroons. For a discussion of anti- colonial resistance in the form of marooning see, for instance, James Walvin, Slaves and Slavery: The British Colonial Experience (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1992), p. 76. See also Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 186-190. 38 Young, Postcolonialism, pp. 74-77; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), pp. 140-42. 39 Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic, pp. 143-44. 40 Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. vii. 41 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. vii. For a discussion of the French Abolition Society see Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, pp. 48-75. As Oldfield explains, the organisation of the Amis des Noirs was Literary Discourses 34 that the Haitian Revolution had for anti-slavery movements was twofold. In the Caribbean it provided an impetus to further slave uprisings, for instance those in Grenada, St. Vincent and Jamaica.42 At the same time the violence of this revolt increased the fear of abolition and raised the number of supporters of slavery in Great Britain.43 Many planters and increasingly also large parts of the French and British public considered the Haitian Revolution ‘synonymous with abolition, a potent symbol of violence, instability, and unrest’.44 Yet, since the end of the eighteenth century, abolitionist movements, and the British Abolition Society in particular, had became increasingly ‘effective pressure group[s]’ that influenced public opinion and Parliament. In the British Caribbean colonies this resistance ultimately brought about first the ending of the slave trade in 1807 and ultimately the official abolition of slavery with the passing of the Emancipation Act of 1834.45 Interestingly, Anglophone anti-slavery movements influenced similar developments in the French context in the 1830s. While the slave revolt in Haiti led to the fact that France ‘became the first great [European] power to abolish colonial slavery’ in 1794, Napoleon Bonaparte reintroduced both slavery and the slave trade as early as 1802 in order to continue reaping profits from France’s colonial trade.46 In the Francophone Caribbean slavery was not abolished permanently until 1848 when the provisional government of the Second Republic (under the influence of the abolitionist Victor founded as a result of the French Revolution; John R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti- Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), pp. 54-55. According to minutes of the committee of the Amis des Noirs, this society was considered the counterpart to abolitionist societies in Great Britain and the United States; Abolition Committee Minutes, 8 July, 29 July, 21 October 1788, 20 January 1789, quoted in Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, p. 55. 42 Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic, p. 145. 43 Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic, p. 145. 44 Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, pp. 60-61. 45 Walvin, Slaves and Slavery, p. 97. 46 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. vii. Literary Discourses 35 Schœlcher) decreed immediate abolition.47 The foundation of the Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage in 1834, which was largely a result of slave emancipation in the British colonies, exemplifies further the inter-relatedness of British and French anti- slavery movements.48 Several French (Republican) newspapers such as Le Semeur, Le National and Le Courrier français reported the smooth passing of the Bill in Great Britain and thus undermined French oppositional voices of the government and planters that had predicted considerable disruptions.49 The impact that British abolitionist ideas had on contemporary France is underscored by the fact that a ‘prestigious British abolitionist delegation’ attended a meeting of the French society in its founding year.50 As Jennings maintains, ‘[t]here was such a preponderant role played by British delegates and concepts in the first sessions of the French abolition society in December 1834 that there can be no doubt about the profound cross-Channel influence on the formation of the leading French anti-slavery organization’.51 One of the consequences of the liberation of slaves in the British Caribbean was a shortage of workers on the plantations and for domestic chores. Britain tried to compensate for the lack of unpaid slave labour by bringing Asians, mainly East Indians and later also Chinese and Malaysians, to the British Caribbean. The overall number of Asian indentured labourers that arrived in the different Caribbean islands varied considerably.52 Trinidad, for instance, has had a noticeably higher Asian population than many of the small Eastern Caribbean islands. Geographical conditions (for instance 47 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. vii and pp. 281-84. For a detailed analysis, based on historical documentation such as petitions, journal articles and government reports see Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies: 1820-1851, Analyse et Documents (Paris: Karthala, 2000). 48 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. 50. 49 Le Semeur, 23 July 1834; Le National, 12 Aug. 1834; Le Courrier français, 8 Sept. 1834; Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. 48. 50 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. 52. 51 Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, p. 53. 52 The significance of these specific demographic characteristics of the individual (Anglophone and Francophone) Caribbean islands will be discussed in the context of creolisation in Chapter Three. Literary Discourses 36 fertile ground to grow sugar cane as opposed to hills and dense rainforest) as well as the use of land accounted, inter alia, for these ethnographic differences between the various British Caribbean colonies. While a large number of former slaves left the plantations in Trinidad, most Africans in Barbados had the ‘choice’ between ‘estate work or starvation’, because ‘every morsel of land was under cultivation’ by white colonisers.53 This meant that there was no need to import new workers from India. After France’s abolition of slavery, Asians were brought to the French Caribbean, too, but in smaller numbers than in the British colonies. With regard to race relations in the Caribbean two major factors have to be kept in mind which have marked the consciousness of African and Asian Caribbeans. In contrast to Africans, Asians had never been enslaved – though also colonised – which means that their common heritage is not the specific legacy of suffering, oppression and dehumanisation of slavery as it is for people of African descent. Consequently, East Asians did not encounter the complete self-effacement that African slave generations did. Slavery and black people’s low economic and social positions have tended to reinforce a divide between Africans and Asians in the Caribbean. Race riots in Guyana and different competing nationalist movements in Guyana and Trinidad are twentieth- century examples of this divide.54 The experience of physical and psychological violence during slavery has marked the legacy of Caribbeans of African descent. It has determined race relations in the Caribbean and, above all, had a significant impact on 53 Wood, Trinidad in Transition, p. 59. 54 See, for instance, Malcolm Cross, ‘East Indian – Creole relations in Trinidad and Guiana in the late nineteenth century’, in Across the Dark Waters; Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean, ed. by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London and Oxford: MacMillan Education, 1996), pp. 14-38 (p. 22). The Guyanese context is discussed by Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), p. 179; and Kean Gibson, The Cycle of Racial Oppression in Guyana (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2003), pp. 36-40. References to tensions between Trinidadians of African and East Indian origin are made by Eric Williams, ‘Race Relations in Caribbean Society’, in Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, ed. by Vera Rubin (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1957), pp. 54-60 (p. 59). Literary Discourses 37 black people’s self-awareness until the present-day. This legacy of suffering pertains to black people across the Caribbean, irrespective of the colonial power. In the first decades of the twentieth century this (shared) legacy of colonial oppression and the dehumanisation of black Caribbeans became the catalyst for the development of black emancipation movements that dominated Caribbean political and literary discourses between the 1920s and 1950s. Writers and intellectuals started interrogating the strong link between the colonies and the metropolis and gradually turned away from a primary focus on Europe towards Africa on the one hand and the Caribbean on the other. In this context of rising anti-colonialism and black emancipation discussions about the problematics of ethnicity, skin colour and self-acceptance became central to the emerging Anglophone pan-Africanist movements and the Francophone discourse of négritude. Before investigating the extent to which specific black counter-discourses of the 1920s and 1940s travelled between Anglophone and Francophone contexts, I will discuss some of the key aspects of the literary developments in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean during this period. This analysis will provide the groundwork for my comparison. As critics such as Kesteloot and Jack point out, Antillean literature that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s tended to be juxtaposed with African writing. Francophone Caribbean texts were commonly placed in the context of the wider literary field of ‘black writing’. Expressing ideas similar to African texts, Antillean writing was therefore often considered alongside African works under the title of littérature négro- africaine.55 During the 1920s and 1930s African and Antillean writers and critics both addressed the shared experience of colonial oppression that connected black people in Africa and the diaspora. Only during and after the struggles for independence in the 55 As the titles suggest already, critical texts such as Lilyan Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro- africaine (Paris: Karthala, 2001); and Belinda Elizabeth Jack, Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History and Theory of ‘Negro-African’ Literature in French (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1996) discuss African and Antillean writing together within the context of ‘Negro- African’ literature. Literary Discourses 38 1950s and 1960s did the unifying idea of ‘Negro-African literature’ shift towards a focus on national literatures in the (former) French colonies. The Francophone négritude poets – the most prominent writers of the 1930s – emphasized the link between the Caribbean and Africa, whereas many of their Anglophone Caribbean contemporaries focused more specifically on local characteristics of the individual West Indian islands. This emphasis on local particularities in most West Indian writing from the 1920s and 1930s and the scarcity of connections between different islands can, to an extent, be related to the large size and heterogeneity of the Anglophone Caribbean. This geographical factor as well as the paucity of publishing and distribution outlets for literary work contributed to the isolation felt by West Indian writers of that period.56 Anglophone Caribbean writing before the literary ‘boom’ of the 1950s and 1960s was highly diverse. As Donnell points out, ‘[t]here was no single nationalist ideology and the expressions of the need and desire for a distinctly Caribbean (or island-centred) culture did not cohere in any easily definable manner during this period’.57 For instance, work by poets and writers such as J. E. Clare McFarlane and Thomas MacDermot (alias Tom Redcam) was thematically and stylistically orientated towards the British Empire, reminiscent of Romantic and Victorian nature poetry and sought to exceed the Caribbean context. The connection between the British metropolis and the West Indies was also represented in fiction by white Creoles such as Alfred Mendes and Herbert George de Lisser. Specifically, they portrayed this link through the ambivalent relationship between white Creoles and black Caribbeans, a perspective which also characterised Jean Rhys’ fiction.58 Interestingly, de Lisser and MacDermot advocated local Jamaican patriotism even as they expressed a strong attachment to the British Empire. MacDermot was convinced of the existence of 56 Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 15. 57 Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, p. 43. 58 See, for instance, H. G. de Lisser, The White Witch of Rosehall (London: Ernest Benn, 1929); Alfred Mendes, Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinindad (London: Duckworth, 1934); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. by Angela Smith (1966; London: Penguin, 1997). Literary Discourses 39 a distinct Jamaican cultural identity, which he saw reflected in local writing. In his capacity as the editor of the Jamaica Times, he therefore fostered the production and publication of local writing, notably de Lisser’s first articles and Claude McKay’s early poems.59 (I will return to McKay’s writing below.) MacDermot’s cultural orientation towards the Empire differed considerably from C. L. R. James’ position. This Trinidadian writer provided a major impetus for the development of West Indian fiction that was no longer based on European literary models but represented the life of the local working-class instead. James’ short story ‘Triumph’, published in the magazine Trinidad in 1929, as well as his novel Minty Alley (1936) were ground-breaking texts that demonstrated the writer’s ‘concern with ordinary people, quite ordinary people who were not members of any union, were not politically advance, but they were there’.60 While representations of urban working- class life became a wider literary trend during the 1940s and 1950s, Minty Alley can be regarded as a landmark text of this sub-genre.61 The Jamaican Claude McKay was another major writer whose work, above all his novels Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933), played a central role for literary developments during the 1930s.62 As indicated above, McKay started as a poet whose early work focuses on his native island both in setting and language. His poems in volumes such as Songs of Jamaica (1912) are written in Jamaican dialect and represent the island in a 59 Boxhill, ‘The Beginnings to 1929’, in Caribbean Literature, ed. by Bruce King (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1979), pp. 38-39. 60 C. L. R. James, Minty Alley (London: Secker and Warburg, 1936); C. L. R. James, in New World Adams – Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers, ed. by D. Cumber Dance (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1992), p. 111. 61 Other Caribbean fiction that portrays working-class life include Joseph Zobel, Rue cases-nègres (Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1950); George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Joseph, 1953); and Roger Mais, The Hills Were Joyful Together (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953). 62 Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1929); Claude McKay, Banjo, trans. by Ida Treat and Paul Vaillant-Couturier (Paris: Rieder, 1931). Literary Discourses 40 nostalgic tone.63 Having moved to the United States in 1912, he established connections to the literary circle of the Harlem Renaissance.64 McKay was one of the first West Indian writers who left the Caribbean in order to pursue a literary career. His new cultural and literary context influenced most of his writing after 1912. In fact, Banana Bottom, which is set in his native Jamaica, is the only novel that relates to his West Indian origins. With fiction such as Home to Harlem (1928) and Gingertown (1932) his work has generally been situated within African-American rather than West Indian writing.65 Like most other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay spent some time outside the United States and temporarily settled in France, first in Paris and later in Marseilles. Written during McKay’s sojourn in Marseilles, Banjo was soon considered to be ‘indispensable for the students who would go on to found the Négritude movement a few years later’.66 For Césaire, this novel constituted ‘really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity’.67 In this novel McKay represents black people’s culture and thus interrogates racist associations of blackness and savagery.68 As I will discuss below, such an affirmation of black 63 Claude McKay, Songs of Jamaica (1912; Miami: Mnemosyne Publisher, 1969). For a brief discussion of these poems in relation to the above-mentioned effort undertaken by MacDermot to foster characteristically Jamaican writing see Cobham, ‘The Background’, in King, West Indian Literature, pp. 9-29 (p. 41). 64 Cobham, ‘The Background’, in King, West Indian Literature, p. 22. 65 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1928); Gingertown (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1932); Cobham, ‘The Background’, in King, West Indian Literature, p. 27; Reinhard W. Sander, ‘The Thirties and Forties’, in King, West Indian Literature, pp. 45-62 (p. 61). 66 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2003), p. 187. 67 René Depestre, ‘Entretien avec Aimé Césaire’, in Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1980); trans. by Maro Riofrancos as ‘An Interview with Aimé Césaire’, in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), pp. 65-79 (p. 71). 68 In the following quotation McKay directly opposes culture with savagery: ‘Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people […] is not savagery. It is culture’; McKay, Banjo, p. 200. Literary Discourses 41 people’s culture and identity was also at the centre of the discourse of négritude. McKay’s writing transcended literary boundaries insofar as it influenced West Indian, African-American as well as Francophone literature of the first decades of the twentieth century. Having been situated within these various literary contexts, his writing seems to exemplify cross-cultural links that developed between the various pan-African movements and related literary discourses. Such literary connections will be investigated further in the following comparison of the African-American ‘New Negro’ movement, African-Antillean négritude and Haitian indigénisme. In the following section I will analyse the main ideas developed in the discourse of négritude, which was one of the most influential movements during the 1920s and 1930s for the development of Caribbean literature and criticism. My focus will be on the cross-cultural character of this discourse. Later Francophone writers and critics, notably Glissant, the Creolists (Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant) as well as Maryse Condé, have criticised négritude for its racial essentialism and have departed from ideas expressed in this discourse; yet they have emphasized the significance that négritude has had for the development of notions of a (black) Caribbean identity.69 This discourse interrogated the imposition of European cultural values and traditions on colonised people and drew attention to the effect of self- estrangement that colonialism has had on Africans and African-Caribbeans. Through the focus on an affirmation of black people’s cultural identities it has significantly contributed to the development (in the course of the twentieth century) of fiction and criticism that interrogated European literary theories, themes and forms. In their opposition to colonial practices and ideologies of imperialism the founders of négritude, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, have to be considered within the context of a global network of influences and of ideas that emerged during 69 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989), pp. 79-83; Marie-Denise Shelton, ‘Condé: The Politics of Gender and Identity’, World Literature Today, 67: 4 (Autumn 1993), pp. 717-22 (p. 718) ; and Maryse Condé, ‘Des Héros et des cannibals: réécriture et transgression dans la littérature des petites Antilles de langue française’, Portulan (Oct 2000), pp. 29-38 (pp. 32, 34). Literary Discourses 42 the 1920s and 1930s and travelled between different contexts. In his analysis of nationalist movements Young stresses this context of black people’s awareness of an African diaspora: Négritude was thus developed as part of an already highly articulate anti- colonial movement […]. Négritude was developed to articulate a new form of [black] cultural identity […]. It did this by developing the agenda of a re-establishment and affirmation of African culture within the context of the larger historic intellectual and cultural struggle by Africans in Paris and the French colonial empire against the mission civilisatrice ideology of French ‘civilisation’ and its unquestioned superiority.70 Young focuses on the ideological links between Anglophone Africanist movements such as Garvey’s Black Zionism and pan-Africanism on the one hand and Francophone African organisations (for instance the Ligue Universelle de Défense de la Race Noire, the Comité de la Défense de la Race Nègre and the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre) as well as the African-Antillean négritude movement on the other.71 In Postcolonialism, he offers a detailed analysis of the political connections between anti-colonial movements in the various colonies worldwide. My focus, by contrast, will be on literary 70 Young, Postcolonialism, p. 266. Focusing on Sartre’s preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), ‘Orphée noir’, Jack situates négritude within cultural, literary and political debates of the late 1940s; Jack, Negritude and Literary Criticism. Interrogating Kesteloot’s assertion that négritude originated in 1932 with the appearance of Légitime Défense, Miller places this Francophone movement in the tradition of anti-colonial and pan-African political movements as well as in relation to African-American writing of the first two decades of the twentieth century; Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, pp. 9-54; and Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1961; Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974), p. 10, quoted in Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, p. 11. 71 Young, Postcolonialism, pp. 218-22, 258-73. Langley, too, underlines links between African- American and Francophone African movements. He states that ‘French African participation in the pan-African movement after 1921 was not negligible but was very active, was political, and was closely following not only the activities of Pan-Negro groups in America but also the nationalist politics of organizations, based in Paris, of North Africa and Indo-China’; J. Ayodele Langley, Pan- Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), quoted in Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, p. 13. Literary Discourses 43 aspects of this discourse, which are relevant for the further development of Caribbean literature. The Martiniquan writer and later politician Aimé Césaire is considered to be the father of négritude, having coined this neologism in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947).72 The Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is a poem and as such not devised as a programmatic theoretical text. However, it anticipates ideas which Césaire developed in subsequent lectures, conference papers, journal articles and political speeches. Some of these key ideas conveyed in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal include the focus on the intellectual advancement of black people, the belief in an international solidarity amongst black people and the need for their self-awareness and acceptance of their skin colour, their history and their culture.73 Aimé Césaire was not alone in calling for a political, linguistic, racial and cultural renewal with regard to the relationship between black and white people as well as for black people’s re-assertion of their race and colour.74 As indicated above, he developed his ideas of what became the négritude movement together with Damas from French Guiana and the Senegalese writer and later President Senghor. They had all met and subsequently worked together in Paris where they emphasized the existence of and sense of solidarity within an African diaspora that connected black people in Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Europe.75 As Suk explains, ‘[i]t was in Paris, not in Martinique, that Césaire became aware of belonging to a community of black people of the African diaspora, and of the imaginative potential of Africa as an origin and a 72 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1956). Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was first published in part in the literary revue Volontés in 1939. The final version dates from 1956. Jeannie Suk distinguishes between the two versions in Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 29. For an outline of the antecendents of négritude, see Young, Postcolonialism, p. 265. 73 See, for instance, Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, pp. 37-39, 43-44, 47, 52-53, 60-62. 74 Young, Postcolonialism, p. 261. 75 Between 1935 and 1936 they launched their journal L’Etudiant noir in which they explored African culture and discussed poetry written by black people. Literary Discourses 44 source of renewal’.76 Offering a forum for intellectuals to meet and engage in literary or political debates, the capital of the French colonial empire contributed to the development and articulation of négritude. The existence or establishment of literary and political circles in Paris, which were frequented by writers, intellectuals and activists not only from French but also from British colonies and from the United States, facilitated the cross-cultural dissemination of ideas. In the context of anti-colonial political activism London played a similarly important role as a meeting place for black people from Africa, the Caribbean and North America.77 However, it did not become a major literary centre for Caribbeans and other black people until the 1940s.78 As the three founders of négritude acknowledged, some of the central ideas of this discourse were derived from the Harlem Renaissance or ‘New Negro’ as Alain Locke referred to this group of writers that became established in the United States during the 1920s.79 René Ménil emphasized that ‘[l]es poèmes des nègres d’Amérique touchent le monde entier’/[poems of the Negroes of America spread around the entire world and allow us to connect to them].80 Similarly, Senghor, Césaire and Damas acknowledged the fact that African and Antillean students resident in Paris were in close contact with 76 Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes, p. 30. 77 In his analysis of the development of nationalist movements in (Anglophone) Africa Young mentions that the first pan-African congress was held in London in 1900 and the Universal Races Congress in 1911; Young, Postcolonialism, p. 218. 78 Since it is outside the scope of this chapter to examine anti-colonial and nationalist political movements in detail, I will not dwell on the significance of London as a political centre. The significance of London and Paris as literary centres during the 1940s and 1950s will be discussed in Chapter Two. 79 Belinda Elizabeth Jack, Francophone Literatures: An Introductory Survey (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 32. Alain Locke was the editor of the anthology entitled The New Negro (1925). This anthology is an expanded version of the March issue of the Survey Graphic magazine, a special issue that was devoted entirely to Harlem. 77 René Ménil, ‘Généralités sur l’écrivain de couleur antillais’, Légitime Défense, 8, quoted in Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 65. Literary Discourses 45 African-American writers during the 1930s and 1940s.81 Senghor even argued that ‘[c’]est ainsi qu’au sens général du mot, le mouvement de la Négritude – la découverte des valeurs noires et la prise de conscience par le Nègre de sa situation – est né aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique’/[it is thus that in terms of the general meaning of the word, the Negritude movement – the discovery of black values and Negro’s becoming aware of his/her situation – was born in the United States of America].82 The main ideas of this black American movement were based on social and literary concerns. Adherents of the ‘New Negro’ movement of the 1920s interrogated white American supremacy and argued for the acceptance of one’s black cultural identity, an identity that was based on the African origins of black Americans. Followers of the ‘New Negro’ movement promoted the development of music, fine arts and literature by black people that was not based on white American models.83 A growing awareness of black Americans’ origins and the incorporation of African cultural traditions such as references to African religious beliefs or to the oral tradition (traditions which were reflected in an emphasis on the musicality of language) were regarded as crucial for the acknowledgement of African-Americans’ ‘blackness’.84 These new literary trends that were developed by African-Americans such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown as well as the Jamaican writer Claude McKay were adopted by the négritude poets.85 Not only themes such as race relations as well as the acceptance of one’s 81 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 65. In his detailed study of black transnational culture Edwards highlights the significance of Paris in the interwar period as ‘one of the key places where African Americans, Antilleans, and Africans were able to “link up”; Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, p. 3. 82 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Problématique de la négritude’, Présence Africaine, 78 (1971), pp. 3-26 (p. 10). 83 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 69. 84 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, pp. 69, 80. Until the present day black and Caribbean writers have emphasized the musicality of their works and presented it as an African legacy evident in their texts. For instance, Patrick Chamoiseau stated that the meaning of the words sometimes mattered less than the rhythm of the text; Delphine Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’, in Perret, La Créolité: espace de création (Matoury: Ibis Rouge, 2001), p. 166. See also Patrick Chamoiseau, public reading at Waterstone’s bookshop (Canterbury, 10 March 1999). 85 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 68. Literary Discourses 46 African cultural heritage and one’s ‘blackness’ but also form and style (for instance, rhythmic language that is reminiscent of the oral tradition, the focus on imagery and sensations) influenced Francophone Caribbean writers between the 1920s and 1940s.86 One of the most prominent figures who fostered this cross-cultural dialogue between négritude and the Harlem Renaissance was the Martiniquan writer René Maran. His narrative Batouala, véritable roman nègre (1921) was the ‘first celebrated novel in French published by a writer of African descent’.87 This novel became a touchstone for discussions of issues of ethnicity and colour on both sides of the Atlantic. The significance of an assertion of black Caribbeans’ culture as one that can be traced back to its African origins has also been expressed in the Haitian indigénisme movement. As was argued in the Introduction, historical and most literary developments in Haiti differ considerably from those of the French Antilles. Yet, certain literary schools such as indigénisme show important similarities with the discourse of négritude which the following analysis will foreground. Indigénisme evolved to counter Western, and particularly North American domination and the imposition of their cultures on Haiti that had marked the country since colonialism.91 Despite the island’s early independence notions of a cultural identity were still largely based on Western cultural 86 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, pp. 78, 80-81. Kesteloot quotes at length the reasons which Senghor and Césaire give for their admiration of African-American literature of the Harlem Renaissance; Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, pp. 80-81. 87 René Maran, Batouala, véritable roman nègre (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1921); Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, pp. 81-82. The fact that a ‘black’ writer who represented the condition of (black) Africans had won the Prix Goncourt in 1921, aroused considerable critical attention both in the United States and in France. For a discussion of the critical reception of Batouala see Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, pp. 81-83. 88 Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, p. 88. 89 Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, p. 98. 90 Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, p. 99. 91 Luciano C. Picanço, Vers un Concept de Littérature Nationale Martiniquaise: Evolution de la Littérature Martiniquaise au XXème Siècle – Une Etude sur l’Oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant (New York, Bern, Frankfurt, Paris: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 12. Literary Discourses 47 values. In the field of literature, for instance, classical European literary canons had greatly influenced Haitian writing. Followers of indigénisme opposed this orientation towards the ‘West’ and called for an acknowledgement in literature of national themes and styles. Writing about figures of national significance such as Toussaint L’Ouverture or about the Haitian landscape was assumed to convey a sense of pride in one’s mother country. Indigénisme focused on Haitians’ continuous struggle against foreign domination, and, like négritude, which it influenced, it was also concerned with the conditions of black people internationally. With Dr. Jean Price-Mars as its most famous representative, indigénisme formed part of pan-Africanist movements. Like Garveyism and négritude, promoters of this discourse placed great importance on black Haitians’ African origins and argued for a re-evaluation of African history and cultural traditions.92 Specifically, Dr. Price-Mars underscored the significance of African and Haitian folk culture, including music, folk dances and tales as well as the Creole language and the voodoo religion. He thereby opposed the views of Haitian intellectuals, and of the mulatto intelligentsia in particular, most of whom did not value local customs and - like many scholars in Europe and North America - considered voodoo to be superstition rather than a religion.93 Like indigénisme, négritude emphasized the significance of African cultural traditions for black people in the diaspora. As was the case with indigénisme, writers of this Antillean movement adapted African themes to their own literature rather than attempting to simply copy them. Césaire’s dramas and stories, for instance, bear witness to references to the oral tradition in his writing. He praised African songs, dances and poetry which he mentioned or included in his literary work. The call to take pride in one’s blackness and the acceptance of one’s African heritage that emerged during the first decades of the 20th century and that was developed in 92 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 27; and Jack, Negritude and Literary Criticism, p. 37. 93 Jean-Marc Moura, Littérature francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), pp. 113-14. Literary Discourses 48 many Caribbean literary discourses between the 1920s and the 1980s gradually led to an assertion of black people’s cultural identity. Africans’ and African-Caribbeans’ self- assertion constituted a continuous struggle against the colonial legacy where African traditions had been degraded. Tracing the development of literary traditions in the Anglophone Caribbean, Ngugi emphasizes that many West Indians still denied their African roots in the middle of the 20th century. He explains this lack of self- consciousness as the inferiority complex based on colonial practices: To Africa, to their past, even to their skin colour, they [Caribbeans] were made to look in shame and discomfort. So that the West Indian intellectuals and writers in between the Wars and even after may well have realized, as [C. L. R.] James has said, ‘that before they could begin to see themselves as a free and independent people they had to clear from their minds the stigma that anything African was inherently inferior and degraded’. Hence their political, literary and emotional involvement with Africa.94 It seemed necessary for black Caribbeans to become aware of their African roots in order to develop a cultural identity which was not based on white European values. While Césaire emphasized that African traditions still influenced the way of life and the perceptions of black Antilleans, he acknowledged that, after the slave trade, Africa and the Caribbean developed differently. Memories of the slave trade and slavery still determined black Caribbeans’ (but not Africans’) self-perception and identity. According to Césaire, the ‘black race’ was characterised by a cultural delay from the 16th to the 19th centuries.95 This delay was primarily due to slavery, which continued in the form of cultural slavery after Abolition. Africans who had been brought to the Americas were geographically and culturally uprooted and, because of continuous oppression, lost pride in their ethnic origins. The notion of ‘enracinement’/[rootedness] is a key concept in Césaire’s work. According to him, the search for one’s origins implied a continuous attachment to Caribbean cultural forms rather than leading to a 94 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 82. 95 Kesteloot, Histoire de la littérature négro-africaine, p. 10. Literary Discourses 49 nostalgic, idealised version of and wish for a return to Africa.96 In contrast to Marcus Garvey’s black Zionism and his call for the return of Caribbeans to the African ‘mother country’, Césaire merely highlighted solidarity within a black brotherhood worldwide without acknowledging the specific developments of black people in different places. The concern with black people’s acceptance of their race and skin colour that was expressed in pan-African movements and in the discourse of négritude was also at the heart of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial activism and writing. His concise investigations, notably in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) and Les Damnés de la terre (1961), of the impact that the colonial condition has had on the colonised have become central texts for discussions of the predicament of colonialism. Fanon was among the first intellectuals to combine in-depth analyses of the cultural and the psychological effects of colonial exploitation and oppression. Although Peau noire, masques blancs was not highly acclaimed at the time of its publication and was only translated into English in 1967 as Black Skin, White Masks and thus made available to an English-speaking readership, this text has since become a crucial point of reference for many literary and cultural critics.97 Building on ideas expressed in the discourse of négritude, Fanon emphasizes the need for the acceptance of one’s skin colour and race. He argues that black people’s alleged inferiority to a white person, which was based on the colour of their skin, had been internalised during colonialism and negatively influenced the 96 Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, for instance, p. 36. 97 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For a discussion of the reception and use of Fanon’s texts, including Black Skin, White Masks, see Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), pp. 277, 280, 282, 301-04. One of the main reasons for the heterogeneous responses to Black Skin, White Masks is the almost revolutionary character of Fanon’s project and the style of the text, which is a combination of psychological observations and literary references; Cherki, Frantz Fanon, p. 43 and Macey, Frantz Fanon, pp. 155, 162-63. Black Skin, White Masks is based on seven years of Fanon’s psychological observations and analyses; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 61. His analysis partially relies on specific case studies and observations, which are additionally illustrated in references to fictional texts. A frequently debated example of his interpretation of literary works is Mayotte Capécia’s novel Je suis Martiniquaise (Paris: Corréa, 1948). Literary Discourses 50 relationship between black and white people.98 According to Fanon, a black person does not recognise him/herself as ‘black’ until he/she is confronted with a white person.99 The confrontation with a white person makes the black person realise that he/she looks different and is treated differently from white people. Fanon develops his concept of a ‘corporeal schema’ in the framework of phenomenology according to which one always exists in relation to others.100 Both black and white people therefore never simply ‘are’ but define themselves in opposition to each other.101 As Macey points out, the Barbadian writer George Lamming similarly explains that ‘[t]he Negro is a man whom the Other regards a Negro’.102 When the black person’s skin colour causes a reaction on the side of the white person, the black person is not only confronted with his/her ‘corporeal schema’, but he/she also has to account for it. The black person becomes ‘responsible for [his/her] body, for [his/her] race, for [his/her] ancestors’.103 While the child, who sees a black person in Fanon’s famous ‘look, a Negro’ scenario, gets frightened, the black person feels nauseous and ashamed of him/herself.104 The only solution for the black person then is to recognise and accept him/herself as being black. It is this need for self-recognition and self-awareness that Césaire and Senghor also argued for when they called for black people’s pride in their race and culture. As Lamming’s above-mentioned quotation indicates, Fanon was not the only intellectual to address the relationship between the white coloniser and the black colonised. In fact, the problematics of race relations in light of racial discrimination against black people on the basis of the colour of their skin dominated most intellectual debates during the 1940s and 1950s. As I will analyse in detail in Chapter Two, those Caribbean writers 98 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, for instance, pp. 13, 18, 51. 99 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 110-12. 100 Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 164. 101 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109. 102 George Lamming, ‘The Negro Writer and his World’, Présence Africaine, 8-10 (June-Nov 1956), p. 321. 103 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112 104 David Macey calls Fanon’s quotation the ‘“look, a Negro” scenario’; Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 167. Literary Discourses 51 and scholars who had come to the colonial metropolis in the postwar period were particularly concerned with the issue of race relations in their criticism and fiction. I would argue that Black Skin, White Masks has become a crucial text for critical discussions of colonialism and racism precisely because it powerfully and very graphically addresses the common experience of racial discrimination at the specific moment in history of postwar migration to the metropolis. Fanon’s distinctive approach – his combination of medical-psychiatric analysis, theoretical reasoning and literary interpretation – makes his writing stand out from other texts that examine issues of ethnicity, skin colour and identity. In a theoretically dense and, at the same time, highly explicit style he investigates experiences of racism that were widely shared by ‘black’ people during the 1950s and 1960s. Sentences such as ‘[m]y body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day’ allow the reader to engage with Fanon’s writing not only intellectually but also emotionally.105 Since Fanon was one of the first intellectuals to explore the problematics of ethnicity and identity in such a complex manner, his texts have remained a hallmark for critics until the present. For Césaire, as later for Frantz Fanon, skin colour was an important ethnic marker of which black people were aware, especially in the presence of white people. In Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire addresses the physical aspects of black people and the ‘ugliness’, both external and in a figurative sense, which was associated with the colour black. Referring to Lacan’s notion of the unconscious, Fanon argues in this context that ‘[i]n the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis, the Negro – or, if one prefers, the colour black – symbolises evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine’.106 Both he and Césaire argued that the acknowledgement and acceptance of one’s outward 105 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 113. 106 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 190-91. Literary Discourses 52 appearance was based on an ‘inner revolution’ that opens the way to an acceptance of one’s personality.107 By making these connections between skin colour, ethnicity and culture a central concern of his work, Fanon has become a central figure in exploring racial issues, and his writing has become a touchstone for many subsequent critical discussions of colonialism and race relations. In both Francophone and Anglophone literature the problematics of race and colour have been explored in various contexts, and many theorists have attributed new meanings to Fanon’s work. As this discussion has revealed, his writing powerfully links Anglophone and Francophone discourses that address issues of (neo)colonialism and decolonisation. Fanon’s emphasis on black people’s awareness and acceptance of their ethnic and cultural origins was further developed by the Martiniquan writer and scholar Edouard Glissant between the 1960s and 1980s. Like Césaire and Fanon, Glissant argues that Caribbeans and, more specifically, Martiniquans have not yet assumed responsibility for their past and their present.108 According to Glissant, Martiniquan communities have to overcome the trauma of slavery and become aware of who they are.109 Writing is suggested as an important means for Caribbeans of getting to know themselves, of exploring silences, of uncovering tormented chronologies and discontinuities.110 He 107 Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, p. 37. 108 Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997), p. 93; see also Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952) and Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961). 109 Glissant, Le discours antillais, p. 93. 110 ‘L’écriture est ici un moyen de connaissance, une exploration des silences, une exploration des chronologies tourmentées et discontinues, une ethnologie sans ethnologues venu d’ailleurs, une ethnologie du peuple antillais sur lui-même, de l’écrivain sur sa propre histoire, sa propre communauté’./[Writing is here a means of knowledge, an exploration of silences, an exploration of tormented and discontinuous chronologies, an ethnography without ethnographers who have come from elsewhere, an ethnography of the Antillean people on itself, of the writer on his/her own history, his/her own community] [translation mine]; Cilas Kemedjio, De la Négritude à la Créolité: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la malédiction de la théorie (Hamburg: Literatur Verlag, 1999), Literary Discourses 53 considers Caribbeans’ awareness of the history of their cultures to contribute to the development of a ‘collective memory’, which has been suppressed by colonialism.111 Glissant argues that, in order to develop an awareness of their cultural identity, it is crucial for Antilleans to be conscious of the history of their people. He advances that this implies an acknowledgement of colonialism and slavery and their impact on the consciousness of people in the Caribbean. Césaire had earlier argued that colonialism has uprooted Caribbeans and has taken away their pride and self-consciousness. Building on this consideration, Glissant emphasizes more explicitly the lack of continuity in the history of black people from the Caribbean. Glissant asserts that ‘[l]es Antilles sont le lieu d’une histoire faite de ruptures et dont le commencement est un arrachement brutal, la Traite’/[the Caribbean is a place where history was made by ruptures and at the beginning of which stands a brutal uprooting, the slave trade].112 In other words, the history of the Caribbean has been determined externally by the colonial powers rather than by the Caribbean peoples. For Glissant, the history of Martinique, like that of other Caribbean islands, is a ‘non-histoire’/[non- history], based on suffering and denial. As Britton explains, Glissant’s focus on the discontinuities in Caribbean history was a common position assumed by critics until the 1980s.113 p. 226. Unless stated otherwise all translations from French into English are mine. In Chapter Four I will explore the issue of uncovering occluded personal histories that are connected to the history of colonial oppression. In this chapter I will also interrogate the notion of writing as a means of recovering from traumatic experiences. 111 Glissant, Le discours antillais, p. 87. 112 Glissant, Le discours antillais, p. 130. 113 As I will discuss in Chapters Three and Four, most Caribbean writers have highlighted the traumatic impact that the history of slavery, displacement and colonial oppression has had on Caribbean societies. See also Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: The Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 47; Glissant, Le Discours antillais, pp. 148-49. Britton highlights that this emphasis on the lacunary state of Caribbean history – a history that has produced a lack of collective Caribbean consciousness and a lack of cultural identity – shifted during the 1990s to a focus on creolisation. Reading Caribbean literature in light of the literary trends of Literary Discourses 54 The traumatic impact that slavery and colonial oppression have had on the development of Caribbeans’ consciousness has been addressed by Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals since the early twentieth century. The promoters of négritude as well as Frantz Fanon advanced the argument that colonialism has led to a sense of servility or, in Fanon’s words, to an ‘inferiority complex’.114 Glissant argues that colonialism has resulted in an adoption of European colonial values which have led to the denial of a proper Caribbean history. Colonial education was based on the assumption that Caribbeans had not contributed to major historical developments and consequently that there was no need to present their history in official documents or text books.115 Both Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean writers have emphasized the heritage of African traditions as well as the significance of anti-slavery and anti-colonial modernism and postmodernism, Celia Britton argues that postcolonial novels have made a ‘transition from a problematic of alienation and marginality to one of creolization, as a shift from modernity to postmodernity’, Celia Britton, ‘The (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 24: 3 (November 2001), pp. 44-58 (pp. 48-49). For further analysis of Glissant’s focus on the ruptures of history see Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes, pp. 70-83. 114 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, for instance p. 13. 115 In the context of recent debates about the remembrance of slavery in France and the Antilles, the members of the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage assert that ‘[d]ans les colonies, après l’abolition, le sentiment de frustration l’emporte; en France métropolitaine, on tire un trait sur cette histoire. L’abolition entraîne en effet un effacement de ces sociétés de l’histoire nationale. La traite et l’esclavage ne sont intégrés dans aucun des grands textes fondateurs qui construisent le récit de la nation dans cette période de la fin du XIXe siècle durant laquelle se forge la mémoire républicaine’/[in the colonies, after the abolition, the sense of frustration carries along ; in metropolitan France one draws a line under this history. The abolition leads, in fact, to an effacement of these societies from the national history. The slave trade and slavery are not integrated in any of the major founding texts that construct the narrative of the nation in this period of the end of the nineteenth century during which the Republican memory is forged]; Comité pour la mémoire de l’escalvage, preface by Maryse Condé, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’escalvage et de leurs abolitions (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), p. 25. The current trend in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing to portray personal (hi)stories of Caribbean people that have remained unaccounted for in most chronologies of Caribbean history indicates the need felt by many Caribbean writers to interrogate the denial of a Caribbean history that was not based on Europe. Literary Discourses 55 activities, for instance by portraying the leaders of rebellions as national heroes.116 Writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco), Robert Antoni (Divina Trace), Pauline Melville (The Ventriloquist’s Tale), Shani Mootoo (Cereus Blooms at Night) and Gisèle Pineau (L’Espérance-macadam) have represented specific historical epochs and events in their fiction which oppose the idea of historylessness and the focus on European history in the Caribbean.117 In the view of both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean intellectuals and writers the assertion of their own Caribbean history has played an important role in the acceptance of their ethnic origins and their culture.118 The re-inscription of local figures into history and the memory of people has helped to develop, in the course of the 20th century, an appreciation of non-European cultural forms, styles and literary themes. Although expressed differently – in theoretical literary discourses by Francophone Caribbean scholars or in more heterogeneous local writing in the Anglophone Caribbean – the main literary discussions from the 1920s until the late 1940s centred on black people’s pride in their ethnicity and its history and culture. The developments in Caribbean literature and criticism of the first half of the twentieth century led to the emergence of a ‘black’ Caribbean consciousness and a gradual move away from European literary forms and themes. In the wider historical context of nationalist and, in the case of the West Indies, independence movements, this growing interest in Caribbean cultural traditions and forms of expression (such as the oral tradition) became a more large-scale trend in Caribbean writing during the 1950s and 1960s. In the Anglophone context this shift towards literary representations of 116 See, for example, Roger Mais, Brother Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Dutton, 1987); Fred D’Aguiar, The Longest Memory (London: Vintage, 1994); Edouard Glissant, La case du commandeur (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981) and Mahagony (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987). 117 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992); Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale; Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night; Gisèle Pineau, L’Espérance-macadam (Paris: Stock, 1995). 118 For further discussion of specific positions on Caribbean history assumed by Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers and critics (Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant) see Chapter Three. Literary Discourses 56 Caribbean cultures is generally associated with writing produced during the ‘boom’ period of the 1950s. As I will discuss in Chapter Two, many prominent West Indian writers settled in London after World War Two, attracted by publishing facilities and the existence of a reading public in the metropolis. This body of literature which was produced and published by West Indians who had emigrated to Great Britain has since been referred to as ‘black British’ literature.119 As Chapter Two will demonstrate, there is no equivalent to a ‘black British’ literary canon in the Francophone context. While most West Indian writers settled in the metropolis during the postwar period, their Antillean contemporaries tended to migrate between the Caribbean and the French ‘hexagone’. The large-scale immigration of West Indian writers led to the establishment of vibrant Caribbean communities, which did not exist in the Francophone context to the same extent during the 1950s. The production of ‘black British’ literature and the cultural exchange between the Caribbean and Britain and within the West Indies was fostered by the introduction of the BBC programme Caribbean Voices (1945-1958), which facilitated both the cultural exchange between the Caribbean and Britain and within the West Indies.120 The 119 In Chapter Two I will investigate the significance that has been attributed by contemporary critics to the canon of ‘black British’ literature and compare developments in Anglophone Caribbean literature of the 1950s to the Francophone context. 120 According to Nanton, BBC Caribbean Voices ‘became, perhaps, the most important focus for the development and promotion of the region’s literary output’. He points out that with BBC Caribbean Voices, Swanzy established, amongst other things, a tradition of literary (and art) criticism in London. Swanzy also ‘provided shape to the melange of Caribbean writing through his efforts to create a sense of community beyond what already existed in the islands’; Philip Nanton, ‘What Does Mr Swanzy Want? Shaping or Reflecting? An Assessment of Henry Swanzy’s Contribution to the Development of Caribbean Literature’, Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, special issue ‘The Windrush Commemorative Issue, West Indians in Britain 1948-1998’, ed. by David Dabydeen, 20: 1 (1998), pp. 11-20 (pp. 11-12). Focusing specifically on poetry, Baugh argues that, together with magazines such as Bim (from 1942) and Kyk-over-al (1945-1961), this BBC programme has ‘help[ed] to account for the upsurge in West Indian poetry which [became] increasingly evident during the 1940s’; Edward Baugh, West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation (Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou, 1971), quoted in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Literary Discourses 57 programme was launched to provide a link between soldiers fighting in Britain during the Second World War or West Indian emigrants on the one hand and their families in the Caribbean on the other.121 It transmitted creative writing, literary criticism and music. Since this programme comprised contributions from West Indians in various places in the Caribbean and in London, it fostered the gradual emergence of a regional rather than a localised identity. As Ramdin explains, the mass migration of West Indians to the metropolis played a major role in the development of a regional Caribbean identity insofar as it had an ‘effect of galvanising the various peoples, especially the West Indians’.122 The cultural exchange between the West Indies and Great Britain that was fostered by BBC Caribbean Voices was further strengthened by the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), an important cultural movement of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It was established in London in 1966 by John La Rose, Andrew Salkey and Edward Kamau Brathwaite as a loose foundation of artists, dramatists, writers, literary and art critics as well as publishers. This movement reflects the growing interest in Caribbean arts and aesthetics that developed at that time.123 Just as the BBC programme, the Caribbean Artists Movement contributed to the growing awareness of regional rather than merely local Caribbean issues. Since its members had come to London from various places in the West Indies, the group displayed the cultural diversity characteristic of the Caribbean. At the same time, however, the individual artists often aimed at capturing characteristics of the culture and the place they had left Welsh, eds, The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 99-104 (p. 104). 121 Una Marson had started BBC programme in 1938 under the name ‘Calling the West Indies’, and in 1946 Henry Swanzy took over as the producer of this programme under its new name Caribbean Voices; Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1992), p. 6. 122 Ron Ramdin, Reimaging Britain: 5000 Years of Black and Asian History (London and Sterling/Virginia: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 164 123 For details about the Caribbean Artists Movement see Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists; and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Timehri’, Savacou, 2 (1970), pp. 35-44 (pp. 41-42). Literary Discourses 58 behind. Many of them thus expressed a heightened interest in their local Caribbean languages and histories.124 The attempts made at that time to develop ‘Caribbean’ literary styles and forms of expression were also reflected in literary discussions, often published in journals, which were at their height during the 1970s in the Anglophone Caribbean. Most famous was the debate between Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. It was based on the assumption that Walcott relied too heavily on ‘English’ literary styles and themes, whereas Brathwaite was perceived as a more ‘original Caribbean’ poet.125 The predominant issue at stake in these discussions was the definition of aspects that were considered important in the portrayal of Caribbean societies and cultures.126 Brathwaite attributed great importance to the incorporation of folk elements in his writing, which made him be regarded more as a writer for the people interested in their local cultures.127 He emphasized the need for a ‘(re)assertion of [the] local’, a ‘(re)establishment […] [of] links - artistic and intellectual - with the people’.128 He saw the need for an ‘explosion of grassroots artistic/intellectual activity’.129 Brathwaite’s focus on and portrayal of folk traditions primarily reflects, however, what Ismond calls his ‘mission of protest’.130 Walcott, by contrast, addressed literary themes from an humanistic perspective, trying to accept and leave behind the past of the Caribbean in order to suggest the building of a more independent society.131 In his famous essay ‘The Muse of History’ Walcott argued for the necessity and benefits of concentrating on contemporary issues relevant to the Anglophone Caribbean rather than nostalgically 124 Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Background’, in West Indian Literature, ed. by King, p. 28. 125 Patricia Ismond, ‘Walcott vs. Brathwaite’, Caribbean Quarterly, 17: 3-4, (1966), pp. 54-70. 126 See Brathwaite’s articles published in Savacou, for instance Brathwaite, ‘Timehri’. 127 Donnell, Reader, p. 116; Brathwaite, ‘Timehri’, p. 37. 128 Brathwaite, ‘Timehri’. 129 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘The Love Axe: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic 1962-1974 - I, Bim, 16: 61, pp. 53-65 (p. 56). 130 Ismond, ‘Walcott vs. Brathwaite’, p. 64. 131 Ismond, ‘Walcott vs. Brathwaite’, p. 69. Literary Discourses 59 harking back to the countries of one’s ancestors.132 Despite their theoretical controversies, both writers granted the representation of Caribbean culture a principal role in shaping an understanding of Caribbean art and literature. From the late 1950s on Francophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals, notably Edouard Glissant, also praised the value of art and aesthetics in the context of Caribbean cultural production. Glissant’s theoretical discourses, and Le Discours antillais (1981) in particular, convey his concern for more ‘authentic’ Caribbean aesthetics and indicate the significance of the writer’s appreciation of Caribbean cultures. Glissant’s theoretical concepts demonstrate his opposition towards an imposed ‘gallicisation’, which might impede artistic creativity.133 In his early work from his essay Soleil de la conscience (1956) to Le Discours antillais, Glissant focuses on the development of a national consciousness.134 He argues that Antilleans need to become aware of their history, culture and literature in order to overcome their ‘objectification’ as experienced during colonialism.135 In contrast to most of his Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean contemporaries, Glissant dismisses the representation of folklore in Antillean literature.136 For him, folklore is not lived but merely represented. Folktales, for instance, represent an imaginary Caribbean past, which seems detached from the present. In his understanding, folklore is unconscious and thus contrasts with the development of a national consciousness.137 Like folklore, theatrical production eventually has to be overcome in order to develop a national consciousness: ‘[l]e théâtre est l’acte par lequel la conscience collective se voit, et par conséquent se 132 Derek Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’, in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. by Orde Coombs (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974), pp.1-27. 133 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 53. 134 Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956). For a detailed analysis of the development of Glissant’s work with specific focus on the notions of Relation, Totality and the nation see Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001), pp. 66-125 (esp. pp. 66-81). 135 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 223. 136 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, pp. 311-15. 137 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, pp. 693-94. See also Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, p. 71. Literary Discourses 60 dépasse’/‘theatre is the act by which the collective consciousness sees itself, and consequently moves beyond itself’.138 As this quotation suggests, Glissant acknowledges the significance of theatre in the development from cultural colonisation to decolonisation. At the same time, however, Glissant stresses the need eventually to move beyond this form of cultural expression. The theoretical position assumed by Glissant in Le Discours antillais seems to contrast with the wider trend during the 1960s and 1970s of a growing popularity of the performing arts. Writers’ and intellectuals’ interest in local and regional issues expressed in both poetry and fiction reflects the general trend of the era when many writers and artists started taking pride in Caribbean forms of literary and artistic expression. In the Francophone Caribbean writers and poets such as Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé and Ina Césaire wrote several plays between the 1960s and the 1980s.139 In the West Indies, especially in Trinidad and Jamaica, Caribbean musical genres such as calypso or reggae had gained popularity since the 1950s, and the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of dub and performance poetry.140 Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and Jean Binta Breeze, to name but a few, are famous dub poets in Great Britain and in the West Indies. With the publication of his trilogy The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) and, a decade later, his critical analysis of West Indian ‘nation language’, Brathwaite, too, contributed significantly to the development of poetry written in ‘non- 138 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 685 139 Aimé Césaire, Et les Chiens se taisaient, tragédie: arrangement théâtral (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958), La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963), Une Saison au Congo (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), and Une Tempête, d'après La tempête de Shakespeare: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Maryse Condé, Dieu nous l'a donné (Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald, 1972), Mort d'Oluwémi d'Ajumako (Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald, 1973), Le Morne de Massabielle (Puteaux: Théâtre des Hauts de Seine, 1974), Pension les Alizés (Paris: Mercure de France, 1988), An Tan Revolisyon (Guadeloupe: Conseil Régional, 1989); Ina Césaire, Mémoires d'isles, maman N. et maman F. (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1985), and L'Enfant des passages ou la geste de Ti-Jean (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1987). 140 For a discussion of calypso see, for instance, K. Warner, The Trinidad Calypso - A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature (London: Heinemann, 1983). For an introductory summary of these movements see Donnell, Reader, pp. 125, 295. Literary Discourses 61 standard’ English.141 Many works of this musical and literary genre are characterised as being highly political, criticising misery, deprivation and unrest in the West Indies and discrimination against black people.142 Dub poetry politicises economic and social conditions in the Caribbean, using a literary form developed in the West Indies. Poets like Johnson and Oku Onuora, who were writing and performing in Great Britain, criticised the problem of racism in the metropolis in their linguistically innovative poetry.143 These poems were usually written in Creole or a form of ‘West Indian English’ rather than in ‘standard’ English, which reinforces the local and radically innovative character transmitted in this literary genre. The incorporation of Caribbean vernacular into dub poetry fostered the wider acceptance of literature written in Creole.144 Subsequent to the rise of dub and performance poetry, the acceptance of popular forms in Anglophone Caribbean literature and the arts has generally been reflected by a more large-scale introduction of Creole into the literary canon. During the first half of the 20th century the Creole language was rarely incorporated in fiction because it was not accepted as literary language in either the Francophone or the Anglophone Caribbean.145 It was widely 141 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy: Rights of Passage, Islands and Masks (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) and History of the Voice: the Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). For his critical engagement with the impact that black musical rhythms such as reggae, calypso and jazz have had on the development of dub and performance poetry see, for instance, Brathwaite, ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel – I’, Bim, 12: 44 (1967), pp. 275-84; ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel – II’, Bim, 12: 45 (1967), pp. 39-51; ‘West Indian Prose Fiction in the Sixties: a Survey’, Bim, 12: 47 (1968), pp. 157- 65 and ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel – III’, Bim, 12: 46 (1968-9), pp. 115-26. 142 For a discussion of dub poetry see, for instance, Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), p. 159. 143 For critical engagement with the innovative character of dub poetry see, for instance, David Dabydeen, ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’ (1989), in Reader, ed. by Donnell, pp. 410-15 (esp. p. 412). 144 Donnell, Reader, p. 363. 145 As Lowenthal explains, both the British and the French colonisers ‘despised’ Creole and ‘[l]ocal forms of speech. He argues that ‘the ‘prejudice [against local patois] is strongest in the French Antilles’ but that ‘Creole speech is likewise abhorrent to the respectable in the British Caribbean’; Literary Discourses 62 associated with the educated elite who had adopted the coloniser’s view that Creole was not a ‘proper’ language and hence not suitable for literary writing. With the rise of dub poetry this attitude gradually changed in the Anglophone Caribbean during the 1960s. This literary genre as well as different fictional accounts of everyday life such as Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (1986) by the Sistren Collective placed great importance on patois and Creole.146 Since the 1960s local languages have been regarded as a counterweight to English, which was then negatively associated with the coloniser. In the Francophone Caribbean, by contrast, the use of French dominated literary texts until the 1990s. Although writers such as Dany Bébel-Gisler and Raphaël Confiant have produced fiction in Creole, most writers have continued publishing their work in French.147 The small number of Creole Francophone Caribbean texts demonstrates the impact that French assimilation policy has had on the Francophone Caribbean. As was argued earlier, the French language has been associated with rationality and progressive thinking which has resulted in the suppression of Creole and local dialects in writing. Thus Creole has, until recently, rarely been accepted as a literary language in the Francophone Caribbean. While it has been used as a concept in theoretical discourses, notably Eloge de la créolité, intellectuals have tried to justify the absence of Creole literary texts with reference to the specific language situation in the Francophone Caribbean. Glissant advances that Creole is usually not the mother tongue in the Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, pp. 271-72. For specific examples of local West Indians who were discouraged from speaking Creole by their teachers see also Alister Hughes, ‘Non-standard English of Grenada’, Caribbean Quarterly, 12: 4 (Dec 1966), pp. 47-54 (p. 52); and Pierre Vérin, ‘The Rivalry of Creole and English in the West Indies’, West-Indische Gids, 38 (1958), pp. 163-67, esp. pp. 164, 166. 146 Sistren Collective with Honor Ford Smith, eds, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1986). 147 See, for instance, Dany Bébel-Gisler (as Dani Bébèl-Jislè), Kèk prinsip pou ékri kréyól (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1975); the various contributions by Raphaël Confiant to the journal Grif An Tè between 1977 and 1981 (for instance, ‘Jik dèyè do Bondyé: nouvelles’ (1979) and ‘Jou Baré: poèmes’ (1981)) as well as his novel Bitako-a: roman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985). Literary Discourses 63 Antilles – in contrast to some islands in the Anglophone West Indies such as Dominica, Trinidad and Jamaica.148 Instead of privileging the use of Creole in Francophone Caribbean literature, Glissant praises a plurilingual Caribbean. Since the 1990s the Creolists, and Chamoiseau in particular, have interrogated the domination of French through the creolisation of both Creole and French expressions.149 Although the Creolists argue that Caribbean issues can only be expressed satisfactorily if Creole terms are used, they only ‘creolise’ the French language. In other words, they make French expressions sound like Creole by imitating the formation of Creole words. As this discussion has shown, West Indian writers have used Creole as a literary language that emphasizes a focus on Caribbean cultures earlier and to a greater extent than their Antillean contemporaries. This difference can be related to France’s practice of assimilation and to the continuing political and cultural interrelation between the Antilles and France since the islands’ departmentalisation. Despite these linguistic differences a wider trend can be discerned in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing, namely an interrogation of European literary conventions. I would therefore maintain that key literary and critical trends such as critiques of colonialism and racism during the first half of the twentieth century as well as the emergence of Caribbean aesthetics have travelled between the different Caribbean contexts. Further continuities between these two literary traditions are evident if we compare trends in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing that have emerged since the 1980s. I agree with Forsdick who contends that what has been called postcolonial studies can be regarded as an example of the travelling of theories.150 Various recent studies have highlighted connections between theoretical and literary concepts 148 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 282. 149 I will discuss Chamoiseau’s use of language in Chapter Three. 150 Charles Forsdick, ‘Challenging the monolingual, subverting the monocultural: the strategic purposes of Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 33-40 (p. 35). Literary Discourses 64 developed by Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals respectively.151 During the last ten years it has been recognised more widely that scholars in the field of (Anglophone) postcolonial studies, notably Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, have engaged with concepts developed by Francophone intellectuals such as Césaire and Fanon.152 Yet, comparisons of specific literary concepts that emerged in the Anglophone and Francophone contexts respectively still represent exceptions rather than a wider trend in literary criticism. As I have emphasized above, I would argue that theories developed by Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals can illuminate each other and should therefore not be considered as exclusively applying to either literary field. The juxtaposition and comparison of contemporary Francophone and Anglophone theories can challenge the assumption that postcolonial theories are only pertinent to Anglophone texts. This comparison also reveals the differences between theoretical 151 See, for instance, contributions to the first two volumes of Francophone Postcolonial Studies such as Celia Britton, ‘New Approaches to Francophone Literature’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 29-32; Forsdick, ‘Challenging the monolingual’; John McLeod, ‘Reading the Archipelago’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 55-59; Jean- Marc Moura, ‘Sur l’étude postcoloniale des lettres francophones en France’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 64-71; Murphy, ‘Choosing a Framework’; A. James Arnold, ‘Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 7-10; Chris Bongie, ‘Belated Liaisons: Writing Between the Margins of Literary and Cultural Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 11-24; Anne Donadey, ‘Overlapping Frames: Reconceptualizing Francophone Postcolonial Studies’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 41-45. Further critical engagement with the relationship between Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial studies and the need for interdisciplinary interpretations of literature from both fields is made by Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley, eds, Postcolonial Criticism (London and New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 1-72; John McLeod, ‘Contesting contexts: Francophone thought and Anglophone postcolonialism’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Forsdick and Murphy, pp. 192-201; Jean-Marc Moura and Jean Bessière, eds, Littératures postcoloniales et francophonie: conférence du séminaire de littérature comparée de l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001); Moura, Littérature francophones. 152 For further discussion of the indebtedness of the above-mentioned intellectuals to Francophone thought see Forsdick, ‘Challenging the monolingual’, p. 35; and Moore-Gilbert et al., Postcolonial Criticism, pp. 22, 28-29, 33. Literary Discourses 65 positions developed in both Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial criticism and thus interrogates assumptions of universal applicability of postcolonial concepts. Over the last twenty years, Anglophone Caribbean writing has chiefly been discussed within the context of postcolonial literature, the main theories of which emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. Said’s Orientalism (1978) has, among Anglophone scholars, often been posited as one of the founding texts of postcolonial criticism, because Said ‘inaugurate[d] […] the application of certain kinds of contemporary “high” theory [for instance Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge] to the study of the relationships between (neo-)colonialism and cultural production’.153 Spivak and Bhabha have commonly been placed alongside Said, as constituting what Young terms ‘the Holy Trinity’ of postcolonial critics.154 Theoretical concepts developed by these three influential intellectuals have widely been discussed in Anglophone postcolonial criticism of the 1990s, notably in key publications such as Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989) and their Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995) as well as Williams and Chrisman’s Colonial Discourse and Post- Colonial Theory: A Reader (1994).155 The main argument in The Empire Writes Back is that former colonies have started producing their own literature which ‘radical[ly] dismantle[es] […] the European codes and […] subvert[s] and appropriat[es] […] the dominant European discourses’.156 As these three critical texts suggest, an engagement with counter-discourses developed in former (Anglophone) colonies was central to discussions in postcolonial studies in the early 1990s. 153 Moore-Gilbert et al., Postcolonial Criticism, p. 22. 154 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 163. 155 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, eds, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 156 Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 195. Literary Discourses 66 Even though many theoretical concepts that have been discussed within the context of Anglophone postcolonial studies were already advanced by Francophone intellectuals since the emergence of the discourse of négritude, little attention has, until recently, been paid to the Francophone context. While postcolonial theory does not pertain to any specific region, country or language, it has primarily been explored within the Anglophone context. Since the late 1980s postcolonial studies have been institutionalised in English departments of British, North American and Australian universities. This compartmentalisation of postcolonial studies has led to the fact that little attention has been paid to non-Anglophone contexts in which similar ideas have been developed. Scholars of French and Francophone studies contributed to the one- sidedness of postcolonial criticism insofar as they analysed literature according to a well-established canon of French theorists without interrogating texts in the wider field of non-French literary criticism.157 Interestingly, critical interventions in the field of what might be called ‘Francophone postcolonial studies’ have primarily been made by scholars in French departments at British and North American rather than at French universities.158 The recent opening of French and Francophone studies towards postcolonial criticism seems to reflect a growing awareness among intellectuals of the need for interdisciplinary readings of Caribbean literature. Remarkably, this development has been far more tentative in the French metropolis than in the Anglo- American context. The period between the 1980s and 1990s saw not only the emergence of postcolonial studies in the Anglophone context but also the development of the discourse of créolité. While postcolonial criticism is, as indicated above, not context-specific, créolité is 157 For further discussion see Murphy, ‘De-centring French studies’, pp. 175-76; and Forsdick and Murphy, ‘Introduction’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, ed. by Forsdick and Murphy, pp. 1-14 (pp. 9-10). 158 Following Compagnon’s assertion that since the 1970s French scholars have merely applied canonical literary theories to fictional texts without interrogating them, David Murphy discusses this reluctance of most French critics to engage with theoretical concepts developed in the Anglophone context and literary trend; Murphy, ‘De-centring French Studies’, pp. 175-76; and Antoine Compagnon, ‘L’Exception française’, Textuel, 37 (April 2000), pp. 41-52. Literary Discourses 67 situated within the distinct context of the Francophone Caribbean. Nevertheless, the main concepts which are advanced in this discourse, namely créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation, can be placed within wider debates about notions of hybridity. As I will elaborate in Chapter Three, the publication of Eloge de la créolité (1989) by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, and five years later Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) were central to scholarly debates about hybridity and creolisation.159 The concept of créolité was developed by Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, building on Glissant’s notion of antillanité. Like antillanité but contrary to négritude, créolité emphasizes local characteristics of the Caribbean (primarily of Martinique and Guadeloupe) to a greater extent than it focuses on links between the Caribbean and Africa. At the same time, the Creolists emphasize that both the Caribbean and the world are moving towards creolisation. They argue that migration and cultural diversity characterise contemporary societies worldwide and in the Caribbean in particular. Especially since the onset of slavery and colonialism different European and non-European cultures have influenced Caribbean societies, and the Eloge de la créolité advocates have tried to capture this diversity and multi-ethnic situation in their writing. Despite their claim that the tendency towards cultural creolisation encompasses the entire Caribbean archipelago and can even be regarded as a worldwide process, the Creolists do not acknowledge or are unaware of the theoretical debates about the related issues of hybridity, mestizaje and, by extension, in- betweenness and diaspora that have emerged in the Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean since the early 1990s.160 In contrast to the proponents of créolité, Edouard Glissant shows greater awareness of non-Francophone Caribbean writers and critics, who have influenced the development of literary-theoretical thought in the Caribbean. In the section on literature and literary production in Le Discours antillais he refers, for instance, to Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul and Nicolás Guillén, who have transformed 159 Bernabé et al., In Praise; and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 160 For critical references to this omission see, for instance, Gallagher, Soundings, p. 42. Literary Discourses 68 the English and Spanish languages in their work.161 There is, however, no sustained engagement across Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literary criticism on the issue of creolisation from either literary-critical side. The following comparison of the notions of créolité and hybridity as developed by the Creolists and Bhabha respectively will reveal the extent to which these concepts have travelled between the specific literary-critical contexts in which they emerged. While Bhabha’s interpretation of the notion of hybridity and créolité as advanced by the Creolists are certainly reminiscent of each other, these two concepts must not be conflated. As my comparison will show, Bhabha dwells on the so-called ‘Third Space’ of enunciation, a figurative space in-between cultures which, he argues, allows the hybrid individual to step back from the different cultural influences. While this ‘Third Space’ is not related to any particular culture, the proponents of créolité emphasize the fertility of the specific mixing of languages and cultural traditions which have shaped Caribbean societies.162 Bhabha points out that ‘the important thing about the hybrid site is to see that the contenders in any antagonistic interaction are never unitary […] and their interaction therefore has the possibility always of setting up other sites’.163 When speaking of the hybrid, he primarily refers to the coloniser/colonised duality which he breaks down by introducing the idea of the hybrid. Hybridity is the result of what he calls partial and double forces. In the encounter of different cultures, and between coloniser and colonised in particular, forces that are disavowed are not repressed but re-emerge in hybrid forms. Cultural hybridity is characterised by an extension of the meanings of certain cultural practices or signs of one particular culture when adapted by another. At the same time, their ‘original’ meanings are restricted when they are taken out of the initial context. 161 Glissant, Le Discours antillais, p. 182. 162 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 36-9. 163 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial Critic: Homi Bhabha interviewed by David Bennett and Terry Collits’, Arena, 96 (1991), p. 61. Literary Discourses 69 Bhabha’s interpretation of hybridity implies a rejection of the notion of cultural diversity and a focusing on cultural difference instead.164 He defines cultural diversity as ‘an epistemological object – culture as an object of empirical knowledge’ and contrasts it with cultural difference, which he construes as ‘the process of the enunciation of culture as “knowledgeable”, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification’.165 He thus regards cultural diversity as something stable and unified – he refers to ‘totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity’.166 Criticising the concept of cultural diversity and its implicit assumption of unified cultures, he focuses instead on the ‘Third Space of enunciation’, a conceptual space that ‘makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code’.167 In this ‘Third Space’, which is created through cultural hybridity, traditions and concepts gain new meanings and cultural signs can be translated and re-historicised.168 It is in this newly established theoretical space that a productive cultural and linguistic exchange can take place. While Bhabha’s notion of hybridity seems to negotiate between shifting power structures of different cultures, particularly those of the coloniser and the colonised, or of dominant and subordinate discourses, the Creolists’ concept of creolisation focuses more closely on the productivity of encounters not only between coloniser and colonised but also between different colonised cultures. These diverse encounters are of particular importance in a cross-cultural examination of Caribbean literature. The concept of hybridity is useful to analyse power structures and contending forces that stem from the various repetitions of colonial patterns and still constitute a basis for 164 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 32, 34, 38. 165 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 34 [emphasis in original]. 166 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 34. 167 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 37. 168 Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity’, p. 208. Literary Discourses 70 many Caribbean texts. However, it seems to limit the focus more closely on antagonistic forces than the concepts of créolité and diversalité/‘diversality’. In the context of a multitude of influences on the Caribbean and influences from this region on other cultures, particularly via the Caribbean diaspora, the notion of ‘diversality’ illuminates the network of Caribbean connections.169 According to this concept, the diversity of local cultural traditions challenges allegedly universal cultural ideas, creolises them and produces new meanings out of them, and finally reaches out beyond the local or regional Caribbean space into the global. The Creolists specify that créolité is a ‘kaleidoscopic totality’ rather than simply a ‘synthesis’ or ‘unity’.170 As such, it constitutes ‘the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity’.171 Placing emphasis on diversity, créolité rejects ‘false universality, […] monolinguism, […] purity’.172 The objective of créolité is to allow different cultures to co-exist in a space to which they have been brought (in most cases by force) and to practise cultural forms on the basis of newly established cultural schemes.173 As emphasized above, ethnic and cultural diversity are some of the main characteristics of the Caribbean which has led to creolisation. Chamoiseau explains that the process of creolisation is rooted in the history of the Caribbean peoples.174 The trauma of slavery, spatial, temporal and cultural displacement and the mixing of languages and cultures in the Caribbean have resulted in creolisation. Chamoiseau understands by this notion ‘not a synthesis but a sort of an uncertain mosaic, always conflicting, always chaotic, always evolutionary and itself organising its balances in the creolities’.175 169 Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane: 1635-1975 (Paris: Hatier, 1991). 170 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 89. 171 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 89. 172 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 90: ‘Creoleness is an annihilation of false universality, of monolingualism, and of purity’. 173 Bernabé et al., In Praise, pp. 91-93. 174 Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997), p. 221. 175 Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, p. 222 [emphasis in original]. Literary Discourses 71 In the Creolists’ terms, créolité is not restricted to the mixing of cultures and traditions, but it is a mind-set of which the Creole population is aware and proud. Créolité is ‘an interior attitude – better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world’.176 Créolité, which emphasizes cultural mixing, is directed at ‘any person of ideas who conceives our space […] in any discipline whatsoever, who is in the painful quest for a more fertile thought, for a more precise expression, for a truer art’.177 This concept of créolité is considered to bring together a fragmented world, connecting communities that have often been living in the diaspora for generations.178 As I will elaborate in Chapter Three, the concept of créolité constitutes a specifically Caribbean form of cultural mixing, whereas Bhabha’s interpretation of hybridity is situated in Indian and diasporic contexts. Although créolité focuses on openness towards various cultural influences, it is, in fact, rooted in the local. In their theoretical manifesto and most notably in their fiction the Creolists seem to concentrate primarily on the Antillean context (the linguistic, historical and cultural conditions that characterise Antillean societies). As my comparison of Robert Antoni’s novel Divina Trace and Chamoiseau’s Texaco in Chapter Three will reveal, the Francophone writer concentrates on the specific Antillean context without any particular references to societies in other, non-Francophone Caribbean islands. This portrayal of particular characteristics of specific island settings is certainly a general trend in (Caribbean) literature. Ironically, it seems to clash with the specific openness towards other cultures worldwide that the Creolists ascribe to Antillean societies. This contradiction underlines the theoretical nature of the discourse of créolité. Similarly, the Creolists have been criticised for the focus on the past in most of their fiction. While their concept of créolité concentrates on contemporary (Caribbean) societies, their fiction tends to capture a vision of the old, rural areas of 176 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 75. 177 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 75. 178 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 88. Literary Discourses 72 Martinique.179 Significantly, as McCusker argues, these contradictions inherent in the Creolists’ writing in general and in the concept of créolité in particular are characteristic of Antillean identity: ‘[t]he paradoxes in which créolité is entangled recapitulate the contradictions which define contemporary Martiniquan society, and point to the tensions at the heart of postcolonial identity more generally’.180 I would argue that the contrast between the discourse of créolité and fictional representations of creolised Caribbean societies reveals the limitations of this set of ideas. In their praise of the cultural diversity of Caribbean societies in Eloge de la créolité, the Creolists seem to neglect those antagonistic forces between different cultures which Bhabha stresses in his interpretation of hybridity. This suggests that créolité has a somewhat Utopian dimension insofar as it idealises cross-cultural contact. However, despite these contradictions and limitations, créolité has become a key concept in the arts for the exploration of cross-cultural relationships in ethnically and culturally diverse (Caribbean) societies. Créolité and hybridity are theoretical and somewhat imaginative responses to cross- cultural relationships in different contexts, namely the Caribbean on the one hand and Indian and diaspora contexts on the other. As such they are context-specific but, at the 179 For discussions of the Creolists’ focus on the past see, for instance, Maeve McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture miraculously forged”: the contradictions of “créolité”’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 112-21 (p. 118); Mary Gallagher, ‘Whence and whither the French Caribbean créolité movement?’, ASCALF Bulletin, 9 (1994), 3-19 (p. 18); Maryse Condé, ‘Order, disorder, freedom and the West Indian writer’, Yale French Studies, 82-83 (1993), 121-35 (p. 130). Similarly, Kemedjio argues that Chamoiseau tries to reveal a distinctly French Antillean language, rhythm and ‘interior vision’, in other words a notion of identity based on one’s ancestral roots; Kemedjio, De la Négritude à la Créolité, p. 276: ‘L’écriture de Chamoiseau s’articule sur les textes-ancêtres dans sa recherche d’un langage, d’un rythme et d’une vision intérieure’/[Chamoiseau’s writing expresses itself in ancestral texts in his search for a language, a rhythm and an interior vision]. 180 McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 116. McCusker analyses the geographically, historically and politically interstitial character of the Antilles and the islands’ continuous close links to France which is largely based on their status as French overseas departments; McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. Literary Discourses 73 same time, related concepts both of which have significantly influenced contemporary debates about cultural diversity and identity in Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial criticism. As my comparison of developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism has shown, literary concepts have travelled between these two linguistically and culturally specific areas. The discourse of négritude has commonly been placed in the wider context of black anti-colonial movements not only in the Caribbean but also in Africa and North America. While literary production in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean tended to focus primarily on the relationship between the colonised and the respective colonising power, the specific literary developments in both regions were part of a wider trend of anti-colonial and nationalist writing. These connections were reinforced during the 1950s and 1960s when both Paris and London asserted their status as literary and intellectual capitals. Antilleans and West Indians were attracted to the metropolises because they offered access to higher education (most Francophone as well as a few Anglophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals attended university in the metropolises), publishing houses and provided forums for literary debates. As I will analyse in detail in Chapter Two, Antilleans and West Indians shared the experience of racist discrimination but also benefited from the solidarity among migrants in the metropolises. Connections between writers and scholars across the linguistic divide were reinforced with the translation into English of landmark texts such as Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1969) as well as Fanon’s studies Peau noire, masques blancs/Black Skin, White Masks (1967) and Les Damnés de la terre/The Wretched of the Earth (1965).181 Subsequently, Francophone and Anglophone critics have reinterpreted and re- contextualised Fanon’s work. Francophone writing from the discourse of négritude until the contemporary créolité movement has influenced literary-critical concepts developed 181 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. by John Berger and Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1969); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965). Literary Discourses 74 by Anglophone scholars whose theories have been discussed in postcolonial studies. Remarkably, however, the recognition of mutual influences has, until recently, remained the exception and has not represented a wider trend. This means that, although literary concepts have obviously travelled between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, these links have not widely been acknowledged either by Anglophone or by Francophone Caribbean critics. Significantly, however, scholarly work produced during the last decade signals a paradigm shift in postcolonial studies. Recent discussions of postcolonial issues in Francophone discourses constitute a fertile ground for cross- cultural debates of Caribbean literature. A similar desire to open up the field of study can be seen in Anglophone postcolonial criticism, which has become more interested in related discussions in disciplines other than English studies during the last ten years. As shown above, an examination of Caribbean literary texts will be most productive at the intersection of selected theories. It is my contention that only a comparative analysis of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism will enable scholars to examine cross-cultural and cross-linguistic links in Caribbean writing without running the risk of generalising. In light of Said’s notion of a travelling of ideas, context-specific differences have to be accounted for alongside structural and thematic connections in order to engage in a dialogue between Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial studies. Indeed, an interdisciplinary approach towards postcolonial writing is necessary for an understanding of the complexity of cultural and literary connections between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literary traditions. Chapter Two ‘Black Metropolises’: Anglophone and Francophone Caribbeans in Mid-Twentieth Century London and Paris For almost a century London and Paris have been vibrant intellectual and literary centres of the (former) colonial powers. From the 1920s onwards and, above all, during the 1950s and 1960s, both cities served as important meeting points for scholars, writers and artists from different parts of the French and British colonial empires.1 Many Caribbean writers were attracted to the metropolitan capitals by the relative lack of censorship, the broadening of their horizons in the encounter with new cultures and the existence of a reading public. Various writers of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ explicitly referred to the absence of a literary market in the Caribbean.2 Another major incentive for writers to come to the metropolitan capitals after the Second World War 1 Frantz Fanon and Joseph Zobel studied and published in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, and earlier writers, intellectuals and political activists from the Caribbean and North and West Africa such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas attended meetings and exchanged ideas in the French metropolitan capital. For a brief analysis of political and literary movements that connected Africa, the Caribbean and France see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 265-69. London witnessed the arrival of writers such as Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Una Marson, C. L. R. James, Andrew Salkey, John La Rose, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (temporarily), Jan Carew, V. S. Reid, John Hearne and Donald Hinds, to name but a few. For an elaboration on the significance of London and Paris as literary, cultural, political and intellectual ‘headquarters’ see Chapter One. 2 See, for instance, George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), pp. 41- 43; Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1966), pp. 168-69; and Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 57, 73. The first generation of West Indian writers who came to Great Britain on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 or during the following years is generally referred to as the Windrush generation in Anglophone postcolonial literary criticism. Black Metropolises 76 was the presence of publishing houses. Publishing activities in the Anglophone Caribbean were largely restricted to the circulation of journals, but no renowned publishing house was established until the late 1970s/early 1980s.3 By contrast, London-based small and medium-sized independent publishers, and especially educational presses such as Faber, André Deutsch, Michael Joseph as well as Oxford UP, Longman, and Heinemann Educational Books actively promoted Caribbean and other ‘Commonwealth’ writing.4 Due to France’s centralisation policy, Antillean writers were equally dependent on publishing houses like Présence Africaine, Editions de la Table Ronde, Editions du Seuil and Gallimard in the French capital.5 Since the early twentieth century London and Paris had been central locations for cultural and political anti-colonial movements. The predicament of colonial oppression and racial discrimination united many members of the black intelligentsia from Africa 3 As I have explained in Chapter One, the emergence of literary journals such as The Beacon, Bim, Kyk-Over-Al and Caribbean Quarterly attested to an active, yet limited, publishing scene in the Caribbean. For an overview of pre-war literary output in the Caribbean see, for instance, Reinhard W. Sander, From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing (London and Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978); Stewart Brown and John Wickham, eds, Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); and, for a more detailed analysis, Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 10-76. Although the Caribbean section of the Heinemann publishing house was started in 1933, Caribbean Literature was not produced as a serious addition to the list until the 1960s. I am grateful for this information to Lisa Hill, Senior Coordinator, Harcourt Education; enquiries.international@harcourteducation.co.uk; email exchange 01 February 2006. For further details see Alan Hill, In Pursuit of Publishing (London: Murray in association with Heinemann Education, 1988). Similarly, the Kingston-based publisher Ian Randle was not established until 1991. 4 In her examination of the publishing history of Caribbean literature, Low addresses the sundry ‘ideological, aesthetic and commercial’ reasons for a growing interest in ‘Commonwealth’ writing by British publishing houses; Gail Low, ‘Publishing Commonwealth: The Case of West Indian Writing, 1950-65’, EnterText, electronic edition, 2: 1 (2001), pp. 71-93 (pp. 77-80) and ‘In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series’, Wasafiri, 37 (Winter 2002), pp. 31-35 (pp. 31-32). 5 In France, administration, transport, education as well as the intellectual and art scene were all centralised in Paris. The economic pull and cultural attractiveness of London led, in fact, to a similar development in Great Britain. Black Metropolises 77 and the diaspora. This trend is testified to by organisations such as Lamine Senghor’s Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre, its successor La Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, Touvalou Houénou’s Ligue Universelle de Défense de la Race Noire and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro’s Improvement Association. The international character of these movements was attested to further by the large number of conferences that were held during the interwar and postwar periods. Paris and London provided forums for the exchange of ideas not only for these anti-colonial and often Marxist movements but also for writers and artists. For instance, many African-American writers associated with the ‘New Negro’ group such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer and the Jamaican Claude McKay, who had settled in New York, spent some time outside the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Paris. Their presence fostered the vibrant interaction between the Harlem Renaissance and the négritude poets. (As was argued in Chapter One, London developed into a literary capital during the late 1940s and 1950s; earlier it had primarily been a centre of black political discourses.6) Even though London and Paris played similarly prominent roles in the international literary and intellectual scene during the 1950s and 1960s, there was surprisingly little direct contact between writers, artists and the black intelligentsia in these two centres. The First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists organised by Présence Africaine in 1956 at the Sorbonne in Paris was a significant exception to this general trend. It was the first metropolitan conference that deliberately moved away from a political to a cultural agenda; political debates took place outside the actual conference.7 This congress provided the first major international platform for Anglophone and Francophone intellectuals and writers alike. With delegates like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alioune Diop, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Dr Jean Price- 6 Susheila Nasta emphasizes that London was the ‘“literary headquarters”, a place where writers from the various islands were meeting for the first time and attempted, paradoxically perhaps, to establish a firm West Indian cultural identity’. Nasta, Home Truths, p. 57. 7 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta, 2000), p. 283. Black Metropolises 78 Mars and George Lamming, it ‘marked the intellectual epiphany of the black world’.8 The eminence of these literary and intellectual figures underscores the centrality of this event for the discussion of the most prominent issues of that time, namely the problematics of slavery, colonialism as well as political and cultural liberation.9 The papers presented at this conference, especially those given by Lamming and Fanon, testified to the existence of commonalities between the position adopted by Anglophone and Francophone writers and intellectuals towards the relationship between colonialism, ethnicity and identity.10 Apart from personal encounters between Anglophone and Francophone writers and intellectuals, translations played an important role in the dissemination of ideas and literature across the linguistic divide. During the 1950s and early 1960s most Antillean and West Indian writers were unfamiliar with each other’s literature in the original. One of the reasons for the scarcity of literary exchange across the linguistic divide was the absence of or considerable time lag between the French original and its English translation. To give but one example, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was not translated into English until 1968, although it constituted a key text in Francophone Caribbean literature.11 Yet, once translated such seminal Francophone texts fostered an engagement with Francophone fiction by Anglophone writers and scholars.12 Such a cross-cultural reading of Caribbean literature took place at the conferences organised by the Caribbean Artists Movement.13 Seminal Francophone texts such as Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal were presented by some speakers at these CAM conferences and thus introduced to the Anglophone 8 Macey, Frantz Fanon, pp. 165, 279-80, 283. See also Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon, Portrait (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), p. 129. 9 Macey, Frantz Fanon, pp. 280-83. 10 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, p. 129; Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 165. 11 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1956); Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, French/English bilingual editions, trans. by Emile Snyders (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968); English edition, trans. by John Berger and Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 12 Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon, 1992), pp. 167-68, 182, 238-39. 13 Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 167. Black Metropolises 79 audience.14 Clive Wake, for instance, gave a ‘systematic account of Césaire’s poem’ at the second conference in 1968, and John La Rose was responsible for the production of and directed the dramatisation of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal at the next conference in the following year.15 Highlighting the significance of introducing the West Indian audience to Césaire’s work, La Rose argued that the dramatisation of the poem ‘marked the Caribbean breaking out of its imprisonment in a single language – whether Dutch, French, Spanish or English - and reaching out to itself across language barriers’.16 Congresses such as those organised by Présence Africaine and the Caribbean Artists Movement testified, indeed, to the existence of some dialogue across the linguistic divide between Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals. This chapter, then, seeks to pursue further such a cross-cultural dialogue by scrutinising striking thematic connections between the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature that was produced in the metropolis during the 1950s and 1960s. I aim to situate the selected fictional texts within the context of a ‘black metropolitan literature’. It is my contention that Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Joseph Zobel’s La Fête à Paris (1953) transcend the geographical boundaries of Great Britain and France even as they represent experiences of postwar Caribbean (im)migrants within specific cultural contexts.17 Indeed, I would argue that the absence of a comparative debate in this area has led to the neglect of connections that have developed between ‘black’ literary traditions in Britain and France. As recent literary debates that have followed the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in Tilbury have shown, the remembering of ‘black British’ writing has been concomitant with the notion that the British literary scene has, since the 1950s, seen the 14 Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, pp. 167-68, 182, 238-39. 15 Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, pp. 167, 238. 16 Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 239. 17 Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Mayflower-Dell, 1966); Joseph Zobel, La Fête à Paris (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1953). Black Metropolises 80 development of a distinct ‘black British’ tradition. My chapter aims to problematise this assumption, suggesting that ‘black British’ writing has to be seen in the wider context of a ‘black’ (literary) presence in Europe. As was argued above, African, African- American and Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals stayed in Great Britain and France during the interwar and postwar period. Themes such as the experience of racism or the emergence of migrant communities in the metropolis addressed by ‘black British’ writers during the 1950s and 1960s are not unique to this literary tradition. These tropes have been addressed in what might be called ‘black French’ literature, too. In addition, Caribbean writers on both sides of the Channel have, to some extent, been influenced by each other. By positing ‘black British’ literature as a neat literary canon literary critics risk overlooking connections between ‘black’ writing in Britain and in other (Western) European countries, especially France, which have seen the emergence of similar literary trends – albeit on a smaller scale than Britain. Like ‘black British’ literature, ‘black French’ writing is not an isolated literary category but part of a wider trend in ‘black European’ writing. My comparison of The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris seeks to intervene in and open up a ‘tradition’ of writing that has been coherently organised around the ‘Windrush generation’. By revisiting fictional representations of prominent literary tropes in these texts, notably racism and solidarity amongst ‘black’ immigrants in the metropolis, I will highlight that the characters’ experiences of racism and solidarity in London and Paris are related to the specific moment in history of Caribbean migration to the metropolis. ‘Black British’ writing of the first generation of Caribbean immigrants has predominantly been discussed in relation to later generations of Caribbean writers in the metropolis. I would argue that diachronic readings of literature of the ‘Windrush generation’ solely within the Anglophone context largely eclipse continuities between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean migrant texts that emerged during the 1950s and early 1960s. Even though very few writers and scholars travelled between Great Britain and France during the 1950s and 1960s, their work shows clear thematic connections, some of which I will investigate in the following comparison of The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris. Unlike any other Black Metropolises 81 Francophone text written during the 1950s, La Fête à Paris deals with Antillean immigration to France, representing it from the perspective of an Antillean (im)migrant who is in the metropolis. Zobel’s novel is thus like The Lonely Londoners a pioneering text in the Francophone literary tradition in subject matter, though not in style. His novel seems to anticipate developments in Francophone Caribbean literature by ten to twenty years; most Francophone fiction that deals with the relationship between the Antilles and France as perceived from the perspective of Antillean (im)migrants did not emerge until the late 1960s and 1970s.18 Set in London and Paris respectively between the late 1940s and the late 1950s, The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris represent common experiences of fictional Caribbean characters who have come to the metropolitan capitals. Both novels address practical, and The Lonely Londoners also psychological, aspects of the predicament of racial discrimination against black (im)migrants and reveal the sense of disillusionment felt by many new arrivals. Significantly, such instances of alienation are juxtaposed with the sense of solidarity that prevails in the (im)migrant communities represented in the texts. The different social status of Zobel’s and Selvon’s protagonists influences their reception in and perception of the metropolises. At the same time, they can be related to the specific migration patterns between the West Indies and Great Britain as well as between the Antilles and France respectively. Selvon’s fictional personae are economic immigrants who have left the West Indies in order to settle in Great Britain permanently, hoping for social and economic advancement. Zobel’s protagonist, by contrast, is a student whose principal reason for leaving his native Martinique is the pursuit of higher education in Paris. While Selvon’s ‘boys’ are part of a mass movement of West Indian immigration into Great Britain, Joseph Hassam in La Fête à Paris is one of few Antillean migrants who arrived in France during the 1940s and 1950s.19 I will 18 In Lettres à une noire: récit antillais (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1978) Françoise Ega emphasizes both the sense of ‘otherness’ in the metropolis and simultaneously the attraction it has to Antilleans. 19 Throughout the novel Selvon’s male West Indian characters are referred to as the ‘boys’. In my following use of this term I will bear in mind that his immigrants are, in fact, grown-up men and are only called ‘boys’ in the logic and language of the novel. Black Metropolises 82 analyse the different status of the protagonists as travellers or immigrants and as both observers and observed. In so doing I will investigate the extent to which these positions have influenced the characters’ experiences in the British and French capitals, especially their encounters with different people – both local white people and other (im)migrants. Both writers represent the ambiguity between the stigmatisation of their Caribbean fictional personae as the racialized ‘Other’ and their acceptance by white metropolitans. This tension is further emphasized in Selvon’s and Zobel’s portraits of the weather as cultural marker and of selected sites in the cities which indicate the characters’ sense of familiarity and, at the same time, their alienation in the metropolis. By analysing these specific themes I will investigate connections between Selvon’s and Zobel’s representations of a Caribbean presence in the postwar metropolis which move beyond the specific cultural contexts. In order to situate the novels more closely in the historical context of the 1950s, I will provide a brief overview of the main characteristics of the immediate postwar era. The period of the 1940s and 1950s was marked by large-scale emigration of West Indians to Great Britain, who were encouraged to move to the metropolitan centres by the prospects of employment and better standards of living.20 The British Nationality Act of 1948 conferred full British citizenship on Commonwealth citizens and thus the right to stay in Great Britain for the rest of their lives.21 This was a chance that many West Indian workers and writers took.22 In addition, workers from the West Indies, which, at that time, were still a British colony, were actively recruited by British companies such as London Transport and Wall’s Ice Cream.23 This meant, however, that Caribbean 20 See, for instance, Nasta, Home Truths, p. 57. 21 According to their passports, West Indians were ‘citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’; Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 32. 22 Peter Fryer, ed., Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 373. 23 See, for instance, Ron Ramdin, Reimaging Britain: 5000 Years of Black and Asian History (London/Virginia: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 174. For British companies attracting West Indian immigrants see Caryl Phillips, ‘A Dream Deferred: Fifty Years of Caribbean Migration to Britain’, Black Metropolises 83 economic immigrants tended to be resented by the white British population as competitors.24 West Indians took the opportunity to emigrate to Britain until immigration was made extremely difficult by the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.25 Although many West Indians had initially intended to return to their home countries, they eventually brought their families to Great Britain and stayed because of the political and economic instability in the Caribbean. While Great Britain saw the large-scale arrival of West Indians during the 1950s and 1960s, North Africans constituted the majority of immigrant workers in France during this postwar period. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that Antillean workers were encouraged in ways similar to West Indians to come to the metropolis by the French government. 26 West Indian and Antillean postwar migration differed not only in Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, special issue ‘Post-Colonial London’, ed. by John McLeod, 21: 2 (1999), pp. 106-18 (p. 107). 24 Many new arrivals were surprised to ‘discover’ the existence of a white working class, to see that ‘white hands did nigger work’. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, p. 217; also referred to in James Procter, ed., Writing Black Britain 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000), p. 58. The fact that white people did manual labour meant that black newcomers were, in fact, competing with white workers for jobs rather than solely carrying out work that white people were reluctant to do. While the existence of a white working class seemed to suggest that racial hierarchies had been broken down, the fact that Caribbean newcomers had to compete for jobs and accommodation with French and British people respectively led to racial discrimination against the new arrivals. 25 The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act ‘set […] up a voucher system allowing entry only to those who have a job to come to. Some of its sections carr[ied] deportation penalties for migrants from the West Indies, Asia and Africa, whom it especially circumscribe[d]’. The passing of the law ‘was accompanied by the most foul racialist propaganda perpetrated against West Indians and other Afro- Asians by Tory and fascist elements’; Kwesi Owusu, ed., Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 52. 26 See, for instance, Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), pp. 314-15; Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 10, 43; and Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 15, 211. In France, the Bureau des migrations des DOM/TOM, BUMIDOM, established in 1963, encouraged and regulated (economic) migration Black Metropolises 84 scale but also in terms of social classes. In contrast to West Indian working class immigrants in Great Britain, most Antilleans who arrived in the French metropolis during the first two decades after the Second World War were part of the middle class. Another major difference between postwar migration to Great Britain and France is related to the different status of the West Indies and the Antilles. The Anglophone Caribbean gradually sought its independence from Britain, whereas the departmentalisation of 1946 officially made the French Caribbean a part of France. This close link between France and the Antilles resulted in two-way migration; Antilleans and French people travelled between these two places in both directions. Migrants thus moved between different parts of what was considered the French Republic rather than within the former Empire. The majority of West Indians, by contrast, emigrated to Great Britain, and there was no equivalent migratory movement from the British metropolis to the Caribbean. Colonial assimilation policies and departmentalisation had established close political and institutional links between the Antilles and France. Students and other members of the educated elite to which many prominent writers and intellectuals belonged, temporarily moved to France; in return, ships calling in the Antilles brought French civil servants at the end of the 1950s, who were to represent the ‘hexagone’ in the French Caribbean islands.27 Because of these close political and institutional connections between France and the Antilles, migration between these different regions appeared smoother than was the case with the Anglophone Caribbean. In contrast to the Anglophone Caribbean, there was no sense of urgency to migrate to France in the late 1940s and 1950s. The economic pull of Europe, which was a major catalyst for West Indian emigration to Britain, did not play a significant role in the Antilles until the 1960s and 1970s, a period when the French Caribbean was marked by an economic depression. During these later decades of the 20th century many Antilleans had become from the Antilles to France; Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: the Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 205. 27 Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 417. Black Metropolises 85 disillusioned with the expected benefits from departmentalisation, especially the anticipated French economic assistance.28 An awareness of these specific historical developments in Caribbean migration to the metropolis during the 1950s and 1960s is important for an understanding of Selvon’s and Zobel’s fictional texts, especially for representations of selected sites in London and Paris. Having emerged from different literary traditions, The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris diverge in their specific representations of their characters’ experiences of life in the metropolitan capitals. In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon depicts, in a tragic- comic style, the experiences of West Indian immigrants who had come to Great Britain in search of material, economic and social advancement.29 In his portrait of episodes from the lives of his characters, he pays attention to their state of mind.30 The Lonely Londoners has been praised by a number of literary critics for Selvon’s innovative use of vernacular language, which made it a landmark at its time of publication.31 Many critics have associated his incorporation of Jamaican-sounding English with the emergence of a national consciousness at the time of independence during the late 28 During the economic crisis in the mid-1950s the Antilles became increasingly dependent on French imports and financial grants. In contrast to the first migration wave from the West Indies to Great Britain, however, many Antilleans only moved from rural areas to the cities rather than migrating to France. At that period of time violent demonstrations took place in Martinique, particularly in its capital Fort-de-France; Macey, Frantz Fanon, p. 417. Political unrest was a common phenomenon in the Eastern Caribbean at that period of time. In Guyana, for instance, the socialist independence movement was destroyed, and Trinidad saw a comparable, although less widespread, political movement. This outbreak of violence in the Anglophone Caribbean intensified emigration to Great Britain. Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, p. 23. 29 For further references to comedy in The Lonely Londoners see Peter Nazareth, ‘Interview with Sam Selvon’ in Nasta, Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988), pp. 77-94 (pp. 80-81); and Michel Fabre, ‘From Trinidad to London: Tone and Language in Samuel Selvon’s Novels’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, pp. 213-22 (p. 217). 30 Kenneth Ramchand, ‘Song of Innocence, Song of Experience: Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners as a Literary Work’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, pp. 223-33 (p. 225). 31 See, for instance, Edward Baugh, ‘Friday in Crusoe’s City: the Question of Language in Two West Indian Novels of Exile’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, pp.. 240-49 (p. 241). Black Metropolises 86 1950s and 1960s.32 It has to be emphasized, though, that Selvon was one of the first Anglophone Caribbean writers who experimented with language in his fiction.33 He seems to have accommodated both a potential British and a West Indian readership by juxtaposing different forms of English in his fiction as well as through his choice of tone. According to Fabre, [s]tylistically, The Lonely Londoners is an achievement because it maintains a mellow, humorous, mildly satirical tone which manages to endear the West Indians to the reader without ridiculing the British too much. The distance between conflicting audiences is thus bridged.34 In his style and choice of language Zobel, by contrast, follows metropolitan French texts more closely.35 His writing can be regarded in the wider context of Antillean literature which took French canonical texts as a model. As I discussed in Chapter One, this trend persisted until the late 1960s and 1970s, when a growing awareness of their own Antillean culture and writing developed. With the increasing disappointment about the promises of departmentalisation during the 1960s, writers such as Edouard Glissant came to regard fiction as ‘a means of interrogating the continuing colonial relationship between France and the DOM’.36 However, African and Caribbean folk culture, the oral tradition and the Creole language hardly influenced Antillean prose fiction before the 1980s and especially the 1990s.37 While Selvon’s novel linguistically challenges a British readership, Zobel makes his novel more easily accessible to a French audience. La Fête à Paris is written in standard French and those few expressions such as béké 32 See Susheila Nasta, ‘Introduction’, in Nasta, Critical Perspectives, pp. 1-14 (p. 7). 33 Peter Nazareth, ‘Interview with Sam Selvon’, World Literature Written in English, 18: 2 (1979), pp. 420-37 (p. 421). 34 Fabre, ‘From Trinidad to London’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, p. 217. 35 Throughout this chapter I will use the term ‘standard’ French or English as referring to the official versions of these languages as used in written texts. 36 Haigh, ‘Introduction’, in Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion, ed. by Malcolm Offord, Laïla Ibnlfassi, Nicki Hitchcott, Sam Haigh, Rosemary Chaptman, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 152. 37 Haigh, ‘Introduction’, in Francophone Literatures, ed. by Offord et al., p. 153. Black Metropolises 87 (Zobel, p. 10) and morne (Zobel, p. 25) that allude to Joseph’s Martiniquan origin are explained in footnotes. Significantly, however, both expressions refer to a characteristically Caribbean cultural and geographical context, with the first describing a specific stratum of colonial Caribbean society and the second a feature in the Caribbean landscape. References to the Antilles such as these are incorporated in the novel through Joseph’s comparisons between his life in France and in Martinique also. As I will discuss below, Zobel thus foregrounds the interrelation between the metropolis and the Antilles. Zobel’s choice of style and language can also be related to his fictional personae. As an educated migrant who has some contact with the French middle-class, Joseph is represented as speaking standard French, not Creole. Zobel’s novel La Fête à Paris (1953), re-published as Quand la neige aura fondu (1979), is the less known sequel to Rue cases-nègres (1947).38 In his first novel, Zobel addresses the racial hierarchy, which is based on skin colour, in the context of the Martiniquan plantation system during the two World Wars. Portraying French education as it is implemented in the Antilles without any regional adjustment, Zobel casts a critical eye on the French policy of cultural assimilation. The benefits of French education and the problems implied in the assimilation policy are transferred to the metropolitan context in La Fête à Paris. Rue cases-nègres thus provides the background for La Fête à Paris in which the protagonist Joseph Hassam receives a scholarship that allows him to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. In his novel Zobel illustrates the attraction of France as a place of study and addresses a common migration pattern between the Antilles and France that many Antillean students undertook, including prominent intellectuals and writers to be.39 38 Joseph Zobel, Rue cases-nègres (Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1950) ; and Quand la neige aura fondu (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1979). 39 There was no university in the Antilles until 1982 and in the Anglophone Caribbean not until the University of the West Indies opened in 1948. For further information on the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane see their website http://www.univ-ag.fr/pres_dir_rep.htm. Black Metropolises 88 In the Anglophone literary tradition The Lonely Londoners has been widely discussed within the discourse of migrant literature as a text that represents Caribbeans’ experiences as immigrants in Great Britain. There was an overall tendency in Anglophone Caribbean literature of the 1950s and early 1960s to emphasize the paradoxical relationship between a sense of alienation on the one hand and familiarity and the sense of belonging on the other. Most of the literary production of the first generation of so-called ‘black British’ writers addresses these issues of disillusionment and estrangement in the metropolis as well as race relations in general. At the same time, however, Britain has also been presented as a familiar place where immigrant communities developed, and shared experiences could be exchanged among immigrants from various places around the world. Anglophone writers like Una Marson, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, Edgar Mittelholzer, and John La Rose all address these aspects of both disillusionment and the sense of familiarity experienced by West Indian newcomers in their writing.40 My comparison of The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris, then, will constitute a case study of specific Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean representations of the problematics of postwar migration to the metropolis and the related issues of integration and assimilation. Having situated the novels in their wider historical and literary contexts, I will analyse the main differences between the characters’ social status in the metropolis as already represented in the opening scenes of the novels. Significantly, Zobel’s novel begins with a long opening section on the actual trans-Atlantic journey, whereas The Lonely Londoners starts right in the heart of London. In contrast to Selvon, Zobel grants his protagonist the position of a traveller and the right to observe his new surroundings during his journey. Zobel attributes great significance to the fact of the journey and gives Joseph Hassam the status of a traveller rather than an immigrant. Selvon, by 40 See, for instance, Una Marson’s poetry; Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending, intro. by Mervyn Morris (1975; London, Kingston, Port of Spain: Heinemann, 1984); George Lamming, The Emigrants (London: Michael Joseph, 1954) and The Pleasures of Exile; Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (London: Hutchinson, 1960); and Edgar Mittelholzer, A Morning in the Office (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950). Black Metropolises 89 contrast, does not represent the actual journey of his West Indian characters in the novel but only focuses on their arrival at Waterloo station in the centre of London. As immigrants rather than travellers Selvon’s characters are not concerned with observing locals but rather with settling down in London, with claiming parts of London as their new home. As a student, Joseph is part of the educated elite which confers on him a relatively privileged position in French society. Unlike Selvon’s economic immigrants, Joseph is not perceived as a competitor on the job market. By many open-minded white French people he is received in France as a guest who, upon his arrival in the metropolis, is one of few Antilleans who have come to France. While most of Zobel’s characters consider France to be a temporary home, Selvon’s immigrants disregard the option of returning to their native Caribbean. Their hope of improving their own economic situation in Great Britain seems to outweigh their potential wish to leave the country in order to escape problems such as social and racial discrimination as represented in certain sections in The Lonely Londoners. This significant difference between a student and traveller in Joseph’s case and economic immigrants in Selvon’s novel has an impact on the further development of the two narratives in the metropolises. As a black Antillean who has the status of a traveller, Joseph occupies an ambivalent position in the novel. Joseph’s ambiguous relationship with France can be interpreted in light of the French colonial policy of cultural assimilation. As I explained in greater detail in Chapter One, this policy encouraged Antilleans to integrate into French society, to disregard their cultural and ethnic ‘difference’ and give up their cultural and social traditions as well as their languages. However, the assumption that Antilleans would entirely ‘fit’ into French society by means of this assimilation policy is problematic. As racist reactions of white metropolitans towards Antillean immigrants suggest, they have not necessarily been accepted as ‘one of us’. As Bhabha argues, the colonial subject occupied an ambivalent status; he/she was neither regarded completely different from nor equal to the coloniser.41 Even though Antilleans were officially 41 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 44. Black Metropolises 90 accorded a higher social status than immigrants from other colonies, especially from Africa, the former were not assigned the same status as white Europeans. Joseph alludes to this privileging in France of European immigrants over Antilleans. While the Antilles have been an important French colony for centuries, other European countries have historically had no connection to the ‘hexagone’. Yet, Anak, a Hungarian immigrant, does not experience racial discrimination as Joseph and his compatriots do. Many Antilleans expected to be accepted in France because of the historical link between the two cultures. The discrepancy between this expectation and the reality of racial discrimination in the metropolis has often led to a sense of disillusionment. While Zobel’s and Selvon’s protagonists occupy different positions in metropolitan society, their experience of racial discrimination in Great Britain and France resembles each other to a great extent. Like Selvon’s characters Joseph is the victim of the white person’s gaze, and becomes the coloniser’s Other. In this position Joseph is depersonalised just like Selvon’s ‘boys’ and seen not as a human being but as an entity with a black skin. As was asserted in Chapter One, Frantz Fanon was among the first intellectuals to crystallise and theorise the experience of being observed and made conscious of one’s skin colour, an experience which many contemporary Caribbeans who had been to the metropolis shared. He is one of the few writers who link literary representations of this experience and theory.42 Fanon examines in his seminal psychoanalytical study Black Skin, White Masks, the psychological impact that racial discrimination has on black people. The moment of ‘epistemic violence’, that is the dissociation of a black person’s skin from his/her personality, is most emblematically 42 W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, too, addressed the relationship between skin colour and racist discrimination in their texts. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903.); James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: The Dial Press, 1963); Richard Wright, Native Son (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940) and Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1945). In contrast to Fanon, Zobel and Selvon, Du Bois and Baldwin situated their representations of racism in the North American context. Black Metropolises 91 illustrated in Fanon’s so-called ‘look, a Negro’ scenario.43 While this scene has been referred to and interpreted in various social, historical and cultural contexts, his writing has rarely been situated in its original context of the Paris of the 1950s where Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks. His psychoanalytical study constitutes the theoretical framework for my analysis of Selvon’s and Zobel’s fictional constructions of the ‘look, a Negro’ scene in the Paris and London of the 1950s. Fanon, in his theoretical text, and Selvon and Zobel in their fiction, point out that skin colour becomes a major problem in the relationship between black and white people.44 Sharp boundaries between different nationalities have primarily been established in the metropolises where most Caribbean immigrants become aware of their ‘blackness’ and the implications of their skin colour for their relationship with some white and racist locals. Fanon asserts that ‘not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man’.45 In the encounter with the white person the blacks’ personality and identity are negated entirely. This means that black people are denied their humanity in the presence of white people. Fanon’s argument that the ‘coloured’ person is seen as black only in relation to white people and that in this encounter skin colour becomes the sole defining factor underlines the fact that there is no ‘essential blackness’. In other words, the ‘colour issue’ has been constructed by white people. Fanon argues that, as the racist ‘creates his inferior’, the white person reduces black people to their skin colour.46 Samuel Selvon makes the same point when he asserts that, in the Caribbean, one is a citizen, whereas in Britain one is a black as opposed to a white person. He maintains that British people ‘feel a kinship because of their colour, although their cultures may be 43 For an investigation of the relationship between a white person’s gaze and the infliction of ‘epistemic violence’ on a black person through this gaze see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 42. 44 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 109-10. See also George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, p. 33. 45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 110. 46 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 93. Black Metropolises 92 vastly different’.47 Only for the white person do black and white become essential, defining and culturally all-encompassing categories.48 While the issue of racial discrimination against black people is an underlying trope in both novels, one particular episode in each text, which is uncannily reminiscent of Fanon’s ‘look, a Negro’ scenario, addresses this theme explicitly. Selvon’s and Zobel’s similar fictionalisation of this episode suggests that it represented a widespread phenomenon in both Great Britain and France. At the same time, this scene constitutes a powerful image of racial discrimination within the fictional texts. Like Fanon, both writers uncover racist attitudes of white people towards black people in their representations of a brief conversation between a mother and her child. In the encounter between the unfamiliar black person and the white metropolitans, the child’s surprise about and fear of the ethnically different person triggers the mother’s disclosure of racist prejudices. In Selvon’s representation of the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario, Galahad is confronted with a child openly addressing his black skin colour: ‘“Mummy, look at that black man!” A little child, holding on to the mother hand, look up at Sir Galahad’ (Selvon, pp. 70-71). While the child’s comment on the colour of Galahad’s skin may well be innocent, if seen in isolation, and a sign of the child’s curiosity, the situation is potentially 47 Nazareth, ‘Interview with Sam Selvon’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, pp. 92-93. 48 George Lamming’s arguments and his choice of words are highly reminiscent of Fanon’s examination of the experience of ‘blackness’ as expressed in Black Skin, White Masks. As was indicated in Chapter One, Lamming – like Fanon – focuses on the white person’s gaze through which black people become conscious of the colour of their skin and of the implications of their ‘blackness’; George Lamming, ‘The Negro Writer and His World’, Présence Africaine, 8-10 (1956), 318-25 (321). During the postwar period many Caribbeans adopted the white person’s point of view, because they were ‘conditioned’ by colonial education and thus assimilated into British or French culture. As Fanon states, ‘[t]he black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 110. This lack of resistance was based on the imperialist imposition of a foreign cultural framework on black colonial subjects. Ultimately, this framework, which was imposed by the colonisers and then often internalised by educated colonial subjects, resulted in the latter’s rejection of their own cultures; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 110. Black Metropolises 93 embarrassing for the mother. Her reaction indicates that this comment is implicitly racist. The mother reprimands the child, telling him/her: ‘You mustn’t say that, dear!’ As such the encounter between Galahad and the white child with his/her mother demonstrates the extent to which racial prejudices have shaped white British society. It seems that the child is not merely surprised about the fact that Galahad’s skin colour differs from his/her own but also that is has, to some extent, adopted common racial prejudices of his/her social surroundings. While Galahad tries to establish some contact with the child, the child feels threatened by him. Galahad, whose ‘skin like rubber at this stage’ responds to the child by ‘bend[ing] down and pat[ting] the child cheek, and the child cower and shrink and begin to cry’ (Selvon, p. 71). The child’s reaction suggests that the fear of black people has already been passed on to the next generation, represented by the child. Zobel represents this confrontation of a white woman and child with a black man in a very similar way in his novel. In a discussion of racial discrimination against black people, Joseph refers to a number of possible reactions of white metropolitans towards black immigrants. I will quote Zobel’s reference to the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario in its entirety in order to analyse it more closely: ‘Regarde, maman, le monsieur, il est tout noir’. Et la maman comme affolée: ‘Cht, cht!’ Ou bien: ‘Pourquoi il est noir, le Monsieur?’ La maman: ‘Faut pas en avoir peur, c’est un Monsieur qui s’est barbouillé’. Ou bien, généreuse: ‘C’est un Monsieur qui a trop été au soleil’. Et de rire tous deux./[Look, Mama, the man is completely black’. And the mother in a distraught way: ‘Ssht, ssht!’ Or: ‘Why is the man black?’ The mother: ‘You mustn’t be afraid, this man has painted himself’. Or, generously: ‘This man was too long in the sun’. And both laugh.] (Zobel, p. 196) Like Zobel’s entire novel, this passage is portrayed in a serious tone and formal style. Even though markers of spoken language such as questions in which verb and subject are not inverted (for instance, ‘Pourquoi il est noir’ rather than ‘Pourquoi est-il noir’) or the dropping of ‘il ne’ in ‘[il ne] [f]aut pas’, this section is represented in a constructed way that is characteristic of the written language. The short sentences in this conversation are typographically separated from each other insofar as Zobel starts a new line for every sentence and narrative voice. This style of writing and the page lay-out produce a staccato effect which reinforces the harshness of this scene. At the same time Black Metropolises 94 this formal tone underlying Zobel’s portrait of this scene suggests that Joseph has reflected on this incident and become emotionally distanced from it. This detachment is reinforced by Joseph’s absence from the scene; remarkably, his voice is written out of this encounter. Paradoxically Joseph seems to be dislocated from the scenario even as the mother and child verbally and visually examine his physical black body. Like in Fanon’s example, the encounter between black and white people in general and the child’s direct reference to skin colour reveal the socially imposed boundary between black and white people in the two novels. This means that Joseph becomes the white metropolitans’ Other, whose physical appearance entirely occludes his personality. This ‘othering’ of the black person is reinforced by the stereotypical association of black people with savagery and cannibalism. Again, Zobel’s representation of this stereotype is reminiscent of Fanon’s psychoanalytical examination of the encounter between white and black people.49 Like Fanon, Zobel addresses the imperialist association of black people with ‘primitivism’ and ‘degeneracy’: ‘Ou bien, si l’enfant pleure, la maman de lui chuchoter: «Tais-toi, sinon le négro qui est là va te manger.» Notre cannibalisme, toujours!’/[Or, if the child cries, his mum whispering: ‘Be quiet, otherwise the Negro who is there will eat you.’ Always our cannibalism!] (Zobel, p. 196) As Fanon emphasizes, these stereotypes dismember the black person, transform him/her into a ‘triple person’: ‘I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors’.50. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon examines the violence that is implied in this fragmentation of the black person through these racial prejudices: ‘What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage [sic] that spattered my whole body with black blood?’.51 Through his choice of words such as ‘amputation’, ‘excision’, ‘hemorrhage’ and ‘[spatter]’ Fanon graphically conveys the 49 As Fanon argues, his ‘ethnic characteristics’ rather than his personality are paid attention to in this encounter: ‘I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’”.; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. 50 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. 51 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. Black Metropolises 95 physicality of the black person’s dehumanisation. The reader can visualise this dismembering of the black person’s body and almost feel the pain when reading Fanon’s description. The white person’s gaze seems to disintegrate the physical body of the black person. Paradoxically this very fragmentation simultaneously removes the black person from white society: ‘[o]n that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me’.52 This splitting of the black person’s body is represented in The Lonely Londoners, too. Interestingly, Selvon portrays this dismembering as an attempt undertaken by the black person to cope with white people’s racism. Having been in London for a few weeks only, Galahad suffers from racist comments and tries to distance himself from them. He develops a ‘theory about Black’, which is based on an imaginary split between his personality and his body (Selvon, pp. 71-72). In Selvon’s novel, Galahad’s encounter with white people reflects his state of mind and his attitude towards the ‘colour issue’. Unlike in Zobel’s novel the reader gets a sense of the psychological effect that this encounter with the white mother and child has on Galahad in The Lonely Londoners. The following quotation makes explicit the fact that the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario constitutes a harrowing experience for Galahad: So Galahad talking to the colour Black, as if is a person, telling it that is not he who causing botheration in the place, but Black, who is a worthless thing for making trouble all about. ‘Black, you see what you cause to happen yesterday? I went to look at that room that Ram tell me about in the Gate, and as soon as the landlady see you she say the room let already. She ain’t even give ma a chance to say good morning. Why the hell you can’t change colour?’ [emphasis in original] (Selvon, p. 72) Compared to the above-mentioned long quotation from La Fête à Paris, Galahad’s response to the encounter with the white woman and her child feels more erratic and spontaneous. While Joseph discusses his experiences of racist discrimination with Maurice, Galahad has a conversation with himself. His interior dialogue is characterised by long, convoluted sentences which represent a stream-of-consciousness. In The 52 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112. Black Metropolises 96 Lonely Londoners we, as readers, gain the impression of working through Galahad’s thoughts and emotions with Galahad, almost as if we were his interlocutors. Expressions such as ‘botheration’, ‘trouble’, ‘worthless’ and the swear word ‘why the hell’ emphasize the fact that he is upset about the mother’s racist reaction. While anger is Galahad’s initial response to this incident, his distress is reinforced by his realisation that this encounter represents his situation in London more generally. As his connection of the ‘look, a Negro’ scene with his experience of discrimination in the housing market indicates, his dehumanisation and ‘othering’ in the encounter with the white mother and child does not represent an exceptional incident. Galahad gets the impression of being unable to escape racial stereotypes and discrimination in white metropolitan society. This awareness leads him to develop the idea of splitting body or skin colour and personality into a whole ‘theory about Black’ that is based on his experiences with white people (Selvon, p. 72). This ‘theory’ can be regarded as Galahad’s attempt to balance the distressing episode with a more structured response to his situation. It has to be emphasized, though, that Galahad’s ‘theory’ remains an illusion.53 Even if Galahad were to pretend that his skin colour was a different entity that was not intricately linked to him, whites would still see him firstly as black and only then as a person – if they regarded him as an equal human being at all. In other words, if Galahad does not accept himself as a black person, other people will not, either. This is what Fanon stresses in Black Skin, White Masks. While Galahad tries to distance himself from his black body in an attempt to escape racial discrimination, Fanon suggests that the only way for 53 Galahad’s ideas about skin colour remain purely theoretical and are not shared by other Caribbean immigrants. Moses’ reaction, for instance, implies that there is a considerable gap between Galahad’s theory and everyday life in London; Selvon, p. 72. Moses is not interested in Galahad’s theory because he is upset about a friend’s experience of racial discrimination in relation to housing. The newcomer is attacked verbally and physically because he questions the justification for the practice of the ‘colour bar’. As Nasta explains, the so-called ‘colour bar’ can be characterised as a ‘vigorous apartheid system, […] which was openly displayed in shop fronts and guesthouses with signs that read ‘No Coloureds Here’; Nasta, Home Truths, p. 61. Neither Galahad, through his theoretical separation between his personality and his black body, nor the newcomer, by ignoring the rules of the ‘colour bar’, can escape racial discrimination in postwar Britain. Black Metropolises 97 Caribbeans to assert their identity is to accept their ‘blackness’. Only then, he argues, can they overcome the shame felt in relation to their black skin colour and to the history and culture of their people: ‘I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a black MAN’.54 Having been rejected by white society, black people, Fanon continues, need to assume responsibility for themselves. He argues that, ‘[s]ince the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known’.55 Accepting oneself as a black person implies that one becomes aware of the cultural traditions and the past of one’s ethnic group. According to Fanon it is by asserting their Caribbean identity, that Antilleans can assume and ‘recompose’ their fractured individuality. Selvon’s fictional character Galahad deliberately attempts to dissociate himself from the colour black by turning it into a person, whereas the Antillean intellectual calls for a reversal of this process, for an embracing of one’s ‘blackness’. As indicated above, Galahad’s distress about white people’s hostility towards him in The Lonely Londoners starkly contrasts with Joseph’s and Maurice’s serious and emotionally detached debate about racism in La Fête à Paris. In Zobel’s novel, Bambam enumerates ‘facts’ about racism in France and in the Antilles (Zobel, pp. 134- 35). Joseph’s rational approach towards the problematics of racism can be interpreted in light of French cultural assimilation. As his French education suggests, he has, to an extent, been influenced by Enlightenment ideas of rationalism. According to Joseph, having adapted to French culture and society helps him to get established more easily in Paris. As his arguments in his discussion about racism with Maurice indicate, Joseph regards cultural adaptation to the metropolis as a means of coping with racial discrimination in the ‘hexagone’ (Zobel, p. 198). As I will show below, cultural assimilation is, however, interrogated in the course of the novel. 54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 115 [emphasis in original]. 55 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 115. Black Metropolises 98 In this conversation Zobel relates racism in the French capital to discrimination in the Caribbean, whereas Selvon’s portrayal of racial discrimination against West Indians is situated solely in London, the new home of his West Indian characters. Thus, unlike Selvon’s boys, French people’s hostile reactions towards Zobel’s protagonist are represented against the backdrop of the ongoing French presence in Martinique. In this context of a regular exchange between the Antilles and France the social situation in Martinique plays a more important role for Zobel’s characters than for most West Indians in The Lonely Londoners, who tend to settle down in Great Britain for good.56 By juxtaposing the situation in France with that in the Antilles, Zobel makes racism as experienced in the ‘hexagone’ apparently more readily acceptable for Joseph. Maurice considers French metropolitan racism an important factor that deters him from staying in the ‘hexagone’ after the end of his studies (Zobel, p. 197). Joseph, by contrast, points out that his experiences in France largely correspond to the situation in Martinique, where racial prejudices often determine the relationship between people of different ‘shades’ (Zobel, p. 197). The existence of a socially and ethnically strictly stratified society in his home country often precludes any interaction between people of different skin colours (Zobel, pp. 197-201). Ironically, contrary to the French imperialist claim that colonised people would benefit from the French Republican ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality, French colonialism, in fact, reinforced the social and ethnic stratification in the Antilles. In France Antilleans can still communicate with white metropolitans, even if the latter are ethnically prejudiced: ‘des mauvais joueurs’/[bad sports] (Zobel, p. 200). Unlike in the Antilles, ‘on peut rendre les coups que l’on reçoit et on trouve même des gens qui vous aident à rendre les coups que vous recevez’/[one can return blows which one receives, and one even finds that people help you to return the blows which one receives] (Zobel, p. 200). Joseph apparently cannot imagine that 56 Already, the development of West Indian communities in several districts of London suggests that Selvon’s characters tend to settle in the metropolis. The gradual introduction of West Indian customs such as buying on credit and the establishment of West Indian-looking shops in Harrow Road – shops that are stocked with Caribbean food such as saltfish – supports this assumption. See, for instance, Selvon, pp. 75-76. Black Metropolises 99 this situation in which white people support black immigrants against their own compatriots would happen in Martinique (Zobel, p. 200). Although racism occurs in the West Indies too, social hierarchies based on different shades of skin colour are of a comparatively greater significance in the Antilles.57 As Lowenthal explains, links across the ‘colour line’ have been rarer in Martinique and Guadeloupe than in most West Indian societies.58 During the first decades of the nineteenth century a distinct, influential and wealthy mulatto middle-class developed.59 Because of their greater cultural assimilation mulattoes tended to regard themselves as being closer to the white upper class than to the black population. The békés in turn felt threatened by the mulattoes in their position and power and sought to differentiate themselves even more clearly from both mulattoes and black people. The legacy of this attempt undertaken by each class to assert its social position by setting itself apart from other classes is still evident in contemporary Antillean societies. Compared to the strict social hierarchy in 57 Fanon refers to the imposition of a racial hierarchy that stems from European colonialism and according to which white people hold the superior position, followed by Jews, Antilleans, Arabs and, eventually, Africans. Similarly, Cherki quotes the Algerian proverb that refers to this hierarchy based on skin colour and which Fanon learnt during his sojourn in Algeria: ‘[L]es Français crachent sur les Espagnols, […] qui crachent sur les Juifs, qui crachent sur les Arabes, qui crachent sur les Nègres’/[The French spit on the Spanish, who spit on the Jews, who spit on the Arabs, who spit on the Negroes]; Cherki, Frantz Fanon, p. 67. 58 Lowenthal retraces the historical development of Antillean societies, which he compares to their West Indian counterparts. He posits that ‘in Martinique an exclusive middle class developed out of a strongly entrenched free-coloured group’. Discussing the various social statuses of Martiniquan society, Lowenthal maintains that ‘Martiniquans […] distinguish light-skinned grands mulâtres – estate owners and professionals linked by fortune and style of life with elite whites – and a darker petit-bourgeoisie of school teachers, shopkeepers, and minor civil servants. Aloof from each other, both groups shun the masses but are in turn shut out by the whites. Economic, even fraternal, connections across the colour line generate only the most restricted social contacts. The 2,300 békés, or resident whites – less than [one] per cent of Martinique’s population – maintain a far more elaborate internal hierarchy than their Barbadian counterparts’; David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 83-84. 59 Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 83. Haigh also refers to the significance of this characteristic of Antillean societies in her brief discussion of historical developments in the Francophone Caribbean; Sam Haigh, ed., An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), p. 5. Black Metropolises 100 Martinique, French metropolitan society appears slightly more open to Joseph. The existence of a stringent social and ethnic hierarchy in the Antilles interrogates the French policy of cultural assimilation and France’s self-representation as an egalitarian Republic.60 Fanon’s theoretical investigation and Selvon’s and Zobel’s fictional representations of the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario foreground fundamental continuities between West Indians’ and Antilleans’ experiences of racial discrimination in the metropolis of the 1950s. Insofar as Caribbean (im)migrants were dehumanised through the white person’s gaze in London and Paris alike, ethnic, cultural and social differences became insignificant. While the specific social and historical contexts represented in the novels largely influence Galahad’s and Joseph’s reactions towards racial discrimination, the denial of their personality through the white person’s gaze remains a harrowing experience for Selvon’s and Zobel’s protagonists alike. In both novels the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario represents a key example of disillusionment and cultural alienation. As such this scene can be interpreted as interrogating concepts of integration and, in the French context of cultural assimilation, of Caribbean (im)migrants in the metropolis. As I will demonstrate in the following section, these concepts are further problematised through Zobel’s and Selvon’s representations of relationships between their Caribbean characters and white metropolitans. Racial discrimination as conveyed in the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario represents a central but not the sole experience of Caribbean (im)migrants. Both Zobel’s and Selvon’s 60 It is interesting that Zobel emphasizes this contrast between Antillean and French societies as it is perceived by his fictional characters to a greater extent in Quand la neige aura fondu than in La Fête à Paris. In the second edition of his novel, Carmen introduces Joseph to Parisian society with the comforting words that black Antilleans are treated in a decent manner in France: ‘Ici, c’est comme ça. Le patron est un homme et je suis un homme comme lui. La patronne est blanche, mais je ne suis pas son nègre’/[Here, it is like this. The master is a man and I am a man like him. The mistress is white, but I am not her Negro]; Zobel, Neige, p. 22. The fact that this passage is not included in the original text suggests that Zobel himself seems to have become increasingly comfortable with living in France. His gradual adaptation to French society seems to have influenced the perceptions that his characters have of France as they are represented in the two versions of the novel. Black Metropolises 101 characters gain access to certain parts of white metropolitan society, although in different ways. Selvon’s boys try to make their way into white metropolitan society through liaisons with white London women, whereas Joseph tends to be accepted by many white French people on the basis of his education. These different social strata of French and English metropolitan society with which Zobel’s and Selvon’s fictional personae have contact influence the characters’ experiences in the metropolitan capitals. On several occasions Joseph is welcomed in Paris as a member of the educated elite. By contrast, the interaction of Selvon’s working class immigrants with white British society is restricted to people of the lower classes in their immediate vicinity and, above all, to young women. Numerous passages in The Lonely Londoners allude to one-night stands and longer-term relationships between the West Indian immigrants and British women. Through these relationships many of Selvon’s characters seem to be able temporarily to overcome their sense of alienation in London. The fact that many of the white British women represented in The Lonely Londoners seem to accept the West Indian immigrants as their partners suggests that the ‘boys’ are (temporarily) seen as human beings and that they are not ostracised simply on the basis of the colour of their skin. Thus their relationships with white women contrast sharply with their experiences of racist discrimination and objectification through the white person’s gaze. This contrast is stressed through Selvon’s juxtaposition of the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario with Galahad’s date with Daisy which makes him forget his worries about racial discrimination. As such the liaison constitutes a compensation for Galahad’s harsh experiences that are represented in the preceding scene. In this encounter Galahad’s position changes from being the victim of the white person’s gaze to becoming the observer of his white female partner. Daisy is introduced to the reader through Galahad’s detailed description of her outward appearance and his chauvinistic comments that ‘[s]he look real sharp, and when he was coming up he notice the trim legs, and the straight lines of the nylons, and the highheel shoes’ (Selvon, p. 74). Selvon’s portrait of Galahad’s male gaze suggests that such a cross-cultural liaison gives him the impression that he is no longer denied his personality but, on the contrary, that he can assume his manhood. As Bentley argues, sexual relationships function in the Black Metropolises 102 novel as a ‘[means] of empowerment’ for the West Indian immigrants, an empowerment which can be regarded as a response to the boys’ social marginalization.61 Forcing their way into white British society with such relationships, Selvon’s male characters transgress social restrictions imposed on them in the metropolis. Galahad, for instance, transgresses and thus unsettles the boundary between white metropolitans and black immigrants when ‘he walk up behind [Daisy] and he put his hands over she eyes, and that evening people in the tube station must be bawl to see black man so familiar with white girl’ (Selvon, p. 73). Unlike in his encounter with the white woman and her child, Galahad now disregards white people’s contemptuous reactions (Selvon, p. 73). Through this relationship Galahad defies ‘the restrictions that dominant white British culture places on the black individual’ and imposes his Trinidadian culture on metropolitan society.62 This means that his liaison with Daisy constitutes an empowerment not only sexually but also culturally. In contrast to the ‘look, a Negro’ scenario in which Galahad is defined by the colour of his skin, he is now portrayed as an individual with a specific – Trinidadian – cultural identity. Galahad’s personal and cultural empowerment is reinforced by his assumption of the role as a host to Daisy. Unlike Joseph in La Fête à Paris, Galahad is not admitted into white people’s homes. As I will discuss below, Zobel’s protagonist is welcomed by several French people and invited into their private houses, but his cultural difference seems to prevent him from reciprocating these invitations and to keep him at a certain distance from French society. Being denied access to this space within metropolitan society, Selvon’s West Indian characters invert the position of the host society and arrogate the role as hosts to themselves. Introducing their British partners to their bedsits thus allows them to impose their own habits on their metropolitan guests.63 61 Nick Bentley, ‘Black London: The Politics of Representation in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners’, Wasafiri, 39 (Summer 2003), pp. 41-45 (p. 42). 62 Bentley, ‘Black London’, p. 42. 63 Selvon’s novel suggests that most of the West Indian characters take their British partners to their flats both for one-night stands and as meeting places in long-term relationships. See, for instance, Selvon, pp. 41-43, 52-53, 76, Black Metropolises 103 Galahad’s embracing of his cultural difference and his confrontation of white metropolitans with his life-style is exemplified by his way of preparing tea, one of the most typical British beverages. Unlike British people, he simply ‘shake some [tea from the packet] down in the pot’ (Selvon, p. 76). Having enforced British cultural conventions in the West Indies during the period of colonisation, the metropolis is now confronted with adaptations of these traditions brought back by immigrants like Galahad. His way of preparing tea unsettles notions of homogeneous British cultural traditions. The fact that Galahad and his compatriots claim their (cultural) space within white British society indicates that they influence metropolitan culture to a certain extent despite their social marginalization. Insofar as British and West Indian cultures are represented as being interrelated, The Lonely Londoners problematises boundaries of white metropolitan society and unsettles notions of a homogeneous British culture. While many of Selvon’s characters force their way into British society in the position as hosts in cross-cultural encounters, Joseph in La Fête à Paris assumes the role of a guest. This means that he is, on certain occasions, admitted into white French society without necessarily imposing himself on his new surroundings. This position is already indicated in the opening scene of the novel where Gaston Chaminder passes the address of his nephew Jacques Chavier on to Joseph, inviting him to call by in case he needs help or seeks company (Zobel, pp. 20, 78-9). Joseph’s and Gaston’s exchange of addresses is not simply a sign of politeness. When Joseph feels lonely on Christmas day and decides to visit Chavier, he is welcomed very warm-heartedly, like a good friend of the family (Zobel, p. 80). Having developed a friendship with Gaston Chaminder on the boat thus makes it easier for Joseph to gain further access to white French society. Both Chavier’s family and the family of his friend André Dorgenne treat Joseph in an amicable manner and invite him to spend the rest of the day with them (Zobel, pp. 80- 86). Joseph is respected by both families as a guest. Like Chaminder during the voyage, Chavier and Dorgenne appear sincerely interested in Joseph as a person and treat him like a cultured individual. His Antillean origins and, above all, his high level of education seem to open French metropolitan society to Joseph to a certain extent. Black Metropolises 104 As the reader learns in Rue cases-nègres and in flashbacks on Joseph’s life in Martinique in La Fête à Paris, Joseph’s attitude towards French life and society has largely been influenced by the French colonial education system. The two novels suggest that education has helped him to leave the impoverished rural life of his childhood behind and advance to higher social classes, to become part of the educated elite. His ability to have erudite conversations with French people and other similarly educated foreigners can be read as a sign of his acculturation, and many Parisians seem to take it for granted that he is culturally assimilated because he has undergone French education. He is thus admitted to the white French middle and upper classes – classes which, as I pointed out earlier, are inaccessible for Selvon’s boys. Personal relationships which have already been established such as his friendship with Chaminder reinforce metropolitans’ assumption that Joseph is a ‘cultured’ person. Thus he is admitted to private homes as well as to public places such as the café where he spends the morning of that same day (Zobel, pp. 71-74, 80-86). However, in contrast to Galahad, Joseph does not assume the role as a host for white French people. This implies that he does not force his culture onto metropolitan society but remains within the social space granted to him by the dominant French culture. As Joseph’s positive experiences on Christmas Day reveal, the French practice of cultural assimilation appears to have ‘worked’ insofar as Joseph seems to have internalised French cultural values to such an extent that he is admitted into the white French middle class. The fact that he is invited to spend Christmas Day with the Chavier and Dorgenne families and happily accepts this invitation suggests that he feels at ease in the company of these white metropolitans. Significantly however, Joseph’s positive experiences in France are juxtaposed with the various instances of racial discrimination discussed above throughout the novel. It seems difficult for Joseph to discern at which occasions he is and when he is not admitted into white French society. As discussed above, he often experiences hidden racism. Thus, even though he might feel accepted at first view, he often realises later that he is, in fact, discriminated against. To give but one example, Joseph soon realises that the other guests in the hotel where he stays until he has found a room to rent look down on him and drive his friends away who have come to visit (Zobel, pp. 62-63). Joseph’s shifting role as a guest, who is welcomed, and as a black Antillean, who is Black Metropolises 105 marginalized by white French people, suggests that his relationship with white metropolitan society is ambiguous. Seen in the context of French colonial practices and the relationship between Antilleans and French people this means that the French policy of cultural assimilation sometimes seems to ‘work’, whereas at other times it appears more like a concept that cannot and should not be aspired to. Other students from (former) French colonies share Joseph’s relatively positive view of France. Thus, speaking from experience, Joseph’s Antillean friend Alex affirms that there are many friendly white people in Paris. Alex links Joseph’s status as a student to his personality and his approach towards French society when he argues that ‘[t]u te débrouilleras bien aussi, tu vas peut-être beaucoup aimer les Blancs, il y a beaucoup qui sont gentils, et toi, tu n’as pas de complexe d’infériorité’/[you will also get along well, you will maybe like the whites a lot, there are many who are kind, and you don’t have an inferiority complex] (Zobel, p. 50). Alex’s comment upon the absence of the ‘inferiority complex’ is reminiscent of Fanon’s assertion that the ‘cultured’ Antillean (im)migrant believes that the French practice of cultural assimilation has made Antilleans become almost French. As his encounters with various French people on Christmas Day reveal, Joseph realises that he is not entirely integrated into white French society. Both in the café and in the nearby bakery he is made aware of the fact that he is Martiniquan, hence not French (Zobel, pp. 74-75). The baker draws attention to this difference between Martinique and the French ‘hexagone’ when she speaks of Joseph’s island: ‘[Ç]a doit vous rappeler votre pays. Encore que José ne prisât pas du tout ces allusions à «son pays», qui n’étaient pas sans un arrière-goût de discrimination’/[That must remind you of your country. Although Joseph did not enjoy at all these allusions to ‘his country’, which were not without an aftertaste of discrimination] (Zobel, p. 75). This gap between his own culture and the French metropolis is also indicated in Joseph’s amusement at French people’s attitudes towards their basic needs, their ‘philosophy’ in their daily lives (Zobel, p. 74). Joseph remains in the position of a guest. This status allows him to establish and maintain friendly contacts with white French people. However, it simultaneously implies that he is not ‘one of them’, that there is always a certain cultural distance between French people and himself. Many of the Black Metropolises 106 conversations he has with French metropolitans on Christmas Day address issues of culture. In an admittedly friendly and interested way, Paul, the owner of the café, the owner of the bakery as well as Chavier and Dorgenne all introduce Joseph to cultural peculiarities of those parts of France from which they come, thus reminding him that he is not a ‘Français de France’/[metropolitan French]. This cultural gap also implies that Joseph remains in the double position of a spectator who is observed at the same time. This distance between the majority of white French people and Joseph seems to preclude the development of close friendships between the protagonist and French metropolitans. Joseph alludes to this absence of a deep-rooted cross-cultural relationship when he argues that he can only have entirely honest conversations and feel at ease in the company of his compatriot Alex: ‘C’était aussi le seul endroit où il pouvait parler de tout à cœur ouvert, et même faire rire de ses petites mésaventures et de ses embarras à Paris’/[That was also the only place where he could open-heartedly speak about everything, and even laugh about his small misadventures and his embarrassments in Paris] (Zobel, p. 123). Alex is the only person with whom Joseph can sincerely share both his trouble and his joy. Thus Joseph argues that ‘chez Alex était pour lui le seul endroit où l’on pouvait rire en France. Mais rire comme rient les Nègres entre eux; rire comme des possédés de la gaieté, sans scandaliser les Blancs’/[Alex’s was the only place where he could laugh in France. But laugh like the Negroes amongst themselves; to laugh like people who are possessed with happiness, without scandalising the Whites] (Zobel, p. 123). This quotation reinforces the impression that most contacts between Antilleans and French people were only superficial and that any return to Antillean cultural habits tended to be regarded as a threat to French society. As long as Joseph adapts to the French lifestyle, he is accepted in Paris. However, as soon as he behaves in a way that is considered inappropriate in the metropolis, he attracts scorn. The complaint of his neighbours about his talking loudly and his laughter reinforces this sense that French people do not tolerate these habits of other cultures (Zobel, p. 227). Interestingly, Joseph is presented as a person who ‘aimait à rire’/[liked to laugh] (Zobel, pp. 123, 244). Yet, direct references in the novel to his laughter are written in a serious Black Metropolises 107 tone. It seems that the lightness which Joseph associates with social gatherings in the Caribbean cannot be recreated in the metropolis. His social surroundings tend to restrict him to apparently quiet and serious behaviour that is acceptable in France. In contrast to Selvon’s characters Joseph largely respects the norms of metropolitan society. As the clash between the tone of the novel and Joseph’s personality indicates, Zobel’s fictional persona has to suppress his emotions in order to avoid being marginalized in France. Joseph is accepted by and integrated into French society to a greater extent than Selvon’s boys, yet the tone in the Francophone novel is far more serious and morose than that in The Lonely Londoners. Even those passages that refer to pleasure and laughter are represented in a formal tone so that the reader almost has to infer from the content that many of Joseph’s social gatherings are, indeed, enjoyable. In Selvon’s novel, by contrast, humour constitutes a key element. While the cold, almost hostile atmosphere prevails in many encounters between (racist) white British people and the West Indian boys, laughter dominates the Caribbean microcosm that they create in several parts of London. In terms of style and content both La Fête à Paris and The Lonely Londoners deviate from what their titles appear to signal. Despite Joseph’s numerous positive experiences in Paris, laughter is almost entirely absent from the novel. While La Fête à Paris is far more serious in tone and content than the title suggests, The Lonely Londoners is – again contrary to the reader’s expectations – a novel of laughter, a comic text. Unlike Zobel’s protagonist, Selvon’s boys consider the metropolis to be a place to party, to go out and benefit from the numerous cultural opportunities that the city offers. Many new arrivals seem unconcerned about their prospective living conditions in the capital, and although they soon realise the clash between their expectations of life in London and the harsh reality, they still retain their humour. In the logic of the novel it seems that keeping their humour and optimism is the only way to cope with difficulties such as racial discrimination which they have to face in their daily lives. As Selvon points out, ‘the comedy element has always been there Black Metropolises 108 among black people from the Caribbean. It is their means of defence against the sufferings and tribulations that they have to undergo’.64 By alluding to the cultural differences between Martiniquan and French society, Zobel challenges the assumption that educated and hence assimilated Antilleans ‘fit’ in and are accepted as equals in France. While there are spaces in France where ‘cultured’ Antilleans are accepted, they will always remain ‘not quite’ French. Despite his privileged position as a student, Joseph is still kept at a certain distance from white French society. This gap between Caribbeans and metropolitan society is even more significant in Selvon’s novel than in Zobel’s. The fact that Selvon’s characters are not admitted to white British society is one of the reasons for them to stay together more closely than Zobel’s characters. They create a Caribbean microcosm in the heart of the metropolis and thus figuratively invert the colonisation process. In both novels the fictional personae are marginalized in the metropolitan capitals as soon as they are considered not to ‘fit’ in. As holds true for La Fête à Paris, their unconscious or deliberate imposition of certain aspects of the Caribbean culture onto metropolitan life is regarded as a threat to the local metropolitan culture. It has to be emphasized that this difference between the two novels is not emblematic of trends in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature of the postwar period. In The Emigrants, George Lamming represents, for instance, both educated and uneducated immigrants. His characters are – like Joseph – invited to white people’s (dinner) parties. Like Zobel, Braithwaite focuses entirely on the experiences of an educated Caribbean (im)migrant in his novel To Sir, With Love (1959). Significantly, however, The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris powerfully represent specific encounters between Caribbean (im)migrants and white metropolitans within distinct historical and cultural contexts. Both novels underscore and thereby interrogate boundaries of white metropolitan society and restrictions imposed on black people by British and French society and, in so doing, problematise notions of cultural integration. 64 Nazareth, ‘Interview with Sam Selvon’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, pp. 423-24. Black Metropolises 109 As the variations of the ‘look, a Negro’ scene quoted above show both Zobel’s and Selvon’s characters are in certain situations victims of white people’s gaze. Unlike Selvon’s West Indian boys, Joseph is, at the same time, given the privileged role of an observer. As a traveller and a flâneur he is given the right to comment on French society and culture. Having been brought up in a former French colony which is now a French overseas department, and having been educated in the French education system, Joseph is not a ‘neutral’ observer, an outsider to the French system. This means that he is not entirely detached from France and French cultural traditions. Nevertheless he perceives life in France from some sort of an ‘outsider’ perspective insofar as he has not been brought up in the metropolis. During his travels to France – both on the boat and the train – Joseph has the opportunity to watch and engage in a conversation with his fellow travellers, especially with the white Frenchman Gaston Chaminder. Through his portrait of Joseph as a flâneur, Zobel represents the city of Paris both as a space that has historical and cultural resonance and as a physical space in which people live. Thus Joseph discovers and has an eye for the ‘les merveilles’/[the wonders] of Paris as it presents itself to him in everyday life (Zobel, p. 182). As Zobel emphasizes at various instances in the novel, Joseph – unlike most of his friends – enjoys strolling through the city, admiring places and watching people: José […] sait flâner. Il flâne avec aisance. Il a un don pour découvrir ce qu’il peut y avoir de beau, d’amusant, d’imperceptible, sous les apparences les plus banales./[José […] knows to stroll. He strolls with ease. He has a gift for discovering what is beautiful, amusing, imperceptible behind the most ordinary appearances] (Zobel, p. 182) Joseph’s ability to discover and enjoy the beauty of Paris suggests that, in his eyes, even the war-stricken city still has some charm. Living in the French capital allows him to relate historic buildings and places which he learnt about at school to actual sites in the city. Many of the locations he visits are thus famous sites such as the place de la Bastille, the place de la Nation, the Palais-Royal or the castle in Fontainebleau, all of which are associated with French culture and history (Zobel, pp. 239, 242, 243). Significantly, Zobel portrays these buildings and places less as historic monuments than Black Metropolises 110 as sites of the city where people meet and enjoy themselves. Thus Joseph observes Parisians at a fun fair at the place de la Bastille and relates their behaviour to the underlying historical significance of this site (Zobel, p. 243). Joseph gains an insight into French culture and society not only by visiting famous historic places but also when he experiences daily life at ordinary places such as big department stores (Zobel, pp. 240-42). Paris is thus represented as a city to live in rather than merely a historical location. While Joseph remains an observer who tends to keep some distance from metropolitan society, many of Selvon’s characters gain a sense of being part of metropolitan culture and society by strolling through London. In contrast to Zobel’s protagonist, Selvon’s fictional personae are only interested in visiting famous rather than common places. This gives them the impression of transgressing their working-class origins and of becoming cultured individuals – a position which Joseph already occupies. Thus, mentioning the name ‘Charing Cross’ and visiting this location heightens Galahad’s self-esteem and makes him ‘feel like a new man. […] just to say he was going there make him feel big and important’ (Selvon, p. 67). For characters like Galahad and Big City, visiting prominent sites of London thus becomes part of the process of claiming certain parts of the city. This figurative appropriation of London is reinforced by the fact that place names are often associated with personal encounters. Galahad, for instance, relates both Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus with specific dates with white British women and with ‘big romance’ (Selvon, p. 67). As holds true for Paris in Zobel’s novel, London is represented as both an historically important place and a location to live in. While both capitals are represented as places to live in, Selvon’s characters are portrayed as actively participating in metropolitan everyday life, whereas Zobel foregrounds Joseph’s position as an observer. This implies that Paris is ultimately not a ‘home’ for Antilleans, contrary to the metropolis’s common self-representation as the colonial ‘mother country’. I will return to the implications of notions of ‘home’ in my analysis of Zobel’s and Selvon’s portraits of the train stations. First, however, I will investigate further the clash between representations of London and Paris as the centre of the former colonial Empires and as Black Metropolises 111 war-shaken capitals after the Second World War. My focus will thereby be on the beginning of the novels. Joseph’s position as an observer is indicated in the opening scene of La Fête à Paris in which Zobel represents the transient nature of Antilleans’ journeys from the Antilles to France. Gradually approaching Paris, Joseph is given the narrative time of the journey to reflect on both his past in Martinique and the life he expects to lead in Paris. As his reservations about coming to Paris in winter show, he is concerned about the French weather already prior to his arrival (Zobel, p. 16). This preoccupation with the unfamiliar climate can be traced through the entire novel. Despite his knowledge about the shortage of food and the miserable status of post-war France, Joseph apparently hopes to witness some spirit of reconstruction and optimism. However, this expectation starkly clashes with the way in which the destroyed port of Le Havre presents itself to the newly arrived passengers (Zobel, p. 22). Memories of his life in Martinique are evoked during his onward journey to Paris where Joseph is surprised about the speed of the train and silence among passengers. He compares his first train journey in France with his various journeys in Martinique where les voyages sont lents, cahoteux, meurtrissants; mais la plupart ont lieu de jour, sur des routes qui musardent au pied des mornes et semblent faire ‘coucou-me-voilà’ tantôt avec la mer, tantôt avec la savane. Et puis, l’on y cause dans ces autocars; et combien!/[the journeys are long, rough, bruising; but most of them take place during day time, on roads which dawdle at the foot of the hills and seem to say ‘hello, here I am’ at times with the sea, at times with the savannah. Moreover, people talk in these coaches; and how much!] (Zobel, p. 25) As this quotation indicates, Joseph is used to long but sociable bus journeys where he can communicate with his fellow passengers and, at the same time, enjoy watching beautiful scenery pass by. In France his position as an interlocutor changes into that of an observer. During his journey to Paris, Joseph has become an individual traveller. He faces an unfamiliar and alienating place and unknown white people’s faces rather than a welcoming crowd of Antilleans. This position as a traveller conveys on him the privileged status of an observer. Black Metropolises 112 Joseph’s arrival by boat in the dilapidated port of Le Havre, in cold and misty France evokes not only disappointment about the decline of France’s greatness but also a sense of alienation. At the ferry port the community of passengers turns into an anonymous crowd that causes a delay for Joseph to pass through the checkpoints and familiarise himself with both the official procedures in the port upon arrival and the parts of the city around the harbour and the train station (Zobel, p. 23). Suddenly, Joseph has become one of many arrivals who, regardless of their ethnic origins, seem to form an indiscernible crowd. This crowd becomes even more alienating in the chaos and noise in the capital: ‘Paris! Ce fut brutal comme une gifle. La gifle qui conjure la syncope’/[Paris! It was as brutal as a slap. The slap that leaves you groggy] (Zobel, p. 27). The exclamation mark after the name of the city, the repetition of the noun ‘slap’ and the enumeration of these short main clauses stylistically repeat the unexpected harshness and social coldness that characterises the capital as Joseph experiences it upon his arrival. These two opening sentences of this passage convey the reader the sense that, after his long journey, Joseph suddenly and abruptly reaches his final destination. Joseph feels utterly disorientated in the French capital and that his head is spinning around with the new, unexpected impressions. Zobel’s use of the terms ‘gifle’/[slap] and ‘syncope’/[fainting/unconsciousness] conveys a sense of brutality of the arrival. It seems as if Joseph was physically hit by the chaos and the coldness in Paris. The harshness of this arrival scene is reinforced in the following sentence: ‘L’éclat de la lumière, le tumulte de la foule, le brouhaha de la gare, tout criait sus’/[The brightness of the light, the chaotic crowd, the hubbub of the station, everybody was screaming out] (Zobel, p. 27). The sudden, bright light at the station starkly contrasts with Joseph’s ride on an evening train in the dark. Like the noise, it contributes to Joseph’s dizziness. Through his choice of the terms ‘slap’, ‘brightness of light’ and ‘noise’ Zobel addresses different senses, namely touching, seeing and hearing. These opening sentences of this passage thus underline that Joseph’s body is very much part of this initial encounter of Joseph with Parisian society. This physicality foregrounds the unexpected brutality of the arrival in the metropolitan capital which clashes with Joseph’s assumed knowledge about the metropolis. Black Metropolises 113 Joseph’s feeling of loneliness is reinforced in the representation of his train ride from Le Havre to Paris. While Joseph experienced a sense of community on the boat and felt that he was part of a ‘village cosmopolite’/[cosmopolitan village], he realises that he is the only black boat passenger in his carriage who takes the night train from the French port to the capital (Zobel, pp. 18, 24-25). His journey becomes even more isolated in Paris where he has to take a taxi in order to get to the house of his Martiniquan host Carmen (Zobel, pp. 27-29). This sense of isolation, which characterises Joseph’s arrival in France, contrasts with Selvon’s representation of the arrival of West Indian immigrants in London. As the expression ‘cosmopolitan village’ indicates, the passengers on board the Colombie were of different nationalities and ethnic groups. During his voyage Joseph is not singled out as a black passenger; he is presented as one among many white and black migrants. In The Lonely Londoners, by contrast, the focus is solely on black West Indian newcomers who enter Great Britain. As can only be inferred from their arrival at Waterloo station, the boat from the Caribbean and the train to London were dominated by a majority of black Caribbeans. While Joseph travels to the French capital on his own, the newcomers in The Lonely Londoners arrive in the centre of London in great number: ‘Meanwhile Tolroy gone down by the bottom of the train, stumbling over suitcase and baggage as he trying to see everybody what coming off the train at the same time’ (Selvon, p. 13). Despite the apparent disorder on the platform the crowd is not perceived as homogeneous. While Selvon represents a group consciousness in his text as Rohlehr rightly argues, he accounts for the heterogeneity of the groups of West Indian immigrants by creating his novel as an assembly of individual episodes.65 Selvon accounts for the different personalities and cultural backgrounds of his fictional personae. However at the same time personal connections between the characters and shared experiences convey the impression to the reader that a general West Indian 65 Nasta, ‘Introduction’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, p. 5; and Edward Baugh, ‘Friday in Crusoe’s City: the Question of Language in Two West Indian Novels of Exile’, ACLALS Bulletin, 5: 3 (1980), 1-12, reprinted in Nasta, Critical Perspectives, pp. 240-49 (p. 240). Black Metropolises 114 consciousness is developing among these immigrants. Read in the historic context this means that Anglophone Caribbeans developed a sense of a regional West Indian identity in addition to their local island identities, for instance as Trinidadians or Jamaicans.66 In the opening sections of both novels the writers’ protagonists are confronted with metropolises that diverge from their expectations.67 Le Havre and Paris in La Fête à Paris, and London in The Lonely Londoners are represented as unfamiliar places. Joseph’s first impression of France is that of a destroyed country, with ruins and dilapidated buildings dominating the sites of formerly prosperous cities. On the boat, Gaston Chaminder reiterates France’s positive self-representation in the colonies by praising French people’s ability to rebuild their country quickly and efficiently. According to him, a new era will begin in France, a period of ‘construction, de création, d’assainissement’/[construction, creation, decontamination] (Zobel, p. 13). Chaminder hopes for a fresh start after the crimes committed during the Second World War. His emphasis on reconstruction suggests that he believes in French people’s ability to re- establish the country’s former glory. However, both Chaminder and Joseph realise upon their arrival in Le Havre that France’s former power has diminished. To Joseph’s great disappointment, Chaminder’s optimistic account of France does not coincide with reality as Joseph experiences it when he arrives in Le Havre and Paris. Like his fellow 66 Lamming refers to the significance of London in facilitating encounters between West Indians who come from different islands: ‘You could hardly get from Barbados to Jamaica. You could get a lot of trouble going from Barbados to Guyana and so on. The very Metropole had in a way organized and supervised this. It would be at the Metropole that you would see the creation of a regional movement. It is really at the Metropole that a certain type of new West Indian was born not in fact in one of the territories itself but by that extraordinary social movement which took place between Jamaica and Barbados between Trinidad, Guyana and so on in London’; George Lamming, ‘The Coldest Spring in Fifty Years: Thoughts on Sam Selvon and London’, Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, special issue, ‘The Windrush Commemorative Issue, West Indians in Britain 1948-1998’, ed. by David Dabydeen, 20: 1 (1998), pp. 4-10 (p. 8). 67 Hinds discusses some of the most prominent myths about Great Britain as being a country of liberty, justice, and prosperity, and in which no white British working class exists; Hinds, Journey to an Illusion, pp. 5, 11, 15, 50. Black Metropolises 115 travellers, he is shocked to see the high degree of destruction in the port of Le Havre. In the uninviting fog he can barely make out ‘des pans de murs déchiquetés, des amas de pierraille, quelques baraques exhalant de petites fumes sinistres’/[ragged walls, piles of stones and the few sheds that exhale some sinister fumes] (Zobel, p. 22). As a fellow traveller intimates, France’s previous greatness is unlikely to be restored, even if functional buildings are reconstructed: ‘On a beau espérer en la reconstruction […], est- ce que ce sont des choses qu’on reconstruit, tout ça?’/[You might well hope for reconstruction, can you reconstruct things like that?] (Zobel, p. 22). The fact that formerly famous buildings were erased during the war indicates that France’s pre-war reputation as a mighty colonial power will not be restored, regardless of the reconstruction effort. As Joseph realises during his sojourn in Paris, not only has the power of the former French Empire been broken during the war, but historical dates and the founding principles of the French Republic have also lost their significance. His position as an observer – first a traveller and, in the course of the novel, a flâneur – allows Joseph to comment on France and French society. Joseph’s Martiniquan origins and, at the same time, his educational formation in the French system make him an informed and yet detached observer. During his frequent strolls through the city Joseph is surprised to notice ‘à cette foule les mêmes regards, la même allure, que ce soit à la Foire du Trône, aux bals du 14 juillet dans les rues, dans les galeries et les voitures du métro, ou dans les manifestations revendicatives entre la Nation et la République’/[in that crowd the same looks, the same air, be it at the Foire du Trône, during the Bastille Day celebrations in the streets, in the galleries and the carriages of the underground, or in protest demonstrations between Nation and Republic] (Zobel, p. 243). These dates have become mere public holidays and an excuse to celebrate without, however, recalling their historic relevance and meaning. The undifferentiated juxtaposition of Nation and Republic suggests that the Republican ideals of the Rights of Mankind are no longer held up. France’s self-representation as an egalitarian Republic therefore turns out to be as much a myth as its power and international influence. The sense of alienation which dominates Joseph’s first impressions upon his arrival in France is reinforced by the fog that covers and obscures Le Havre. Because of his Black Metropolises 116 inability to see far, Joseph loses a sense of direction and has difficulties in finding his way around the unknown city of Le Havre. In a figurative sense the misty location suggests that Joseph has only a vague sense of the reality of France. Joseph’s unfamiliarity with the place hints at the fact that, despite the French practice of cultural assimilation, a gap between French metropolitan and Antillean cultures remains. As my analysis above has revealed, Joseph realises in the course of the novel that Antilleans who have come to the metropolis are not treated as equal French citizens. The same effect of defamiliarisation is created in the opening sentence of The Lonely Londoners: ‘One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet’ (Selvon, p. 7). The fog in The Lonely Londoners renders the city as strange a place to Moses as it does to Joseph in Zobel’s novel. Covered by fog, both Le Havre and London seem blurred, intangible locations. In connection with the darkness – Moses’ bus ride to the station happens in the early morning and Joseph’s train to Paris leaves in the evening – these cities create a sense of alienation. The cold, darkness and fog render Le Havre and London gloomy, depressing locations which contrast sharply with the tropical climate and the liveliness to which the Caribbean characters are used from their native islands. In both novels the weather is a major trope which interrogates the notion of a welcoming and warm ‘mother country’ in which the (im)migrants can feel at home. It becomes a cultural marker, a ‘[sign] of national difference’, to use Bhabha’s expression.68 Being interrelated with a country’s culture, the weather is an integral part of the literary construction of the nation.69 Read in light of discourses of colonial power relations, the metropolitan weather simultaneously evokes memories of its colonial Caribbean counterpart.70 This clash between the metropolitan and the Caribbean 68 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139-70 (p. 169). 69 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, pp. 140, 169. 70 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 169. Black Metropolises 117 climates and cultures is intimated in the opening scenes of both novels. The torrential rain in which Joseph leaves Martinique is as much an indicator of the tropical climate as references in The Lonely Londoners to the summer clothes in which many newcomers arrive in Great Britain. The first impression that many of Selvon’s West Indian characters get upon their arrival in the metropolis is the sense that the Caribbean sun and heat are replaced by constant cold and seemingly never-ending winters. Significantly, however, Selvon’s representation of grim and uninviting winter weather in the opening sections of the novel is juxtaposed with long passages on the warm summer season. The following quotation demonstrates very explicitly the extent to which the weather influences the atmosphere in London: everywhere you turn the English people smiling isn’t it a lovely day as if the sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their faces for the winter and on a nice day every manjack and his brother going to the park with his girl and laying down on the green grass and making love in the winter you would never think that the grass would ever come green again but if you don’t keep your eyes open it look like one day the trees naked and the next day they have clothes on sometimes walking up to the Bayswater Road from Queensway you could look on a winter day and see how grim the trees looking and a sort of fog in the distance through right near to you ain’t have no fog but that is only deceiving because if somebody down the other side look up by where you are it would look to them as if it have fog by where you are and this time so the sun in the sky like a forceripe orange and it giving no heat at all and the atmosphere like a sullen twilight hanging over the big city but it different too bad when is summer for then the sun shine for true and the sky blue and a warm wind blowing it look like when is winter a kind of grey nasty colour does come to the sky and it stay here and you forget what it like to see blue skies like back home where blue sky so common people don’t even look up in the air and you feeling miserable and cold but when summer come is fire in the town big times fete like stupidness and you have to keep the blood cool for after all them cold and wet months you like you roaring to go (Selvon, p. 85) While the cold, grey and foggy winter weather seems to distance people from each other, summer gives Selvon’s West Indian characters the opportunity to mingle with white Londoners and to be part of the exciting city life. In summer British people appear more outgoing, relaxed and willing to interact with Caribbeans than in winter. The warm weather feels invigorating for both white British people and West Indian immigrants. In fact, summer seems to release new energy, and with their continuous Black Metropolises 118 flirting in the parks the ‘boys’ appear to make up for the cold and hostile atmosphere that marks British winter. In their joy and happiness many of Selvon’s characters do not even take offence by inherently racist and discriminatory prejudices such as British people’s assumption that ‘black people living primitive in the jungles of the world’ (Selvon, p. 91). On the contrary, some black immigrants live up to these expectation in order to be able to go out with white British women (Selvon, p. 91). Selvon presents this cultural clash in a tragic-comic style. While the fact that ‘films and stories’ continue portraying black people as ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’ is serious, even tragic, the following sentences display a humorous underlying tone (p. 91): that is why you will see so many of them African fellars in the city with their hair high up on the head like they ain’t had a trim for years and with scar on their face and a ferocious expression going about with some real sharp chick the cruder you are the more they like you (Selvon, p. 91) The immigrants’ outward appearance – their long hair that seems to sit like a turban on their heads – and their ‘wild’ facial expressions are represented very visually and in a slightly satirical tone. As such this passage vividly illustrates Selvon’s bridging of the gap between white British and West Indian characters.71 The lightness of the atmosphere in summer is reinforced in this passage by Selvon’s use of stream-of- consciousness. This narrative technique suggests that the boys chiefly follow their emotions without interrogating white people’s ignorance of West Indian cultures and their racist stereotypes to a great extent. Just as the sentences on the page run into one another without any interruption, so do Selvon’s boys incessantly meet and date white London women and ‘cruise’ through the park areas of the city (Selvon, p. 87). The happiness, laughter and comedy that characterise Selvon’s representations of summer in London differ considerably from the few instances when this season is mentioned in La Fête à Paris. Although the warm weather and the long daylight are appreciated by white Parisians and Joseph alike, Zobel’s portray of this season lacks the gaiety characteristic of Selvon’s novel (Zobel, p. 222). It seems that only the beginning 71 Fabre, ‘From Trinidad to London’, in Critical Perspectives, ed. by Nasta, p. 217. Black Metropolises 119 of summer can be enjoyed because temperatures soon rise too high and the light becomes too bright for Parisians to take pleasure in being outside: ‘Il n’y a pas de soir, il n’y a pas de fin. … Oui, mais au commencement. Puis c’en est trop. Trop de lumière, trop de chaleur, trop de poussière, trop d’autos, trop de monde. C’est encore la souffrance’/[There is no evening, there is no end. … Yes, but at the beginning. Afterwards there is too much of it. Too much light, too much heat, too much dust, too many cars, too many people. There is again suffering.] (Zobel, p. 222). The excessive, almost oppressive heat affects city life negatively and renders Paris as dirty, dusty and polluted as snow does in winter. In La Fête à Paris both French summers and winters are presented as extremes, whereas summer in London is portrayed as vitalizing and uplifting. While Selvon’s West Indian immigrants seem to take less offence in racial prejudices in summer, the heat that marks summer in Paris evokes further stereotypes against Antilleans. As the reader learns in the fictive conversation between Joseph and white French people, the latter assume that Antilleans are used to the high temperatures and, in fact, appear to ‘accuse’ them of having caused the heat: Et José se fâche de bonne foi, car c’est comme si on les accusait, lui et la Martinique, en lui disant: ‘Vous devez être heureux par ce temps-là! C’est du temps de chez vous, ça!’ […] Maurice Perrin aussi: ‘Ces gens-là vous disent: « Vous êtes content, vous, c’est votre temps, ça! » comme si, au fond, ils pensaient que c’est un peu à cause de vous qu’il fait si chaud.’/[And José gets angry in good faith, because that is as if one accused them, him and Martinique, by telling him: ‘You must be happy about this weather here! This is the weather from you at home! […] Also Maurice Perrin: ‘Those people tell you: “You are happy, this is your weather” as if, deep down, they think that it is a bit because of you that it is so hot.’] (Zobel, p. 223) As this passage reveals the relationship between white French people and Antillean migrants remains tense and ambiguous regardless of the season. This tension is reinforced by the serious underlying tone of the passage. Like the rest of the novel this section is presented in a matter-of-fact style, and the discussions between Joseph, Maurice and white Parisians indicate that Joseph reflects on French people’s comments and implicit accusations. While the season of the year tends to influence white people’s Black Metropolises 120 reactions towards West Indians in The Lonely Londoners, in La Fête à Paris Joseph’s social status rather than external, climatic factors primarily determines the extent to which he feels at ease in Paris. Despite Zobel’s references to the summer, the cold season is preponderant in his novel. The significance of the weather as a cultural marker is presented most explicitly in La Fête à Paris and The Lonely Londoners alike through the various repeated references to the trope of coldness. Zobel frequently calls the reader’s attention to the low temperatures, the dirty and disgusting snow, hail and rain, hence to the continuously hostile meteorological conditions in Paris (see, for instance, Zobel, pp. 15-16, 36, 87, 104, 155-56). Similarly, Selvon’s characters often complain about the ‘grim winter’ in London where the (winter) sun produces no heat (see, for example, Selvon, pp. 30, 35, 42, 71). Like the infectious fog referred to above, the cold appears to be so pervasive – creeping even into the houses – that the characters cannot escape it. As Selvon mentions, his fictional personae have to make an effort to stay warm even indoors (Selvon, pp. 20, 30, 55). Similarly, Joseph is obsessed with the cold against which it seems impossible to protect himself. In order to bear the European winter, he has to put all his clothes on top of each other: ‘José [était] emmailloté dans toute sa garde-robe: caleçon long, pull-over sur pull-over, pardessus, cache-col’/[José [was] wrapped in all his clothes: long underwear, pullover on top of pullover, overcoat, scarf] (Zobel, p. 108). By enumerating the individual pieces of clothing, pointing out the sheer number of different layers, Zobel highlights Joseph’s preoccupation with and shock about the cold. Throughout the novel Joseph’s obsession with the French metropolitan climate is reinforced by the fact that he endlessly talks about the cold. The weather dominates not only the general atmosphere in the metropolises but is also intricately linked to personal memories of specific events such as the arrival in the metropolis or gatherings with friends (see, for instance, Zobel, p. 156; Selvon, pp. 7, 49, 84-86). In Zobel’s novel the French weather has a predominantly negative connotation; it takes the charm off social activities and makes it harder to go about one’s everyday business (e.g. Zobel, p. 156). This means that the climate contributes to the character’s sense of alienation in the metropolis. The central position that the trope of coldness holds in Zobel’s novel is Black Metropolises 121 reinforced by the change of the title from La Fête à Paris to Quand la neige aura fondu in the re-edited version. It seems that Joseph’s first impressions of France as a meteorologically and socially cold place have to melt or fade away before he can feel entirely at ease in the metropolis. Literally and figuratively speaking, the ice has to be broken between these two cultures in order for Joseph to be accepted in France as an Antillean rather than a ‘replica’ of French culture. Zobel’s and Selvon’s constant allusions to the weather underscore the cultural differences between the Caribbean and the metropolises. Joseph notices, for instance, that ‘[l]e froid le brûlait aux oreilles avec l’acuité d’un fer chauffé à blanc, et lui enfonçait sous les ongles des espèces d’aiguilles de bambou invisibles. Il dut plonger les mains dans ses poches’/[The frost burnt his ears with the intensity of a white-hot iron and rammed some sort of invisible bamboo needles under his nails. He had to bury his hands in his pockets] (Zobel, p. 71). The term ‘blanc’/[white] alludes to the white metropolitan surroundings in which Joseph experiences this extreme frost. The European climate and, by implication, French society seem to exert physical violence on him. Both are characterised by a certain sense of hostility and aggression. Comparing the impact that the climate has on social conventions, Joseph points out that the gesture of keeping one’s hands in one’s pockets would be unacceptable in the Antilles; there it would be interpreted as ‘une contenance hostile, menaçante, déloyale même’/[a hostile, threatening and even disloyal attitude] (Zobel, p. 71). The mere necessity of keeping warm forces Joseph to disregard the Martiniquan cultural norms and, instead, to adapt to the French ones. In both novels the metropolitan weather and hence the French and British cultures are represented as trying to impose themselves on the Caribbean (im)migrants. Like Joseph, most characters in The Lonely Londoners suffer from the cold weather and atmosphere in the metropolises and have to adjust to the European climatic conditions. Galahad, by contrast, pretends that he is perfectly comfortable in his Trinidadian summer clothing despite the harsh winter in London (Selvon, p. 33). His apparent ease in light clothes is not primarily an expression of his ignorance of the British climate, as Moses supposes upon Galahad’s arrival. More importantly, it symbolises his refusal to integrate into Black Metropolises 122 white British society. To Moses’ great surprise, Galahad claims that he feels comfortable in this climate despite his tropical clothes: ‘This is the way the weather does be in the winter? It not so bad, man. In fact I feeling a little warm’ (Selvon, p. 17). Wearing ‘inappropriate’ clothes both in summer and in winter, Galahad seems to figuratively invert the British seasons. While he is warm in winter, he shivers in summer, when most of the other West Indian immigrants get into a better mood because the warming sun eventually appears (Selvon, p. 83). This means that he imposes his own seasonal rhythm on British society rather than adapting to the new meteorological and cultural conditions. He inverts the process of cultural assimilation, ignoring the local culture and inscribing his own culture in the metropolis. In both novels the trope of the winter is used as an obvious and repeated sign of cultural difference. Causing a sense of alienation, it makes the characters aware of the fact that they do not ‘belong’ in the metropolises – contrary to the idea of coming ‘home’ to the (former) colonial mother countries. In addition to defamiliarising the city of London, the fog turns it into an unsanitary location. The unhealthy, cold and misty weather is represented as potentially causing infection. Selvon illustrates this risk of infection in an emblematic episode in the opening scene of his novel: ‘When Moses sit down [on the bus] and pay his fare he take out a white handkerchief and blow his nose. The handkerchief turn black and Moses watch it and curse the fog’ (Selvon, p. 7). In this quotation Selvon plays on the significance of the adjectives ‘black’ and ‘white’. As Fanon discusses in detail, the colour black has, in connection with people’s skin colour, been associated with evil, sin and dirt in imperialist discourse, and this connotation of blackness still prevailed in the unconscious of many white Europeans.72 Selvon interrogates and inverts the colonial 72 ‘In the collective unconscious of the homo occidentalis, the Negro – or, if one prefers, the colour black – symbolises evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine’; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1967), pp. 190-91. Fanon continues arguing that ‘in the collective unconscious, black [and by inference the black person is equalled with] = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality’; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 192. For a more detailed discussion of Fanon’s analysis see Chapter One. Fiction writers such as Edward Ricardo Braithwaite, Black Metropolises 123 argument that immigrants infect the metropolis. The fog turns London not only into an alienating place but also an infectious space. Covering the entire city, black immigrants cannot escape this unhealthy fog nor can they pinpoint the exact source of infection. The heart of the British Commonwealth thus turns out to be a site of infection – an infection against which black immigrants cannot protect themselves. Zobel, too, alludes to the unsanitary location of the metropolis. His protagonist points out that he took it for granted that a shower was as much part of French people’s daily hygiene as it was of Antilleans (Zobel, p. 38). Having come to the heart of the former French Empire, he now has to content himself with washing himself with cold water. Ironically, France exported the very soap to Martinique which the French postwar metropolis lacked. The novel suggests that, contrary to the widespread association of colonials with dirt and infection, these (im)migrants have to re-introduce hygiene practices into the metropolis. It seems as if Martiniquans have to invert the colonial ‘civilising mission’. The idealised image of France as a clean and healthy location thus turns out to be a myth. By representing the metropolises as dirty, unhealthy places of infection, Zobel and Selvon interrogate predominant colonial myths about these locations. London and Paris are not the expected impeccable and wealthy places of the metropolitan self- representations but rather dirty European cities that are marked by wartime destruction. Through different literary techniques both writers hint at the end of the British and the French colonial Empires. The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris highlight that France and Great Britain are no longer as powerful and globally influential as they used to be and as they represented themselves in their (former) colonies. In classic formal French style, Zobel represents a French Republic that has suffered from the war so severely that it cannot provide its population with the basic needs such as food, clothing allude to this equation between black people and dirt, too; Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love (London, Sydney, Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1959), pp. 42-43. Black Metropolises 124 and hygienic products. In The Lonely Londoners emphasis rests on a similar image of London in a state of collapse after the war. In The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris the characters’ sense of disillusionment and alienation in the metropolis is juxtaposed with the development of (im)migrant communities. In the following section the differences between Selvon’s and Zobel’s portraits of these communities will be analysed in light of the different migration patterns between the Caribbean and the respective metropolises. In both novels the train stations vividly illustrate the creation of a community among Caribbean (im)migrants. Both writers incorporate passages that take place at major train stations of the capitals, but these scenes figure in different parts of the novels. The Lonely Londoners opens with a long passage at Waterloo station, whereas Zobel concludes his novel with a comparable scene at the gare Saint-Lazare. If we want to understand these structural differences between the two novels in the historical context, we have to bear in mind the different moments in history when large-scale migration to Great Britain and France took place. Selvon’s characters are, from the beginning, part of a wider Caribbean community, whereas Joseph still belonged to that generation of Antilleans who initially came to France in order to pursue their studies and then decided to stay. In La Fête à Paris a sense of development of a larger Caribbean community does not emerge until the end of the novel. The sense of Caribbean community that is represented in The Lonely Londoners is largely absent from La Fête à Paris. Although Zobel refers to several Antilleans who spend a number of years in the French capital, Joseph’s encounters with compatriots tend to be coincidental. Apart from Carmen, Alexandre is the only Martiniquan whom Joseph gets to know in the initial stage of his time in France. The Antillean community gradually grows during Joseph’s sojourn in Paris. This is represented by the arrival of Antilleans like Maurice Perrin and, most significantly, in the final scene of the novel at the gare Saint-Lazare. Like Waterloo station in London, this railway station was the central location in Paris for the arrival and departure of Caribbean migrants. Both places thus constituted crucial meeting points for new arrivals and Caribbeans who had already established themselves in the capitals. They evoke a sense of solidarity and of home for Black Metropolises 125 the wider Caribbean communities in London and Paris. Despite this common notion of the stations as meeting points, they play different roles within the novels. Waterloo Station represents the point of arrival, whereas the gare Saint-Lazare constitutes the point of departure. Because of these different functions which these sites fulfil, they are perceived slightly differently by Selvon’s and Zobel’s protagonists. Joseph remains relatively distant from the scene at the station, whereas Moses is moved by the atmosphere at Waterloo station. In The Lonely Londoners Selvon points out that the station is a place which evokes a sense of nostalgia and homesickness as well as feelings of both joy and sadness: When he [Moses] get to Waterloo he hop off and went in the station, and right away in that big station he had a feeling of homesickness that he never felt in the nine-ten years he in this country. For the old Waterloo is a place of arrival and departure, is a place where you see people crying goodbye and kissing welcome, and he hardly have time to sit down on a bench before this feeling of nostalgia hit him and he was surprise. (Selvon, pp. 9-10) Selvon emphasizes Moses’ emotions through evocative verbs such as ‘to cry goodbye’ and ‘to kiss welcome’ [emphasis added] (Selvon, p. 9). In a similar way, the verb ‘to hit’ alludes to the apparently inescapable force of the sentiment of nostalgia which dominates the atmosphere at that location. While Selvon focuses on feelings that are aroused at the station, Zobel represents the gare Saint-Lazare in a neutral, descriptive fashion. In La Fête à Paris the station is an apparently anonymous, cold and rigid place of no emotion or warmth that is determined by strict order, a place where fixed schedules dominate the arrival and departure of trains: Même l’été, […] les files de wagons restent rigides, s’ébranlent à heure fixe, stoppent à heure fixe, et la gare est neutre, avec ses uniformes sombres, ses casquettes droites, ses sifflets hystériques et ses fanions discrets/[Even in summer, […] the lines of carriages remain rigid, are set into motion at a fixed time, stop at a fixed time, and the station is neutral, with its sombre uniforms, its straight caps, its hysterical whistles and its discrete pennants.] (Zobel, pp. 249-50) In contrast to Waterloo station, the Parisian station appears dominated by official procedures and anonymous staff whose personalities are concealed by their uniforms. Black Metropolises 126 Through his abrupt enumeration of facts Zobel reinforces the sense of a strict, impersonal, alienating rhythm that is imposed on the location of the station and on people who work or go there. Regardless of the season, the gare Saint-Lazare is described as an uninviting place that causes anguish and obscured personal dramas: ‘Stricte, neutre, et, surtout la nuit, hantée de drames et d’angoisses qu’on ne sait pas’/[Strict, neutral, and, particularly at night, haunted by dramas and anxiety which one does not know] (Zobel, p. 250). Despite the anonymity that characterises this place as an almost sterile site within the city, people still dominate the scene. As is the case at Waterloo station, a crowd of Caribbeans who leave or arrive in Paris dominates this Parisian station. Like in Selvon’s novel the crowd of Caribbeans indicates the arrival or imminent departure of a boat train: Il n’est qu’à voir une foule d’Antillais à la gare Saint-Lazare pour être sûr qu’il y a au Havre ou à Dieppe un bateau en provenance ou à destination de la Martinique ou de la Guadeloupe’/[One only has to see a crowd of Antilleans at the gare Saint-Lazare in order to be certain that there is a boat in Le Havre or in Dieppe that has come from or is bound for Martinique or Guadeloupe.] (Zobel, p. 250) Although Joseph remains emotionally distant from the scene of arrival and departure at the gare Saint-Lazare, at first view the overall atmosphere at this station largely resembles that at Waterloo station. However, in La Fête à Paris the station is portrayed as a cold point of departure which figures at the end of Zobel’s novel, whereas Waterloo station represents an emotional point of arrival in Selvon’s narrative. Through their representations of the stations both writers draw the reader’s attention to the fact of a journey, of constant movement between the Caribbean and the metropolis. While Selvon foregrounds the arrival of Caribbean immigrants in Great Britain, Zobel’s novel points to a continuation of movement beyond the end of La Fête à Paris. Despite these important different associations of the gare Saint-Lazare and Waterloo station, both stations are meeting places for Caribbeans where they exchange news from their native islands and thus feel slightly closer to home. As the following two quotations from La Fête à Paris and The Lonely Londoners respectively suggest, the stations in London and Paris where the boat trains arrive are both significant as places Black Metropolises 127 that allow Caribbeans in the metropolises to reconnect with their native islands. In both passages conversations about the Caribbean, ‘oldtalk’ among compatriots, to use Selvon’s term, create an atmosphere that evokes positive memories of life in the Caribbean. Regardless of the size of the Caribbean population in the metropolitan capitals, the stations are the sites in the cities where Caribbeans are most likely to encounter each other, to meet familiar and unfamiliar faces: Pas qu’ils [les Antillais] y viennent spécialement pour accompagner ou accueillir qui un parent, qui un ami; ils y sont la plupart pour accompagner tous les compatriotes qui s’en retournent au pays, et accueillir tous les Antillais qui débarquent à Paris, et qui donnent si chaudement à ceux que ronge le cafard l’impression d’être venus leur apporter du soleil, du rhum et des chansons de plantation. L’on y vient aussi pour le plaisir de se retrouver entre Antillais; car ceux qui ne se sont pas vus depuis longtemps ont plus de chance encore de s’y rencontrer qu’au bal nègre de la rue Blomet/[Not that they [Antilleans] came there especially in order to accompany or welcome a relative, a friend; they are mostly there in order to accompany all the compatriots who return to their country and to welcome all the Antilleans who disembark in Paris and who give to those who have the blues so warmly the impression that they have come to bring them some sun, some rum and plantation songs. One also comes there for the pleasure of meeting Antilleans; because those who have only recently arrived have a greater chance of meeting each other there than at the Negro ball in the rue Blomet.] (Zobel, p. 250) It have some fellars who in Brit’n long, and yet they can’t get away from the habit of going Waterloo whenever a boat-train coming in with passengers from the West Indies. They like to see the familiar faces, they like to watch their countrymen coming off the train, and sometimes they might spot somebody they know: ‘Aye Watson! What the hell you doing in Brit’n boy? Why you didn’t write me you was coming?’ And they would start big oldtalk with the travellers, finding out what happening in Trinidad, in Grenada, in Barbados, in Jamaica and Antigua, what is the latest calypso number, if anybody dead, and so on, and even asking strangers question they can’t answer, like if they know Tanty Simmons who living Labasse in Port of Spain, or a fellar name Harrison working in the Red House. (Selvon, p. 10) In both passages emphasis is placed on characters rather than on the physical place of the stations. The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris represent the metropolitan capitals as intangible, discursive places rather than geographical locations. The stations are thus not merely functional buildings for public transport but places of cultural Black Metropolises 128 exchange, contact points between the (former) colonial ‘mother countries’ and the (former) colonies. Selvon and Zobel both focus on the symbolic space of the stations as a ‘gateway’ to the Caribbean. Fundamentally, both Selvon and Zobel represent the train stations as a gateway between two worlds, namely the world of Caribbean and metropolitan characters, between the Caribbean and the metropolises. As these quotations illustrate, the stations convey a sense of home, a sense of belonging within a Caribbean community, albeit with a touch of nostalgia and melancholy. Significantly, however, the gare Saint-Lazare is primarily associated with Antilleans’ departure from the metropolis, whereas Waterloo station is linked to the arrival of Caribbean immigrants. By focusing on departure, Zobel suggests that most of his characters eventually return to the Antilles. This implies that the sense of belonging, which is evoked by their compatriot community at the station, is only of temporary nature. In La Fête à Paris Zobel represents the metropolis as not being ‘home’ for Antilleans, no matter how well they are accepted by and allowed into French metropolitan society. Selvon, by contrast, seems to take it for granted from the very beginning of his novel that Great Britain has become the ‘home’ for Caribbean immigrants. As the scene at the gare Saint-Lazare indicates, there is a sad moment at the end of Zobel’s novel where people return home to the Antilles. This means that there is a sense of melancholy in La Fête à Paris, a sense that France is not ‘home’ for Antilleans. Ironically, France’s efforts at culturally assimilating Antilleans ultimately do not overcome the cultural gap between white French people and Francophone Caribbeans. It seems to be precisely the tight interrelation between France and the Francophone Caribbean as well as the French practice of cultural assimilation that makes Antilleans acutely aware of their ‘difference’ within metropolitan society. While most West Indian newcomers soon realise that they are marginalized in white British society, Antilleans tend to vacillate between being accepted and being rejected by white French society. West Indians thus establish some sort of Caribbean community in their new British surroundings, whereas most Antilleans continually move between white French society and other ‘foreigners’. The often temporary character of their sojourn in France tends to reinforce their sense that France is not their ‘home’. Black Metropolises 129 In La Fête à Paris, the gare Saint-Lazare is associated with France’s colonial past. Rum, a product of sugar cane, and the plantation songs referred to in the above quotation allude to the hardship of the ancestors of those Antilleans who now come to the French ‘mother country’. With these material and immaterial products of slavery, which are brought to Paris, Antilleans confront French people with their colonial history at the very heart of the former French Empire. Apart from contributing to a Caribbean atmosphere at the station, the newcomers and their cultural attributes attest to the interrelation of the Antillean and the French ways of life and simultaneously create a clash between these two cultures. This confrontation of different parts of the French Republic – the ‘hexagone’ and one of its overseas departments – is reinforced by the climatic differences between those two places. As central sites of cultural exchange and meeting points for Caribbean newcomers who have settled in the capitals, the stations allude to the close link between the metropolitan ‘centres’ and the (former) colonies. In the passage from The Lonely Londoners quoted above (Selvon, p. 10) a link between the West Indies and England is figuratively established through the fictive conversation between a West Indian who has been living in London and a newcomer who is expected to have news from family members or friends in the Caribbean. Selvon renders his passage lively through his incorporation of direct and indirect speech, whereas the quotation from La Fête à Paris is, through the third-person narration, more impersonal in tone. While Selvon foregrounds the ‘oldtalk’ between newly arrived and settled West Indians, Zobel’s passage evokes an Antillean atmosphere through the reference to Caribbean culture – ‘rum’ and ‘plantation songs’ – as well as the hot climate and the sun. The arrival of (im)migrant writers, artists, intellectuals and workers in Great Britain and France during the 1950s and 1960s has to be considered in the wider context of postwar migration to Western Europe. As I have argued in this chapter, each migratory trend undeniably has its specific characteristics. In fact, this chapter has underscored the importance of investigating context-specific developments within the different (im)migrant groups, their experiences and reception in the metropolises. Nevertheless it is worthwhile pointing out that the migration of Caribbeans to Great Britain and France Black Metropolises 130 in the aftermath of World War Two was, by no means, an exceptional phenomenon. In particular, Caribbean migration to the Netherlands and African migration to Belgium come to mind.73 This chapter can therefore be read in light of a wider phenomenon of what might be called a ‘black European presence’. The migration of formerly colonised Africans and Caribbeans to the Western European metropolis has confronted the ‘host’ societies with their colonial past at the heart of the former colonising powers. For instance, Belgium needed to face her collaboration in the assassination of the independence leader Lumumba and eventually ask the Congolese government for forgiveness in 2001. This symbolic gesture is reminiscent of the recent recognition in France of slavery as a crime against humanity and, by extension, of commemorations of slavery in Great Britain which I discussed in the Introduction. These acts of remembrance are related to the anniversaries of significant moments in colonial history (the arrival of Columbus in the Americas and the abolition of slavery in the different colonies) as well as to recent debates about issues of immigration and integration. A comparison between the current situation in France and in the Netherlands would be particularly interesting insofar as most of the Dutch Caribbean islands have a similar political status to the French Antilles. Depending on the specific islands, their status varies from association to integration into the Dutch state. Future research will extend the focus to the Dutch-speaking Caribbean and investigate the impact that the different political status of the individual Anglophone, Francophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean has had on the relationship between the Caribbean and the different former colonising powers. The migratory trends between Africa and the Caribbean to the former European colonising powers can be embedded in the wider trend at that time of Western European governments actively seeking immigrant workers to help rebuild their war-shaken countries. In this context, West Indian immigration to Great Britain, North African and 73 Alain Guillemoles discusses the different current situations of immigrant communities, especially from the Caribbean and Africa, in Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands; Alain Guillemoles, with Eric Albert, Alain Franco and Jon Jordaan, ‘Une communauté moins revendicative ailleurs en Europe’, La Croix, special issue, 30 January 2006, p. viii. Black Metropolises 131 later Antillean migration to France as well as the arrival of Turkish and Italian Gastarbeiter/[guest workers] in Germany are ultimately all connected.74 People whose ancestors were not born in their ‘host’ countries have become part and parcel of today’s societies of countries such as Germany, Great Britain and France. They have, in their own specific ways, contributed to economic as well as cultural developments in the countries where they settled temporarily or permanently. For instance, they have influenced the dominant language of their ‘host’ countries both in daily life and through their literary production. As I have shown in my discussion of The Lonely Londoners, British citizens have been confronted with distinct West Indian dialects the use of which has become increasingly common in the metropolis. Similarly, Germany has had to adjust to the linguistic diversity in her society. To give but one example, certain German private hospitals recently started to employ interpreters who could offer medical advice in languages other than German in order to provide equal service to their different patients.75 The co-existence of different ethnic and cultural groups in countries such as Germany, Great Britain and France has led not only to mutual influences but also to discrimination and racist attacks. The experience of social marginalization has, indeed, been a common experience among (descendents of) immigrants in the different Western European countries. Some effects of the interrelation between the ‘host’ society and ‘guest’ communities – an interrelation that has been fraught with tension – has been investigated in this chapter. The similarities between Anglophone and Francophone representations of (im)migrants’ experiences in the postwar metropolises of London and Paris, which I have investigated in this chapter, problematise the notion of a unique ‘black British’ and a distinct ‘black French’ literary tradition. The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris hint at connections within a wider ‘black’ presence in Europe even as they represent specific colonisation 74 Although Stadler differentiates between immigration from former colonies and from other countries, his article ultimately hints at parallels in migration patterns to different Western European countries and their reactions to newcomers. Rainer Stadler, ‘Das ist nicht mehr unser Land’, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, 48 (2004), pp. 7-11 (p. 7). 75 Stadler, ‘Das ist nicht mehr unser Land’, p. 7. Black Metropolises 132 practices, different fictional personae, the distinct status of the Antilles as French overseas departments as opposed to the West Indies as members of the Commonwealth, which gradually sought their official independence from Great Britain. Embedding writing from the ‘Windrush generation’ and contemporary Francophone literature within a wider ‘black European’ presence requires us to read the texts both within the literary and historical context of the 1950s and 1960s and to relate them to current developments in literary representations of the issue of immigration. In the Anglophone context, James Procter rightly argues that ‘the notable vibrancy, diversity and success of black cultural formations in the late 1990s means that a twenty-first-century black Britain is undoubtedly something to look forward to’.76 With the tight interrelation between the Antilles and France and the increasing migration of Antillean writers and intellectuals to the metropolis, Antilleans – like North Africans and other ‘black’ people – have shaped France’s cultural and literary scene in similar ways to ‘black British’ people. In addition, the postwar developments in black people’s migration to the metropolises are still of great significance for understanding current political and sociological discussions about the issue of immigration.77 The ambivalent relationship between white metropolitans and black immigrants represented in novels from the 1950s such as The Lonely Londoners and La Fête à Paris can be related to contemporary debates about immigration, integration and cultural assimilation. As Hargreaves lucidly argues in the context of Algerian immigration in France, the ‘lack of trust’ on the part of immigrants and of (white) metropolitans stems from the history of European colonisation.78 Recent events such as the London bombings on 7 July 2005 and the riots in France between 27 October and 17 November 2005 have shown some of the consequences of this history of cultural assimilation as well as social and racial discrimination against (descendents of) immigrants. The immediate connection of the London bombings with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand and the 76 Procter, Writing Black Britain, p. 1. 77 Procter convincingly challenges the sense of a ‘sedimented’ black British literary tradition in Writing Black Britain, esp. pp. 1-2, 8-9. 78 Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity, p. 164. Black Metropolises 133 xenophobic tone underlying Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches against the rioters on the other give us some idea of contemporary discourses on racial issues. As Gérard Noiriel argues, resorting to the discriminatory registers of ‘l’étranger’/[the stranger] or ‘délinquance’/[delinquency] is a common discursive move in French politics in order to stigmatise particular social movements which are considered ‘undesirable’.79 Even though most French ‘mainstream’ newspapers and television programmes no longer speak of the ‘enfants d’immigrés’/[children of immigrants] but of the ‘jeunes des banlieues’/[youth of the districts (meaning the suburbs)], these adolescents are still discriminated against in daily life on the basis of both their social status and their (parents’) ethnic origins.80 There seems to be some continuity between racist slogans of the 1950s and politicians’ and journalists’ representations of terrorist incidents in the context of the so-called ‘war against terrorism’. As Gilroy points out, Europe has for centuries been represented as principally ‘white’, and ‘identity, belonging – and consequently the imperilled integrity of national states – [have been] communicated through the language and symbols of absolute ethnicity and racialized difference’.81 Black people’s presence in and contribution to art, culture and everyday life in Europe have to be acknowledged both in its historic development and in its present forms in 79 Gérard Noiriel, ‘Haro sur l’étranger!’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 24-30 November 2005, pp. 44-46 (p. 44). 80 Several reports and commentaries on the riots which started in the Parisian suburbs highlight that inhabitants of these suburbs are primarily discriminated against because of their low social status. However, the issues of culture and ethnicity are evoked in political and public discourse in order to differentiate between ‘us’ (white French people) and ‘them’ (children of former ‘immigrants’). This merging of ethnicity and social status is reminiscent of political and public reactions towards postwar immigration in France and Great Britain which I have discussed in this chapter. For commentaries on the social situation in France in autumn 2005 see, for instance, Noiriel, ‘Haro sur l’étranger!’; Anne Fohr, ‘L’alibi polygame’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 24-30 November 2005, p. 47; Elsa Vigoureux and Nadhéra Beletreche, ‘Avoir 15 ans à Clichy-sous-Bois’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 17-23 November 2005, pp. 38-42; Elsa Vigoureux, ‘L’appel de Mohamed Dia’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 17-23 November 2005, p. 41; Nadhéra Beletreche, ‘Ce que disent les filles’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 17-23 November 2005, p. 42. 81 Paul Gilroy, ‘Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe’, in Blackening Europe: The African Presence, ed. by Heike Raphael-Hernandez, with a foreword by Paul Gilroy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. xi-xxii (p. xii) [emphasis in original]. Black Metropolises 134 order to interrogate and possibly overcome this problematic linking of ethnicity, identity and citizenship, which seems to be at the root of racist representations of immigrants. Britain’s and France’s colonial history and concomitant migration between the metropolises and the former colonies cannot be entirely separated from present-day immigration.82 By foregrounding connections between different representations of this ‘black European presence’ during the 1950s and 1960s I hope to have opened up the fields of Anglophone and Francophone literary criticism for further synchronic and diachronic interdisciplinary investigations of representations of the issues of immigration and identity. 82 I agree with Gilroy, who argues that ‘[t]he little-known historical facts of Europe’s openness to the colonial worlds it helped to make, might then be employed to challenge fantasies of the newly embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration, barred to asylum-seeking, and wilfully deaf to any demand for hospitality made by refugees and other displaced people’; Gilroy, ‘Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map’, in Blackening Europe, Raphael-Hernandez, p. xii. Chapter Three The Representation of Creolisation in Divina Trace by Robert Antoni and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau In the Introduction I asserted that Caribbean fiction and criticism from the late 1980s and 1990s testified to a heightened awareness of Caribbean history and its significance for the development of Caribbean cultural identities. As was argued, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the archipelago in 1992 and, in the Francophone Caribbean the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998, were important historical markers which led to critical and literary re-appraisals of the Caribbean past. While the history of slavery and colonialism was, during the 1970s and 1980s, commonly interpreted in terms of a lack – a lack of collective Caribbean consciousness and a lack of cultural identity – the response to this fragmentation of the Caribbean past has more recently been a focus on creolisation.1 In the 1990s the cultural diversity that 1 Reading Caribbean literature in light of the literary trends of modernism and postmodernism, Celia Britton argues that postcolonial novels have made a ‘transition from a problematic of alienation and marginality to one of creolization, as a shift from modernity to postmodernity’, Celia Britton, ‘The (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 24: 3 (November 2001), pp. 44-58 (pp. 48-49). Other critics who support Britton’s argument are, for instance, Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1992); Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1995); Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: the Creole Identities of Postcolonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). In his analysis of Divina Trace Patteson, too, points out the contemporary emphasis in Caribbean literature on creolisation; Richard F. Patteson, Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), p. 145. Creolisation 136 characterises Caribbean societies has thus been regarded as a form of enrichment, with a focus on the dynamic process of different forms of linguistic and cultural transformation.2 The publication of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992) and Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace (1992), the novels which constitute the basis of my analysis in this chapter, can be directly related to the historical significance of this Quincentenary year.3 Both novels can be regarded as timely representations of histories and identities in Creole Caribbean societies. In the two narratives particular emphasis is placed on transformation and the fertility of cultural diversity. I will assess the extent to which Chamoiseau and Antoni posit cultural and linguistic transformation as having shaped histories and collective identities in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. In my comparison of their representations of various processes of linguistic and cultural transformation in different creolised Caribbean societies, I will explore the instability of the concept of creolisation and also discuss its limitations. Scrutinising the writers’ transformation of certain myths – myths which fictionalise recreation as well as cultural and linguistic transformation in Caribbean history – will allow me to analyse context-specific examples in the approaches adopted by these two writers towards cultural diversity in Caribbean societies. While transformation is a gradual process in which existing structures are adapted to new conditions, recreation is defined as creation after destruction. Having focused on the fertility of cultural diversity in the first half of this chapter, I will introduce the concept of exoticism in the last section in order to re-evaluate the notion of creolisation. Comparing The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) by Pauline Melville with Divina Trace and Texaco in this later section will facilitate my investigation of the extent to which creolisation and exoticism are interrelated in fictional representations of 2 Britton, ‘The (De)Construction of Subjectivity’, pp. 49-50. 3 Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press, 1992) and Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992). I will refer to Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (London: Granta, 1997), except on a small number of occasions where I disagree with the official translation. Creolisation 137 cultural diversity.4 The respective positions of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant and the Creolists in relation to forms of cultural transformation in Caribbean history, all of which have contributed to the shaping of creolised societies, will constitute the wider theoretical background against which I will examine differences between Chamoiseau’s and Antoni’s fictional approaches towards Caribbean history and cultural as well as linguistic transformation and creolisation. Walcott, Harris, the Creolists and, to some extent, Glissant do not solely dwell on the traumas of slavery and colonialism but rather point out the transformative potential of Caribbean societies. All of them agree that the shared experience of colonial oppression and uprooting constitutes a common basis for the transformation of literary and cultural traditions. This specific Caribbean form of transformation has become known as creolisation. In the following section I will explore the interstices between the different Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean interpretations of creolisation. As the Creolists’ focus on the fluidity of the understanding of creoleness and creolisation indicates, and as the subtle differences between the main Anglophone and Francophone interpretations suggest, these concepts are unstable. Before turning to the literary texts, I will investigate key aspects in the positions on cultural transformation in ethnically diverse Caribbean societies adopted by Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant and the authors of Eloge de la créolité. I will also refer to Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who has often been regarded as the founder of the term creolisation in the Anglophone Caribbean. I will further examine connections between notions of créolité and hybridity. Both concepts have become major theoretical touchstones in identitarian discourses in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean studies. Although the concepts of creolisation and créolité/creoleness were developed in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean during the same period of time, it is striking that there are no cross-references by the authors or in general discourse between these two linguistically separated literary spheres. Even less so, any critical engagement with 4 Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). Creolisation 138 these ideas exists across this divide. As I have pointed out in the Introduction, the Creolists do not relate their discussion of the concepts of créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation to the theoretical debates about the related issues of hybridity that have emerged in the Anglophone Caribbean since the early 1990s. This critical neglect seems to be at odds with their claim that the tendency towards cultural creolisation encompasses the entire Caribbean archipelago and can even be regarded as a worldwide trend.5 As this chapter will demonstrate, this lack of critical engagement with postcolonial interpretations of creolisation and hybridity which transgresses cultural and linguistic boundaries pertains not only to Francophone but also to Anglophone Caribbean scholars. This neglect by the Creolists of theoretical developments in literary criticism beyond the Francophone Caribbean is reciprocated by Anglophone intellectuals. Walcott, Harris and Brathwaite restrict their development of notions of transformation and creolisation to the Anglophone Caribbean context. Similarly, Bhabha does not mention the term creolisation, nor does he refer to contemporary debates about cultural identity in the field of Francophone (Caribbean) studies. As was argued in Chapter One, Edouard Glissant refers to several non- Francophone Caribbean writers and critics in his theoretical texts. Remarkably, however, there are, to date, no thorough and sustained comparisons of Anglophone and Francophone critical approaches towards issues of hybridity and creolisation. While créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation are related concepts, they must not be conflated. The former refers to a state – a state of linguistic, religious, ethnic and cultural diversity – and thus tends towards some essentialism, whereas the latter describes a process of cultural mixing. Glissant rejects the notion of créolité/creoleness precisely because of the implicit risk of positing cultural heterogeneity as an essential characteristic of Caribbean societies.6 In my comparison of Texaco and Divina Trace I 5 For critical references to this omission see, for instance, Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: The Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 42. 6 See, for instance, Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990), p. 103. Creolisation 139 will primarily examine representations of creolisation and thus focus on the process of ever-changing heterogeneous Caribbean societies. As Confiant mentions in an interview, the Guadeloupean Hector Poullet was the first writer to use and define the term créolité in his journal Mouchach: Bulletin de la créolité in the 1970s.7 This term was thus introduced to Caribbean criticism by a Francophone intellectual. Unlike the later development of this concept, Poullet’s notion of créolité was limited to the Creole language, which he believed needed to be re- evaluated in Francophone Caribbean literature.8 Albeit with a different focus, Edward Brathwaite’s understanding of creolisation in the context of Jamaican plantation society between 1770 and 1820 was similarly restricted in its definition. As Sandiford aptly summarises, the Jamaican poet and critic understood the process of creolisation as the gradual development of a distinct cultural identity by diverse groups of people ‘caught up in some kind of colonial arrangement’ with a metropolitan European power, on the one hand, and a plantation arrangement on the other, and where the society is multiracial but organized for the benefit of a minority of European origin.9 As this definition suggests, Brathwaite’s analysis of creolisation is clearly situated in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jamaican plantation society.10 7 Ottomar Ette and Ralph Ludwig, ‘En Guise d’introduction: points de vue sur l’évolution de la littérature antillaise: Entretien avec les écrivains martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant’, Lendemain: Etudes comparées sur la France, 17: 67 (1992), pp. 6-16 (p. 13). Confiant points out that the expression créolité had appeared in texts published prior to this journal but in a far less detailed manner. I have not been able to trace the journal Mouchach: Bulletin de la créolité. 8 Confiant emphasizes that he and his colleagues moved on from this narrow linguistic focus to wider literary, socio-cultural and even political aspects related to this concept; Ette and Ludwig, ‘En Guise d’introduction’, p. 13. 9 Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 5-6; and Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. xv. 10 Brathwaite clearly limits his discussion of the development of creolisation in the Caribbean to Jamaican plantation society, whereas most other critics tend to extend their understanding of the concept of creolisation to the wider context of Caribbean societies. In contrast to the Creolists, for Creolisation 140 Nevertheless the main characteristics of creolised Caribbean societies, namely the cultural and ethnic diversity of these societies and their attempts to develop a ‘distinct cultural identity’, are already signposted in Brathwaite’s discussion of creolisation. Despite Brathwaite’s and Poullet’s references to creolisation/créolité as early as the 1970s, this concept was not developed further in the Francophone Caribbean until Glissant made mention of it in his Discours antillais in the 1980s, and a decade later, in Poétique de la relation (1990). As I will point out below, Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott engaged with similar issues related to Caribbean history at the same period of time. None of these critics, however, engaged directly with each other’s ideas. While Glissant’s vision of antillanité primarily pertains to ideas of relationality and opacity – an opaque and hence not directly accessible Caribbean past as well as opaque, rhizomatic connections within this archipelago – he also refers to the notion of creolisation. Glissant’s interpretation of creolisation as a ‘process of mutation and adaptation’ is reminiscent of definitions provided by the Creolists.11 Likewise, it brings to mind Derek Walcott’s and Wilson Harris’ focus on constant transformation in Caribbean histories and societies. Since the appearance in 1989 of Eloge de la créolité, a theoretical manifesto that was published in a bilingual edition in French and English, the concept of créolité has become a widely debated issue within both Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literary criticism. Interestingly, even though this bilingual edition suggests that the Creolists have attempted to speak to the Francophone as well as to the Anglophone Caribbean, the text itself lacks any thorough investigation of the West Indian context. While Eloge de la créolité offers, to date, the most sustained theoretical engagement with the concept of creoleness, Harris’ and Walcott’s discussions of the development of creolised Caribbean societies have been highly influential in the gradual shift from the instance, who claim to speak for the entire archipelago and even relate creolisation in Caribbean societies to more global trends of hybridisation, Brathwaite largely avoids generalising this concept. 11 Glissant, Poétique de la relation, p. 103. Creolisation 141 interpretation of cultural diversity as a manifestation of fragmentation to the focus on its fertility. Walcott and Harris critically engage with cultural transformation in the Caribbean, a process which is closely related to the creolisation of these societies. In order to explain the main differences between the Anglophone and Francophone approaches towards ethnic diversity in Caribbean societies, I will briefly compare the key issues addressed by the critics mentioned above. Although Walcott and Harris do not explicitly use the term creolisation, their analyses of literary, linguistic and cultural transformation in the Caribbean archipelago have nonetheless been acknowledged by scholars as literary illustrations of the process of creolisation.12 Both Anglophone and Francophone critics agree that the various linguistic, religious, ethnic and cultural influences which have shaped the Caribbean archipelago since the beginning of European colonialism represent a fertile basis for the development of Caribbean cultural identities. In their theoretical texts, as in Chamoiseau’s novels, the Creolists consider the historical moment of colonial displacement to be the catalyst for the creation of new cultures and societies. While the experience of displacement and cultural diversity in the Caribbean constitutes the common basis for the interpretations of transformation put forward by Walcott, Harris and the Creolists, they all focus on different aspects of adjustment to the new situation in the Caribbean. Both Harris and Walcott contrast their notions of transformation with the ‘documentary stasis of imperialism’, as Harris describes it.13 The Guyanese critic thereby refers to Euro-centric, imperialist accounts of Caribbean history such as those by the nineteenth-century historian Froude.14 For Walcott, the transformation of 12 See, for instance, Kathleen M. Balutansky, ‘Créolité in Question: Caliban in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove’, in Penser la créolité, ed. by Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 101-12 (p. 102). 13 Wilson Harris, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’, in Wilson Harris: Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966-1981, ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1981), pp. 20-42 (p. 28). 14 Jacob J. Thomas, Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude, with an introduction by C. L. R. James (London: New Beacon, 1969). Creolisation 142 different cultures in the Caribbean is a dynamic process of constant renewal.15 Caribbean history itself is perceived as a process and not in terms of chronological events that are fixed in time.16 Harris, too, considers the development of Caribbean cultures and societies to be a creative, ongoing process. However, when compared with Walcott, he seems to concentrate to a greater extent on specific cultural traditions that are transformed in Caribbean societies. For Harris it is the imaginary that can connect the different traditions and cultures in the Caribbean archipelago.17 The Middle Passage can thus be regarded as a passage of creation and transformation, which Harris calls the ‘limbo gateway’.18 Harris uses the African limbo dance as a metaphor for transformation. Playing on the words ‘limbo’ and ‘limb’, he links the dance and, more generally, African as well as Indian traditions with variants that have developed in the Caribbean: Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles. It is – in some ways – the archetypal sea-change stemming from Old Worlds and it is legitimate, I feel, to pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre.19 Through the image of ‘limbo’ and (phantom) ‘limb’, Harris retraces connections between diverse cultures and art forms such as dismembered or re-assembled deities, traditions of carnival or voodoo rituals.20 It is worthwhile pointing out that Harris’ focus on brutal rupture which engenders recreation is reminiscent of the Creolists’ understanding of créolité. According to these Francophone critics, a key aspect of 15 Derek Walcott, ‘The Muse of History: An Essay’ in Orde Coombs, ed., Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974), pp.1-27 (p. 3). 16 Walcott, ‘Muse’, p. 6. 17 Harris, ‘History’, p. 35. 18 Harris, ‘History’, p. 26. 19 Harris, ‘History’, p. 26. 20 Harris, ‘History’, p. 27. Creolisation 143 ‘Creoleness’ is its nature as a ‘world diffracted but recomposed’.21 The shared experience of slavery, colonial oppression and uprooting thus constitutes a common basis for creolisation throughout the Caribbean archipelago. Rather than solely representing a traumatic experience, the original brutal uprooting and fragmentation gain new significance in the emergence of creolised Caribbean societies as well as of their cultural traditions and art forms. Through the linking of ‘limbo’ and ‘limb’, Harris’ metaphor of the ‘limbo gateway’ serves to indicate, on the one hand, the transformations of rituals and traditional customs and, on the other, to stress connections between the different cultures in the Caribbean archipelago. Harris traces the development of Trinidadian forms of calypso and Haitian voodoo beliefs from the African limbo dance and thereby points out parallels between these cultural expressions.22 His concept thus supports my contention that Caribbean literature has to be approached comparatively in order to overcome, in the field of literary studies, the ‘asymetric ignorance’ [sic] that Dipesh Chakrabarty writes of in relation to history: ‘Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; European historians do not feel any need to reciprocate’.23 The variations of the limbo dance and representations of the related phantom limb within the Caribbean also reinforce the need for a clear contextualisation of these religious and cultural forms of expression as well as of the diverse (hi)stories represented in Caribbean literature. Only if variations of the limbo such as Haitian voodoo or Trinidadian carnival are considered against the historical and cultural background can we assess the extent to which cultural traditions have travelled between different contexts. Harris’ analysis of the interrelation of these variants of particular cultural traditions thus reflects the ethnic diversity of the Caribbean. 21 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989) p. 88 [emphasis in original]. 22 Harris, ‘History’, pp. 31-36. 23 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations, 37 (Winter 1992), pp. 1-26 (p. 2). Creolisation 144 Despite the different focal points in the positions on transformation and creolisation adopted by Brathwaite, Harris and Walcott which I have made explicit, these critics all seem to agree on the basic characteristics of creolisation. As Balutansky argues, creolisation is commonly understood among Anglophone Caribbean critics as a ‘process of cultural syncretism that is the source of cross-fertilization and literary creativity in the region’.24 The related notion of creoleness is defined as a state of ‘ethnic plurality’.25 These definitions of the process of creolisation and the resulting condition of creoleness, in other words the emergence of creolised societies, constitute the key elements of the various interpretations brought forward by Anglophone and by Francophone Caribbean critics and scholars alike. The Creolists define creoleness as ‘the interactional or transactional aggregate of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements, united on the same soil by the yoke of history’.26 The Creolists emphasize the aspects of complexity and fluidity implied in creoleness to a greater extent than the Anglophone definition given above suggests. They argue that this characteristic feature of Caribbean societies must not simply be accepted but that the fertility implied in cultural and ethnic complexity be investigated, too: ‘Exploring our Creoleness must be done in a thought as complex as Creoleness itself’.27 As holds true for Harris and Walcott, this exploration is primarily the task of the artist: ‘full knowledge of Creoleness will be reserved for Art’.28 For these critics, creoleness denotes a ‘constant dynamic’ in which the various cultural 24 Balutansky, ‘Créolité in question’, p. 102. 25 Balutansky, ‘Créolité in question’, p. 102. 26 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 87 [emphasis in original]. In order to emphasize the oppressive character of colonial ‘History’, the Creolists capitalise this term in the French original but, interestingly, not in the English version. Since this typographical differentiation between the admittedly now contested notion of the grand narrative of colonial History as opposed to local accounts of history or histories exists in English, too, this difference might constitute a slippage in the translation. 27 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 90. 28 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 90 [emphasis in original]. Creolisation 145 influences transform each other in a complex process.29 While addressing a number of aspects of creolisation and creoleness in their manifesto, the authors of Eloge de la créolité refrain from giving a clear definition of these concepts. In their view creolisation cannot be reduced to a single, static definition insofar as this process of cultural interaction in the Caribbean is dynamic. Creoleness forms a ‘Totality’ [sic] for which ‘it is not time to give a definition’ but rather to live it: ‘we say that it ought to be approached as a question to be lived’.30 The instability of the term creolisation, then, seems to reinforce the emphasis on the fluid and constantly changing character of Caribbean societies. Certainly, all societies undergo changes. In the Caribbean, however, this aptitude for change has been attributed particular significance insofar as it underlines that the notion of static Caribbean societies is an imperialist construct. More recently, this concept of fluidity also critically engages with the sense of displacement and fragmentation that has long marked Caribbeans’ perceptions of their own histories. My working definition of creolisation will be a synthesis of the Anglophone and Francophone interpretations of this term. Following Balutansky’s conceptualisation of creolisation mentioned above, I will define this concept as a complex, ongoing process of linguistic and cultural transformation and syncretism that forms a fertile basis for cultural creativity across the Caribbean archipelago. The term transformation itself can be defined as a continuous process in complex Caribbean societies, which involves a combination and adaptation of different religious, linguistic, ethnic and cultural influences that form a Caribbean cultural identity – a cultural identity which is based on a shared experience of colonisation and – for most ethnic groups – displacement. However, the main focus in my analysis will rest on an investigation of the context- specific differences in meaning of transformation and creolisation that are implied in the 29 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 111. The Creolists highlight the complex thought implied in ‘Creoleness, itself complex’; Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 111. 30 Bernabé et al., In Praise, pp. 88-89. Creolisation 146 instability of these concepts. In my comparison of Divina Trace and Texaco I will therefore scrutinise the extent to which the different interpretations of transformation and creolisation have travelled across the Caribbean archipelago. As I indicated above, the concepts of créolité and creolisation are related to the notion of cultural hybridity. Creolisation could be interpreted as a culture-specific account of the type of cultural mixing discussed in more general terms by Bhabha. Just as Eloge de la créolité by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant has become central to scholarly debates about notions of créolité amongst critics of Francophone Caribbean literature, so has Homi Bhabha’s publication of The Location of Culture (1994) five years later been of major significance for discussions about hybridity and creolisation in the field of Anglophone postcolonial studies.31 While the notion of hybridity is now widely discussed by Anglophone writers, critics and intellectuals, Bhabha has developed this concept in the most sustained theoretical way. Hybridity and creolisation have both been applied to critical investigations of cultural identities in ethnically diverse societies, albeit within different contexts. Creolisation has been developed with particular focus on the Caribbean space, history and cultural diversity, whereas hybridity as theorised by Bhabha foregrounds the relationship between coloniser and colonised primarily in Indian or diasporic contexts. Analysing this colonial relationship within a psychoanalytical and deconstructionist paradigm, Bhabha defines the colonial hybrid as the coloniser’s ‘double, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different – a mutation, a hybrid’.32 Insofar as the colonial hybrid reverses and thereby undermines colonial authority he/she 31 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 32 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 111 [emphasis in original]. Creolisation 147 constitutes a threat to colonial authority and ‘breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside’.33 Through the confrontation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised both of them are transformed. In Bhabha’s view this colonial encounter is always fraught with tension, since the authority of colonial discourse is undermined through the coloniser’s confrontation with the hybrid colonised. In his discussion of a hybrid cultural identity Bhabha focuses primarily on literary representations of colonial discourses. Hybridity, he argues further, ‘is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures’ but ‘a problematic of colonial representation’.34 While the Indian intellectual focuses primarily on the relationship between coloniser and colonised as illustrated in literary representations, the Creolists additionally relate their discussion of cultural diversity to cross-cultural encounters in practice. As was mentioned above, they consider créolité to be ‘an interior attitude’ that allows individuals to accept their mixed cultural heritage.35 Paradoxically, the Creolists define créolité further as ‘an interior vision’ rather than a lived experience.36 This suggests that the notion of creolisation seems to be more Utopian than hybridity as proposed by Bhabha. As McCusker emphasizes, créolité is restricted to the arts and political implications of cultural diversity are paid hardly any attention.37 Within these limits it has, however, contributed to a re-evaluation of Caribbean and specifically Antillean history and culture. Creolisation is more explicitly situated within 33 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 116. 34 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 114 [emphasis in original]. 35 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 75. 36 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 85. 37 Maeve McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture miraculously forged”: the contradictions of “créolité”’, in Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 112-21 (p. 120). Creolisation 148 the context of cultural diversity where the cultures of various colonisers and colonised people are transformed in the contact with each other. The Creolists praise the fertility of the mixing of various languages and cultural traditions which have shaped Caribbean societies, whereas Bhabha’s notion of the ‘Third Space’ of enunciation addresses this fertility primarily in relation to the (antagonistic) encounter between coloniser and colonised.38 This means that hybridity as interpreted by Bhabha accounts less for cross- cultural relationships between different (formerly) colonised cultures than the Creolists’ concept of créolité. In conclusion, both sets of ideas constitute intellectual and imaginative responses to very different cultural and literary contexts, the Caribbean on the one hand and the Indian and diaspora contexts on the other. Despite their limitations both concepts have become crucial for literary-critical discussions of cross-cultural influences in different cultural contexts. Having identified the main strands of creolisation in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literary criticism and juxtaposed them with Bhabha’s interpretation of the notion of hybridity, I will now situate the two novels in the wider literary-critical context. I will thus demonstrate that Chamoiseau’s and Antoni’s choice of themes is, to some extent, related to the contemporary literary-critical discussions about creolisation. Having been awarded literary prizes – Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 and Divina Trace the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1992 – both novels have been positioned in similar ways on the literary market.39 Despite this literary award Divina Trace has, like Antoni’s other fictional texts, received 38 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 36-39. 39 Both Patrick Chamoiseau and Robert Antoni are prolific writers. Divina Trace was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and was republished as a second edition in 2001. Other works by Antoni include his second novel Blessed is the Fruit (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), the collection of short stories My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) as well as a number of other short stories and essays mainly published in journals. Creolisation 149 comparatively little critical attention outside the United States of America. This lack of wide critical acclaim clearly distinguishes the Anglophone writer from Patrick Chamoiseau. As Derek Walcott’s ‘A Letter to Chamoiseau’ indicates, the award of the Prix Goncourt to Texaco has helped spread its reputation beyond the Francophone Caribbean, and the translation of Chamoiseau’s novel in 1997 has further contributed to the extension of Chamoiseau’s readership to the Anglophone world.40 Nevertheless most criticism on the novel has remained within the field of Francophone postcolonial studies. In fact, Derek Walcott’s response to the award of the Prix Goncourt to Texaco is one of the few engagements by Anglophone writers and critics with Chamoiseau’s fiction. The French-English bilingual publication of the theoretical manifesto Eloge de la créolité has initiated more literary-critical debates among both Francophone and Anglophone scholars than Texaco.41 Within criticism on Chamoiseau’s theoretical and fictional texts, insufficient attention has been paid to the relationship between the specific Antillean historical and sociological context in which his tenets have emerged and the transposition of these ideas to the wider Caribbean archipelago. In this chapter I 40 Walcott, Derek, ‘A Letter to Chamoiseau’, The New York Review of Books (August 1997), pp. 45-48. One of the articles that directly refers to the Prix Goncourt is Liesbeth Korthals Altes’ ‘Un Prix Goncourt à la saveur créole’, Rapports – Het Franske Boek, 63 (1993), pp. 160-63. The fact that the Prix Goncourt, which is a literary prize that is traditionally awarded to French rather than Francophone literature, was awarded to Texaco indicates Chamoiseau’s special position among French Caribbean writers. Though the first Antillean writer, Chamoiseau is not the first Francophone author to have won this literary prize. In 1987 Tahar Ben Jelloun received it for his novel La Nuit sacrée (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987) and Amin Maalof in 1993 for Le Rocher des Tanios (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1993). This means that certain Francophone writers have been recognised in the ‘mainstream’ publishing scene. His work seems to be more widely accepted in the French ‘hexagone’ than that of many of his contemporaries. Despite her comparatively high literary reputation, Maryse Condé, for instance, has never received any French or Francophone literary award. 41 See, for instance, Penser la créolité, ed. by Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé (Paris: Karthala, 1995), a collection of English and French articles on concepts developed by the Creolists as well as Delphine Perret, La Créolité: espace de création (Matoury: Ibis Rouge, 2001); Jean Bernabé, ‘De la Négritude à la créolité: éléments pour une approche comparée’, Etudes françaises, 28 (Autumn 1992), pp. 23-38; Mary Gallagher, ‘Whence and Whither the French Caribbean “Créolité” Movement?’, ASCALF Bulletin, 9 (Autumn/Winter 1994), pp. 3-18. Creolisation 150 will suggest a number of ways in which this gap between Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean interpretations and representations of different facets of creolisation might be bridged. As holds true for Chamoiseau’s writing, Antoni’s work has primarily been situated within one field of studies. In the few critical readings of Antoni’s Divina Trace the link between the legend of La Divina Pastora and the Ramayana and Antoni’s use of innovative narrative and stylistic techniques have been central to criticism on the novel. Eric D. Smith contextualises his interpretation of Divina Trace within the postmodern literary context, and offers a psychoanalytical reading which focuses on the universal character of the novel.42 Although the style of his novel is reminiscent of other postmodern texts which have emerged outside the Caribbean, I would argue that Antoni’s representation of cultural diversity needs to be situated more firmly within the Caribbean context. As my comparative analysis will reveal, Antoni’s fictional retracing of the development of creolised Trinidadian societies highlights cultural and linguistic aspects which are of a specifically Caribbean rather than universal nature. Raphael Dalleo seems to bridge postcolonial and conventional ‘European’ readings of the novel through his focus on translation and intertextuality, mimicry and translation in his essay on Divina Trace.43 Dalleo points out that Antoni has been strongly influenced not only by postcolonial writers but equally by European literary criticism such as French feminism and psychoanalysis.44 His article constitutes a thorough analysis of the syncretic, creolised nature of Caribbean societies, investigated from the perspective of structure, style, language and intertextuality with Latin American as well as European 42 Eric D. Smith, ‘Johnny Domingo’s Epic Nightmare of History’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 31: 4 (Oct 2000), pp. 103-15 (pp. 103-04, 106, 110). 43 Raphael Dalleo, ‘“Tink is you dawson dis yana?” Imitation and Creation in Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 32: 4 (Oct 2001), pp. 21-45 (pp. 21-45). 44 For psychoanalytical readings of sections of Divina Trace see, for instance, Richard F. Patteson, Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), pp. 164-65; and Smith, ‘Johnny Domingo’s Epic Nightmare of History’, pp. 103-04, 108, 112. Creolisation 151 fiction. While Dalleo concentrates on genealogy and different forms of translation, my investigation of Divina Trace will focus in greater detail on the development and the effects of creolisation in Antoni’s Corpus Christi. The myth of the black Madonna has been scrutinised in detail by Richard F. Patteson, and analyses of the development of cultural identity through the retelling of stories have opened the close reading of Divina Trace to the wider field of Caribbean literary criticism.45 It has to be pointed out, though, that Patteson’s interpretation of the novel remains restricted to the context of Anglophone Caribbean literature. His brief discussion of examples from Divina Trace of what he refers to as processes of syncretism is based on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of creolisation.46 Despite his apparent awareness of similar tendencies within the Francophone Caribbean – he mentions, for instance, Edouard Glissant’s notion of métissage – Patteson does not account for similar ideas developed by the Creolists.47 His lack of engagement with the créolité concept in a novel that is highly reminiscent of the culturally diverse Caribbean archipelago praised in the Eloge de la créolité is a significant shortcoming in the wider context of Caribbean literary criticism. Criticism that has been brought forward against the Creolists with regard to the narrow focus on theoretical developments in the Francophone Caribbean seems to apply equally to Patteson’s reading which situates Antoni’s novel only in relation to the Anglophone literary context. My comparison of Divina Trace and Texaco in light of both Anglophone and Francophone interpretations of creolisation and créolité/creoleness will explore the instability of these concepts and reveal the extent to which they have travelled between different Caribbean contexts. Published only three years after Eloge de la créolité, Chamoiseau’s novel has certainly been influenced by this theoretical manifesto. Two main strands in the novel are reminiscent of ideas discussed in Eloge de la créolité, namely the issues of Creole 45 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, pp. 144, 146, 155-56. 46 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 145. 47 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 146. Creolisation 152 cultural identity and of Caribbean history. Like Antoni, Chamoiseau posits his novel as a fictional (Creole) family chronicle.48 What this suggests is that both writers represent local Caribbean histories from the perspective of individuals whose retold memories have remained unaccounted for in standard academic historiography. Divina Trace is the history of Corpus Christi, a fictionalised version of Trinidad, rewritten through two major legends, namely the myth of La Divina Pastora and the Indian epic of the Ramayana. The main story line evolves around Manuelito, a mysterious anencephalic child, half-human, half-frog, and his mother Magdalena, who becomes the patron saint of the island.49 The plot is told in different and often contradictory versions, which Johnny Domingo, the main narrator, tries to piece together into a coherent story. Besides numerous flashbacks, Antoni concentrates on the post-abolition period, particularly the late nineteenth and the entire twentieth centuries.50 Chamoiseau, by contrast, chooses to retrace the developments in Martiniquan society from slavery until the mid-twentieth century. The ethnically and culturally diverse Trinidadian society developed after the abolition of the slave trade, and was reinforced by the subsequent importation of indentured labourers. By contrast, the ambiguous relationship between African-Antilleans and French people in the French Antilles, which is portrayed in 48 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 144 ; and Solange Billano, Discours et stratégies des romanciers de la créolité (Mémoire de DEA, UAG/GRELCA, Québec: Université Laval, 1995-1996), p. 34. Billano compares Texaco with Le Nègre et l’amiral (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1988) by Raphaël Confiant, pointing out similarities in the writers’ fictional representation of ‘Creole’ narrative structures as suggested in their Eloge de la créolité. 49 According to the medical interpretation Manuelito is an anencephalic child, which means that an excess of liquor in the womb causes a ‘defective development […] in the early embryo’; Antoni, p. 97. 50 Although several dates are included in the novel, these references to historical events and incidents in the lives of the different characters tend to contradict each other. As Hawley and Patteson point out, details about Magdalena’s age and significant events in her life are inconsistent; Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 152; and John C., S. J. Hawley, ‘Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace and the Womb of Place’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 24 (Jan 1993), pp. 91-104, (p. 96). Similarly, dates in Johnny Domingo’s life contradict each other. See Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 154. While accounting for an approximate time frame with the incorporation of certain dates, Antoni simultaneously underscores the fictional character of his text and interrogates the concept of linear time. Creolisation 153 Texaco, goes back to the period of slavery. In his novel Chamoiseau reveals how the almost mythical Noutéka, a settlement which was founded by recently freed slaves, constituted itself largely in opposition to the system of slavery and French colonial influences. The specific forms of creolisation represented in Texaco and Divina Trace can be understood in light of these differences in time, setting and societies. Set in different parts of the Caribbean and representing different ethnic groups, Chamoiseau’s and Antoni’s novels indicate certain aspects of cultural diversity, which characterises the Caribbean archipelago. With their emphasis on distinct local characteristics of specific places these texts question and overcome an artificially imposed divide between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. While calling for a distinct local contextualisation, they simultaneously illustrate cross- linguistic and cross-cultural connections within the Caribbean. Irrespective of their thematic and linguistic differences, Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s fictional texts illustrate the preoccupation with the past of many Caribbean writers. Both Francophone and Anglophone novels address the colonial legacy of the Caribbean insofar as they refer to different cultural heritages and the domination of the (is)lands by different colonial powers. In a literary attempt to overcome the amnesia that has marked Caribbean societies, both writers focus on linguistic and cultural transformation as constituent elements in the process of creolisation. My comparison of Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s representations of the history of culturally diverse Caribbean communities suggests that certain concepts of créolité have travelled between the Anglophone and the Francophone Caribbean. By building on incisive existing literary criticism in both Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial studies, this chapter will develop a specific cross-cultural interpretation of fictional representations of creolisation. In the previous sections I sketched out the theoretical and literary-critical contexts in which Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s novels are situated. To some extent these contexts have influenced the writers in their choice of themes addressed and characters portrayed. In the remainder of this chapter I will now analyse key examples of forms of cultural transformation in the ethnically different societies of Corpus Christi/Trinidad and Martinique as represented in the Divina Trace and Texaco. These texts represent Creolisation 154 different forms of creolisation, which, as Patteson argues, has ‘become history’s answer to its own dismemberment’.51 In Texaco Chamoiseau represents the development of a Creole cultural identity in a community of recently freed slaves who have come from different places in Africa. Significantly, these African-Antillean communities are not ethnically homogenous. On the contrary, the fictional personae are descendents of different African countries. Through the naming of his characters Chamoiseau alludes, for instance, to cultural elements from West and Central Africa, for instance from Nigeria, Guinea and neighbouring countries.52 These regions historically represent the main areas for the French slave trade in the nineteenth century. Chamoiseau’s focus on heterogeneous African-Antillean communities in Martinique seems to be suggestive of Glissant’s assertion that creolisation operates not only between different ethnic groups – as portrayed in Divina Trace – but within similar cultures too.53 Thus Chamoiseau’s characters, most of whom are of African origin, share the history of slavery – a traumatic experience that Antoni’s Amerindian, European and Asian cultural groups did not have to undergo. As Nnadi mentions, Chamoiseau avoids clear differentiations between the West African cultural influences and alludes to the mixing and transformation of these different traditions in the Caribbean instead. Even though the Laborieux family is said to be rooted in Nigeria, Esternome is merely claimed to have come from West Africa. Similarly, freed slaves not only of different origins but of equally different social standing live together in some communities and gradually integrate in the settlement of Noutéka. Chamoiseau mentions, for instance, maroons (Chamoiseau, p. 125), ‘black affranchis’ [sic] (Chamoiseau, p. 126), ‘blacks of the land’ (Chamoiseau, p. 127) as well as different racial distinctions based on skin colour such 51 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 145. 52 For an in-depth analysis of African elements in Texaco see Joseph Nnadi, ‘Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique: la congruence des mythes du nègre dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau’, Etudes Francophones, 15: 1 (2000), pp. 75-91 (pp. 77, 79-80 and p. 89, endnotes 7, 8). 53 Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation, quoted in Charles Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’, Paragraph, 24: 3 (2001), pp. 12-29 (p. 23). Creolisation 155 as ‘chabinous’ (Chamoiseau, p. 127) and mulattoes (Chamoiseau, p. 125). In Noutéka and subsequent settlements these various groups of Africans overcome the divisions which partly stem from their different African origins and partly from the system of slavery, which assigned them to different social statuses. The gradual integration and adaptation of the various African cultural heritages can be interpreted as an example of creolisation between historically related cultures. This development of a Creole cultural identity between different African groups is initially based primarily on their opposition to the French colonisers. Gradual interaction and increasing co-operation between these two main ethnic groups only occurs towards the end of the novel, which is set at a later stage in Martiniquan history. Chamoiseau’s comparatively greater focus on the ambiguous relationship between coloniser and colonised has to be considered in the socio-historical context in which the novel is set. Thus, if we want to understand Texaco on the historical level, we must be aware of the heterogeneity of the African groups that were brought to the Caribbean and forced together under the system of slavery. The vast majority of Martiniquans are descendents of former African slaves, for whom the development of an Antillean cultural identity was initially based on the struggle for freedom. Their relationship with the békés has necessarily been more dualistic than was the case in the culturally diverse society of Trinidad. McCusker points out that this ambiguous interrelation between coloniser and colonised can be retraced to ‘the space of the plantation [where] the boundaries between self and other were destabilized, if not irrevocably broken down, through an ongoing engagement with the other’.54 While this certainly also pertains to Anglophone Caribbean colonial societies, Antillean writers and critics emphasize this preoccupation with the relationship between (former) coloniser and colonised to a greater extent than their West Indian colleagues. As I have explained in Chapter One, the continuing dependence of the French Antilles on France – as a French overseas department – reinforces this tension between being attracted to the metropolis and 54 McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 116. Creolisation 156 rejecting its influence on Antillean societies.55 In Divina Trace, by contrast, the transformation of cultural traditions and the adjustment to their new surroundings in the Caribbean take place in an already culturally diverse society. In the novel Antoni refers to the Amerindian presence on the island and points out that people from different European countries had settled in Trinidad. Apart from these different ethnic groups, Africans and, since the abolition of slavery, East Indians, were brought to the Anglophone Caribbean, and these groups came to constitute the ethnic majority.56 In this culturally highly diverse society, the relationship between European colonisers and the different groups of colonised people played a less important role than in Martinique. Although Chamoiseau and Antoni both represent forms of linguistic and cultural transformation, they situate these processes of creolisation in ethnically different societies. This crucial demographic difference between Martiniquan and Trinidadian society partly explains Chamoiseau’s principal focus on the African heritage of Martinique, whereas Antoni, understandably, portrays both African and East Indian cultural influences. The considerable number of African-Antilleans in the French Caribbean confronted with ‘white’ indentured labourers and plantation owners led to the development of an intricate colour code to distinguish between various shades from black through different degrees of mulatto to white skin. As I will show, rivalries between these different social groups are intimated in Texaco in the chant of ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’. Even though ethnic discrimination was also largely based on skin colour in the British West Indies, this nuanced and strict categorisation of shades is peculiar to the French islands.57 Chamoiseau alludes to this rigorous stratification of 55 McCusker argues that the French Antilles constitute an ‘interstitial space’ ‘between “Old” World and “New”’. She extends this in-between position of Antillean societies to the postcolonial period and the departmentalisation of this region; McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. 56 Apart from East Indians low numbers of Chinese and Syrians immigrated to the Caribbean. They have, however, constituted minorities only, and they are only fleetingly referred to in Texaco and Divina Trace. 57 For an analysis of different social structures and the respective relevance of class and colour on the different Caribbean islands see David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 81-84 (esp. pp. 83-84). Creolisation 157 Martiniquan society during and after the abolition of slavery when he portrays ethnically and socially different groups of Africans in his passage entitled ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’ (Chamoiseau, pp. 123-32). Since Martinique was continuously governed by the French apart from the short period between 1794 and 1815 when Martinique was under British rule, the Martiniquan békés were primarily descendents of metropolitan French. Trinidad, by contrast, had been ruled by several European colonising powers, until the island gained independence in 1962.58 Consequently, the ‘white’ minority in Trinidad was more culturally diverse than in Martinique. In the Antilles slaves from different parts of Africa constituted for a long time the only non-white labour force for the sugar plantations on the island. By contrast, East Indians soon formed the majority of the overall population in Trinidad. While East Indians in the French and British Caribbean alike were more prone to diseases than any other ethnic group, the high death toll was compensated in Trinidad by the continuous immigration of East Indians until 1917, whereas the Antilles soon resorted to a growing number of African immigrant labourers. As Lowenthal asserts, [t]he East Indians of Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the Windward Islands […] [were] only small minorities – [two] to [four] per cent of the population. Far from challenging Creole hegemony, they hardly constitute viable separate entities and are in large measure subsets of the rural lower class.59 In contrast to Trinidad, East Indian immigration to Martinique was limited to the period between 1854 and 1889. Despite the strict control by the British government of the import of East Indians in the Anglophone Caribbean, their number soon increased and 58 Trinidad was ruled by the Spanish (1498-1783), the French (1783-1797) and finally by the British (from 1797). 59 Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 146. For an analysis of the different groups of East Indians that arrived in the British and French Caribbean see Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 152. See also Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition: the Years After Slavery (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1968), p. 108; and Paul Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises XVIIe – XXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2002), pp. 309-10. Creolisation 158 eventually came to constitute the second-largest immigrant population in Trinidad. As Wood argues, no planter foresaw that by this permission [the sanctioning of importing East Indian labour by the British government] […] a movement of people was being set in train that was to go on with only minor interruption until 1917, and that the whole balance of ethnic forces in […] Trinidad was to be radically altered by the Indians who chose to settle in the Caribbean.60 Emphasis ought to be placed on the last part of the sentence, where Wood refers to the sociological implication of East Indian immigration for Trinidad. The significance of East Indians in number, and concomitantly in influence and social position accounts for the ethnic friction that has afflicted Trinidad ever since. In contrast to most other ethnic groups, East Indians remained largely separate from the rest of the island communities.61 As this discussion of the socio-historical developments of specific Caribbean islands has revealed, considerable demographic and cultural changes have affected the archipelago since the onset of slavery and colonialism. However, these changes varied greatly according to the respective socio-historical contexts. Chamoiseau’s and Antoni’s representations of specific examples of Creole societies are, to an extent, related to these different contexts. At the same time, it has to be borne in mind that Texaco and Divina Trace are fictional texts which do not seek to merely reflect the social conditions of Martinique and Trinidad. In both texts creolisation is most explicitly illustrated in the adaptation of different myths and legends which are part of the collective consciousness of the different Caribbean societies. In Texaco, Chamoiseau posits Esternome Laborieux’s chant of ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’ as a form of foundation myth for the Creole Martiniquan communities which have developed since the abolition of slavery. This chant praises the 60 Wood, Trinidad in Transition, p. 108. 61 For further discussion see Wood, Trinidad in Transition, p. 159. Creolisation 159 achievements of the first freed slaves in their creation of a Creole settlement, which in turn becomes an ideal for subsequent Creole towns. Chamoiseau underlines the transformative character of Creole societies primarily in his representation of the development of several Creole settlements.62 The adaptable nature of Creole Martiniquan communities is represented most clearly in the chant of ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’. It simultaneously represents the earliest stage in the development of a free Martiniquan society while narrating the effort undertaken by the African-Antillean characters to overcome the psychological pain of slavery. Compared to the syncretic legend of Magdalena Divina in Antoni’s novel, where the period of slavery lies two generations back, Esternome’s chant is consequently based on the dualistic forces between the French coloniser and the recently freed slaves.63 Many of Chamoiseau’s African characters have undergone the trauma of the Middle Passage and experienced labour in bondage. Their physical and/or psychological wounds that stem from this geographical and cultural uprooting and from slavery have therefore not healed. In Divina Trace, by contrast, slavery is portrayed as a heritage of Caribbean societies 62 Milne interprets these dynamics in light of Chamoiseau’s Ecrire en pays dominé where the ‘traces- mémoires’ suggest constant evolution: ‘La Trace est marque concrète: tambour, arbre, bateau, panier, un quartier, une chanson, un sentier qui s’en va… Les mémoires irradient dans la Trace, elles l’habitent d’une présence-sans-matière offerte à l’émotion. Leurs associations, Traces-mémoires, ne font pas monuments, ni ne cristallisent une mémoire unique : elles sont jeu des mémoires qui se sont emmêlées. […] Leurs significations demeurent évolutives, non figées-univoques comme celles du monument’./[The Trace is the concrete mark: drum, tree, boat, basket, district, song, path running away… Memories radiate out from the Trace, they dwell in it with an immaterial presence open to affectivity. Their associations, Trace-Memories, are not monuments, and do not crystallize into a single memory; they are the play of different interwoven memories. […] Their meanings remain in evolution, not fixed and unequivocal like those of a momunent]; Lorna Milne, ‘From Créolité to Diversalité: The Postcolonial Subject in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco’, in Subject Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present, ed. by Paul Gifford and Johnnie Gratton (Amsterdam and Atlanda: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 162-80 (p. 172); and Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominée, p. 130. See also Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Haïti: 1635-1975 (Paris: Hatier, 1991) and Patrick Chamoiseau, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne (Paris: Caisse Nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1994). 63 As pointed out earlier, Aiyaba’s grandmother was the last generation to have experienced slavery in Corpus Christi/Trinidad. Creolisation 160 rather than as an immediate experience. In Esternome’s chant the primarily African- Creole community assumes an almost mythical dimension. This community can be considered creolised insofar as it encompasses various social and ethnic African groups who live together in solidarity rather than being forced together as was the case during slavery. ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’ might be interpreted as a vision of a Creole society that has created an idealised community. Chamoiseau’s idealisation of the Creole community of freed slaves in Noutéka attests to his at times idealised representation of the Antillean past. However, only the short, albeit important section on Noutéka represents the post- slavery period in this glorifying manner. Overall, the novel suggests a more balanced portrayal of the Martiniquan past. Apart from demonstrating the successful creation of Creole settlements, Chamoiseau mentions the hardship of African-Antilleans’ lives both during and after the period of slavery. The ambiguous relationship between the (former) French colonisers and ‘Creoles’ further suggests that Martiniquan society has been marked by tensions from the time of colonialism up to the present. The term ‘chant’ suggests in itself that this passage assumes a myth-like dimension. Both in French and in English, this expression carries the connotation of glorification and praise. Another factor that contributes to this connotation is the temporal distance between the post- abolition period narrated in the chant and the fictional time of writing down the (hi)story of Martinique. The multi-layered story of Texaco is recorded by the ‘Word Scratcher’, who has learnt about the history of this settlement and of the Laborieux family from Marie-Sophie. His written account of the history of Martinique and its inhabitants is a combination of his informant’s memories which she relates to the scribe orally and fragments of her notebooks. The fact that Marie-Sophie tells not only her own story but also that of her father and of other characters contributes to the complexity of the narrative. Distortions in the story and hence the idealisation of the community in Noutéka (as well as in the later settlement of Texaco) stem from both Esternome’s and his daughter’s temporal and emotional distance from that period. It can be inferred from the novel that Noutéka was founded in the 1850s. The story about its community is, however, not written down until the late twentieth century. In addition to Creolisation 161 this time gap, both Esternome and Marie-Sophie have related the story when they were already elderly people which implies that detailed memories (of both Noutéka and Texaco) have faded. Consequently, life in this first free settlement appears more harmonious in retrospect than it might have been in reality. Allusions to certain instances of social and ethnic friction indicate that the different groups of ‘black’ Martiniquans and mulattoes are likely not to have lived together as peacefully as the chant suggests. Thus the unease between maroons and liberated slaves remains after the abolition of slavery, as is indicated by their spatial separation: ‘[t]hey came out, not to say hello, but so we’d know that this place was taken, that we should beat the bush a little further’ (Chamoiseau, p. 125). Consequently, harmony seems to exist between those different groups of Africans who remained in bondage until abolition. It cannot necessarily be extended to the relationship between African-Antilleans and mulattoes nor to maroons.64 In the idealised community of Noutéka, however, the inhabitants respect each other as well as their natural surroundings. Thus the freed slaves manage to settle on rich soil, and they lay out a ‘Creole garden’, which is based on the laws of nature and suggests harmony with the natural elements rather than ‘tir[ing] the soil’ (Chamoiseau, p. 128). Apart from underlining the mythical dimension associated with the word ‘chant’, Chamoiseau’s choice of this term also hints at his preoccupation with the relationship between the spoken word and the written text. As I will explain in my analysis of key examples of linguistic transformation in the novel, the writer attributes great significance to the musicality of the language and tries to adapt it to the largely oral tradition of the Antilles. Throughout the text he hints at the ambiguities implied in the task of the ‘Word Scratcher’ to write down a story that has been passed on orally. This conflict is expressed, for instance, in the scribe’s wondering whether filming Marie- 64 For a discussion of the relationship between maroons and slaves see, for instance, Richard D. E. Burton, Le Roman marron: études sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), pp. 51-58 (pp. 57-8). Creolisation 162 Sophie would have rendered greater justice to her oral account than writing it down (Chamoiseau, p. 389).65 The Creole quarter that is constructed by the first freed slaves stands for freedom from colonial oppression and dependence as well as a life in nature rather than in the sugar cane business, represented by the plantation and the ‘factory’ (Chamoiseau, p. 130): ‘To say Quarter is to say: blacks who came out of freedom and entered life through this side of the land. Plantation meant: Big Hutch, service buildings, bound-up land, and blacks. Quarter meant: sun, wind, only God’s eye watching […]’ (Chamoiseau, p. 128) [emphasis in original]. The chant of Noutéka suggests that harmonious relationships between different social, cultural and ethnic groups existed primarily in this first Creole quarter. However, the various settlements through which the first freed slaves pass on their way from the plantations to the market towns of the City are dominated by one particular ethnic group. Having left the plantations of the békés, the freed slaves meet ‘békés’ blackwomen’ (Chamoiseau, p. 124), maroons (Chamoiseau, p. 125) and mulattoes (Chamoiseau, p. 125). These different groups show either indifference or hostility towards the former slaves. They still seem to be anchored in the social hierarchies imposed on Caribbean societies during slavery. The maroons, for instance, still despise black people because the recently freed slaves were given their liberty whereas the maroons had fought for it (Chamoiseau, p. 125). Marie-Sophie’s comment in the notebook that ‘[f]rom them we could only expect contempt’ and that former slaves were well aware of that ‘piece of history’ indicates that she rejects this historical fact as a justification for the hostility between maroons and recently freed slaves (Chamoiseau, p. 125). The contempt that békés, mulattoes and maroons show towards the freed slaves is posited as a heritage of the system of slavery. They are reminiscent of the colour code that has played an important role in Antillean societies since the 65 For further critical discussions of the relationship between orality and writing see, for example, Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘Que faire de la parole? Dans la tracée mystérieuse de l’oral à l’écrit’, in Ecrire la ‘parole de la nuit’: La nouvelle littérature antillaise, ed. by Ralph Ludwig (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994); Marion Pausch, ‘Exprimer la complexité antillaise à l’aide de la tradition orale. Interview avec Patrick Chamoiseau’, Matatu, 12 (1994), p. 155. Creolisation 163 beginning of slavery and colonialism. As the former slaves gradually ascend into the hills they seem to leave behind some of these social and ethnic tensions. Only the settlements in the hills are characterised by freedom and solidarity (Chamoiseau, p. 128). The quarters on the plains, however, ‘meant the same thing as plantation’ (Chamoiseau, p. 128). In other words, the oppression of black people continues there insofar as they are now exploited as contract workers.66 In Texaco the issues of recreation and transformation are closely related to the formation of a Creole cultural identity and the development of a Creole Martiniquan society after the abolition of slavery.67 Thus the first freed slaves deliberately follow a path leading away from colonialism. In deciding where to go these Martiniquans have to listen to their hearts: ‘[t]he Trails were therefore something other than the colonial roads’ (Chamoiseau, p.130). As this quotation indicates, the traumatic experiences of the Middle Passage and slavery prevent any conciliation between coloniser and colonised immediately after the abolition of slavery. Although it is pointed out that black Martiniquans eventually have to reach some form of accommodation with the white population of the island, they still have to follow their own beliefs and retain their own life-style: ‘[l]ater we had to connect the Trails with roads going to the factory. But the Trails still remained something other’ (Chamoiseau, p. 130). This sharp distinction between French and Creole communities in Martinique is based on a clear attempt made by the colonised to avoid complete domination of the French colonial culture. 66 See, for instance, Oruno D. Lara, De l’Oubli à l’histoire: espace et identité caraïbes (Guadeloupe, Guyane, Haïti, Martinique) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998), pp. 45-46; Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, pp. 308-09. The authors of Mémoires de la traite négrière underline that the abolition of slavery ‘marque une rupture entre servitude et liberté, mais cette dernière est vécue comme une promesse plutôt que comme un fait. L’abolition ne met fin ni au racisme ni aux inégalités’./[marks a rupture between servitude and liberty but that the latter is lived like a promise rather than as a fact. Abolition does not put an end neither to racism nor to inequality.]; Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, preface by Maryse Condé, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), p. 23. 67 For a further investigation of subjectivity and identity in Chamoiseau’s work, particularly in Texaco, see Milne, ‘From Créolité to Diversalité’, p. 170. Creolisation 164 Chamoiseau seems to suggest that forms of cultural and social recreation, which largely resist French influences, lead to the development of characteristically Creole Martiniquan societies. In the aftermath of slavery different cultural traditions are transformed primarily within these Creole communities from which French colonisers are initially excluded. As Milne argues, Noutéka stands for a place that Esternome and the other freed slaves can, for the first time, claim as their own.68 Representing the start of a new period in the history of black Martiniquans, this quarter promises an ‘ideal, harmonious relationship between human being and landscape’.69 It is thus portrayed as an Edenic place where the black Martiniquan community seems to arrogate to itself what Walcott calls the ‘Adamic’ task of naming or of creating. In other words, freed slaves establish a community that sets itself apart from the capital, the life of oppression on the plantations, and from African societies insofar as blacks from different countries and tribes live together in Martinique. As Nnadi points out, Madame Ibo recalls the Nigerian origin of many black Antilleans, and ‘Grandpapa of the dungeon’ is presented as ‘[man] from Guinea’ (Chamoiseau, p. 36).70 Chamoiseau attributes great importance to the differentiation between an imposed sense of community during slavery and the sense of liberation and solidarity underlying the voluntary co-habitation in Noutéka. As he explains in an interview: Ce qu’il faut comprendre pour ce nous, c’est que l’esclavage, c’est un nous forcé obligatoire, c’est-à-dire qu’on est tous ensemble, on est tous des nègres, on travaille ensemble, on se réveille ensemble, on marche ensemble vers le champ, on revient ensemble. C’est vraiment le nous forcé, l’espèce de communauté obligatoire totalitaire./[What one has to understand about this we is that slavery is a forced obligatory we, which means that we are all together, we are Negroes, we work together, we 68 Milne, ‘From Créolité to Diversalité’, p. 169. 69 Milne, ‘From Créolité to Diversalité’, p. 169. 70 For references to different locations in Africa see Nnadi, ‘Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique’, pp. 77, 89 endnotes 7-8. Creolisation 165 wake up together, we march together to the field, we return together. It really is the forced we, a sort of obligatory totalitarian community.]71 In contrast to this imposed sharing of the same space during slavery, the Creole settlement conveys the illusion of a voluntary solidarity and the creation of a new black Martiniquan society in which ‘[h]elping each other was the law, a helping hand to do what was possible’ (Chamoiseau, p. 131).72 The driving forces behind this new sense of freedom and solidarity are what Chamoiseau calls ‘individualist’ and ‘communitarian forces’. Rather than being forced together according to the dictates of slavery, people can now choose to help each other: ‘Ce nous-là est constitué de forces individualistes et de forces communautaires qui sont dans une alchimie, un système de force qui vont dans tous les sens. […] Ce je qui répond, qui refusait le nous esclavagiste, ce je construit encore du nous’./[That we is constituted by individualistic forces and community forces which are in an alchemy, a system of force that go in all directions. […] This I that responds, which refused the we from slavery, this I still constructs a we’.]73 Chamoiseau thus indicates a clear rupture between structures imposed by the French colonisers, and the development of a new Martiniquan society which differs considerably from ancestral societies and from French communities. The experience of colonial violence seems to be the main reason for the ambivalent or even hostile relationship between African-Martiniquans and the (former) French colonisers. As Marie-Sophie argues, they ‘have shed tears’ and have shown the colonisers that they ‘[have been able to] fight too’ since the period of slavery (Chamoiseau, p. 34). The friction between Texaco and the neighbouring capital of Fort- de-France is therefore ‘a very ancient war’ (Chamoiseau, p. 10). A gradual 71 Delphine Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’ (Martinique, 10 August 1995), in Perret, p. 254. 72 The mutual help in Creole communities is also addressed in Maximin’s novel Soufrières where private and institutionalised co-operation in Creole settlements in Guadeloupe are mentioned. Daniel Maximin, Soufrières (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), p. 39. 73 Delphine Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’ (Martinique, 10 August 1995), quoted in Perret, p. 255. Creolisation 166 accommodation between Texaco and Fort-de-France, and likewise between African and European Martiniquans, does not take place until Marie-Sophie and the French town planner reach a mutual agreement over the future character of the Creole settlement.74 Chamoiseau’s emphasis on this highly ambiguous relationship between the two main ethnic groups in Martinique contrasts considerably with Antoni’s representation of the peaceful living together of various entirely different cultural groups in Trinidad. Even though the chant of ‘The Noutéka of the Hills’ constitutes only a short section in the novel, great significance is attributed to it by Marie-Sophie. The creation of this settlement is central to Esternome’s and his daughter’s memories insofar as it formed the basis for all further Creole settlements. Since Marie-Sophie is the founder of Texaco, the development of Creole Martiniquan communities is of particular interest to her.75 The ethnic origin of Esternome and his daughter reinforces both the sense of a mythical original Creole settlement and similarly Chamoiseau’s focus on the African heritage in Texaco. Marie-Sophie is the offspring of a former African slave, who has passed on his perception of Martiniquan society and historical events to his daughter. The overall focus in the novel is thus on the history of African-Antillean communities in Martinique, which initially developed separately not only from plantations or towns of békés but also from East Indian villages. Historically, East Indians throughout the Caribbean have largely remained among themselves rather than mixing with other ethnic groups. They were usually separated from other ethnic groups on the basis of culture, religion, ethnicity, legal restrictions and because of their relatively late arrival in the Caribbean compared to Africans.76 As 74 See, for instance, Chamoiseau, p. 6: ‘A road called Pénétrante West joins the neighborhood of Texaco to Fort-de-France. Messianic arrival of the urban planner in Texaco. Beginning of rehabilitation’ [emphasis in original]. 75 Milne refers to the flexibility and adaptability that is required by Creole Martiniquans to build different settlements in the course of history; Milne, ‘From Créolité to Diversalité’, p. 170. 76 Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad 1783-1962 (Kingston, Port of Spain, London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 116. Creolisation 167 Lowenthal emphasizes, ‘[l]ittle was done […] to bring East Indians and Creoles together. Indians were imported specifically to work on plantations, which were long the only places that they were legally permitted to be. And where East Indians settled, Creoles generally departed’.77 As mentioned above, unlike in the British colonies Guyana and Trinidad, East Indians constituted a minority in Martinique which seems to have reinforced their marginalization on this Francophone island. This implies that East Indians are unlikely to have lived within the African-Antillean communities represented in Texaco. The absence of East Indian characters in the novel is also related to the significance that the abolition of slavery has for the development of a Creole Martiniquan identity. As was emphasized above, the chant of the ‘Noutéka of the Hills’ posits the immediate post-abolition period as an historical moment for the emergence of creolised African-Antillean communities. By portraying slave emancipation as a pivotal moment in Antillean history, Chamoiseau’s novel seems to have anticipated debates about the remembrance of this event which have followed its 150th anniversary in 1998. Texaco can thus be read as a novel that interrogates the ‘effacement de[s] [sociétés esclavagistes antillaises] de l’histoire nationale [de France]’/[wiping out of Antillean slave societies from national French history] by uncovering the occluded (hi)stories of African-Antilleans.78 In Antoni’s novel the development of a Creole Caribbean cultural identity is not related to any specific event such as the abolition of slavery but is situated within the wider context of post-emancipation Trinidadian society. The Anglophone writer portrays creolisation between various ethnic and cultural groups, including Europeans, Africans, West Indians and Amerindians. Antoni combines various cultural elements through his choice of characters and, as I will show below, in his creolised re-writing of the 77 Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 157. 78 Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, p. 25. The authors explain further that ‘[c]e silence […] explique en partie le sentiment de déni «organisé» d’une histoire vécue comme centrale par ces populations’/[this silence […] partly explains the sense of ‘organised’ denial of a history experienced as central by these populations]; Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, p. 25. Creolisation 168 Ramayana. In her role as a saint to whom the various religious groups of Corpus Christi can relate, Magdalena exemplifies this cultural amalgam. Her – assumed – ethnic origins reinforce the claim that she embodies a syncretic strand of creolisation. Carrying a tilak on her forehead, she seems to have East Indian ancestry. While her blood relationship to Amerindians is left uncertain in the novel, she is said to have been raised by the Amerindian tribe of the Warrahoons in the bush until her adolescence.79 The family of Johnny Domingo holds the view that Magdalena is the illegitimate offspring of Barto and Mother Maurina, who might be one-fourth Amerindian.80 Her interpretation and modification of the Ramayana, which she blends with the histories of her family and of Corpus Christi, are necessarily influenced by her upbringing. Situating Valmiki’s original story in the Caribbean, she transposes part of the action to the Amerindian bushland where she imagines an encounter between the East Indian characters of the legend with local Warrahoons (Antoni, pp. 175-76). Although the Amerindian heritage plays only a minor role in Magdalena’s ‘Caribbeanised’ re- narration of the Ramayana and the creolisation of religions and cultures in the Caribbean, occasional references to the Warrahoons are included. Thus it is suggested that Warrahoon religious beliefs have contributed to the religious ‘callaloo’, other parts of which are based on Hinduism and African-Caribbean obeah (Antoni, p. 222).81 It is 79 ‘Warrahoon’ is Antoni’s creolised spelling of the Amerindian Warahun tribe, which, as Patteson points out, was indigenous to Venezuela. In contrast to what is suggested in the novel, only few Warahuns settled in Trinidad. See Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 170, endnote 20; and H. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 224. I will return to the significance of the Amerindian heritage in the Caribbean in my discussion of problematic aspects of the concept of creolisation. In order to highlight the specific situation of Amerindians in this archipelago I will engage with Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale in addition to Texaco and Divina Trace. Apart from Magdalena, Granny Myna is said to be of Amerindian descent. As Pappe Vince tells his grandson, she ‘was in fact the granddaughter of a Warrahoon tribal bushdoctor’; Antoni, p. 365. 80 For further details on the characters in Divina Trace as well as a discussion of the theme of illegitimate offspring and incest see Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 152; and Hawley, ‘Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace’, p. 95. 81 Antoni coins the neologism ‘creoleobeah-Warrahoon’ to refer to some religious and cultural origins of this type of creolisation; Antoni, p. 222. Similarly the composite noun ‘Warrahoon-Windsor chair’ Creolisation 169 worthwhile pointing out that Antoni’s novel suggests a merging between Amerindian and other cultures in Corpus Christi. His fictional representation of creolisation in a particular culturally diverse Caribbean society differs considerably from Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale, which for its part indicates a far more problematic encounter between Amerindians and other ethnic groups. In this text Melville highlights the specific history of Amerindians, which starkly differs from the past of immigrant groups in the Caribbean and which has contributed to their overall isolation from other cultures. I will return to this significant aspect in the final section of this chapter in my discussion of potential problems implied in certain aspects of creolisation. It is interesting that Robert Antoni represents Amerindian peoples as part and parcel of Caribbean history and hence of the process of creolisation itself. Even though they were an insignificant minority compared to Europeans and, above all, Africans and Asians from the nineteenth century onwards, Antoni re-inscribes their history into the past of the island. He thus fictionally pays tribute to their cultural heritage.82 The Anglophone writer represents the Amerindian cultural heritage as a small but crucial factor in Caribbean histories and societies, whereas the Creolists barely mention the significance of indigenous Caribbeans. This omission seems to contradict the claim made in Eloge de la créolité to speak for the development of cultural creolisation in the entire Caribbean archipelago. While the Creolists’ negligence of the specific Amerindian historical development in the archipelago in their Eloge de la créolité represents a significant inconsistency in their argument, Chamoiseau’s fleeting references to the pre- colonial Amerindian past in Texaco (he only mentions the Amerindian presence in pre- suggests that the Amerindian culture has been mixed with European, in this case British, traditions to form the peculiar ‘callaloo’ of Corpus Christi; Antoni, p. 227. 82 There is a greater tendency among Guyanese writers to represent Amerindians in their fiction because continuous presence of the latter has shaped the mainland Caribbean to a greater extent than the islands. Apart from Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale see, for instance, Pauline Melville, Shape-Shifter: Stories (London: Picador, 1990), Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), Tumatumari (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) and The Sleepers of Roraima: a Carib Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). Creolisation 170 colonial Martinique in his chronological table, ‘Milestones in Our Attempts to Conquer the City’ (Chamoiseau, pp. 3-6, esp. p. 3)) can be understood within the historical framework of the novel, which begins with the colonial period of slavery. Having established that ‘Galibis, Arawaks, Caribs occup[ied] the Caribbean islands’ between 3000 BC until 1492, Chamoiseau points out that ‘Caribs and Arawaks are exterminated as slave sugar plantations appear and cities grow’ (Chamoiseau, p. 3).83 He chooses to focus on African-Antillean communities in Martinique and to portray the life story of the Laborieux family rather than to account for the legacy of other cultural groups on the island. Chamoiseau concentrates on creolisation within Martiniquan communities of various African origins, in other words, (former) slaves who have come from different parts and tribes in Africa. Antoni, by contrast, represents a more culturally syncretic form of creolisation that incorporates a number of entirely different cultures. In the following section I will analyse this cultural syncretism more closely, focusing on Antoni’s transformation of certain legends. In his fictional account of the different forms of cultural transformation in the process of creolisation, Antoni draws on several legends that originated in different cultures. The writer establishes intertextual links between the ancient Indian epic of the Ramayana and the Catholic legend of La Divina Pastora, both of which are creatively transformed into a ‘callaloo-like’ Trinidadian story.84 83 Apart from Chamoiseau’s incorporation of some events which are related to his fictional characters in these ‘Milestones in Our Attempts to Conquer the City’, this chronological table is based on historical facts. Historians such as Lowenthal, Butel and Lara also emphasize that indigenous Caribbean people did not remain in the French Antilles; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 179; Butel, Histoire des Antilles françaises, pp. 32-34; Lara, De l’Oubli à l’histoire, pp. 82-87, esp. p. 83. Although there are still some ‘Caribs’ in Trinidad and the Windward islands, most of them are, in fact, only partly of Amerindian origin. As Lowenthal argues, most of them are partly Amerindian, partly Creole; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 178. 84 In his discussion of Divina Trace, Patteson provides the reader with a good summary of the main plot of the twenty-four thousand verse long epic of the Ramayana. Since Patteson focuses on those aspects in the Indian epic that are relevant for a discussion of Antoni’s novel, I will quote his summary of one of the many versions of the Ramayana in its entirety: Creolisation 171 The term ‘callaloo’ already indicates the diversity and creative potential that seem characteristic of the communities of Corpus Christi. The name itself hints at the pre- Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean insofar as it is said to be derived from Arawak (Antoni, p. 317). Choosing this term as one of his leitmotifs in the novel, Antoni thus underlines the significance that the native Indians have had in the Caribbean before its colonisation. Through this leitmotif and Magdalena’s Amerindian origins he writes the Amerindian presence back into Caribbean history.85 Divina Trace thus highlights that Amerindian cultural elements are part and parcel of this religious, ethnic and cultural Trinidadian ‘callaloo’. The cultural richness and fertility of the colonial era is alluded to in the recipe for this Caribbean dish. Three of the main ingredients originate from different countries and thus represent different cultural influences: as an indigenous swamp plant, the dasheen stands for the Caribbean, the okras represent the African heritage of many Caribbeans, and the curry powder recalls the East Indian presence (Antoni, pp. 317-18). The parallel between this typical Caribbean dish and the society of Corpus Christi is explicitly addressed when the island is referred to as a big callaloo in which the individual ‘ingredients’, meaning the different religious, ethnic and cultural groups can no longer be traced: ‘the whole of Corpus Christi was nothing but one big callaloo with all of we boiling up swimming together inside, and nobody could know In the Ramayana, Rama is the son of Dasaratha, the king of Ayodhya, by his wife Kausalya. Dasaratha also has two sons, Lakshman and Satrughna, by his wife Sumitra and another, Bharata, by his wife Kaikeyi. When he attains adulthood, Rama marries Sita, foster daughter of the king of Janaka. Sita lives in the city of Mithila (nicely transformed by Antoni into “Mythmythilia”). Eventually, Rama is banished for fourteen years through the trickery of the jealous Kaikeyi, who is ambitious for her own son. During their exile, Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, the demon ruler of the island of Lanka. The monkey demigod Hanuman [whose version of the story constitutes, in a transformed way, the middle section of Divina Trace] and his monkey army help Rama rescue Sita, and during this period Hanuman tells the embedded story of the monkey race – a subplot that to some extent parallels the main plot but which is probably much older. (Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 159) 85 Significantly, Antoni accounts for the Amerindian heritage in the Caribbean as being part of a larger ethnic and cultural ‘callaloo’. In my comparison of the ethnic origins of the main fictional personae in Texaco and Divina Trace I will return to Antoni’s incorporation of various Amerindian elements in the novel. As I will explain later, Pauline Melville casts a more sceptical eye on the assumption that Amerindians have been creolised in similar ways as other ethnic groups. Her novel suggests that their specific history, which differs considerably from that of all other immigrants to the Caribbean, has not sufficiently been accounted for in claims about creolisation. Creolisation 172 any longer who was who and what was what, much less care to make a difference’ (Antoni, p. 365). Life in the Caribbean constitutes a new beginning where origin and previous social status can hardly be discerned. The ‘callaloo’ represented in Divina Trace can be regarded as a specific Caribbean form of Rushdie’s cultural ‘hotchpotch’. Both metaphors refer to the transformation of existing cultural practices and traditions into new cultural forms in which the various ‘ingredients’ are blended together. However, in Antoni’s novel, this mixing of cultures in the boiling callaloo pot that represents the Caribbean is not necessarily always unproblematic. As the final sub- clause in the above quotation indicates, the enforced encounter of various cultures in the Caribbean also represented geographic and cultural displacement and thus a potential loss of cultural identity. Significantly, however, the conversation between Pappe Vince and his grandson suggests that it seems possible to relate to one’s ancestral culture through the collective consciousness. Memories of the past of both one’s own family and one’s culture have, to some extent, been kept alive on the island through the practice of story-telling as well as in written accounts.86 Obviously details are being changed over time as all (hi)stories are necessarily of a subjective nature. At the same time, however, every generation of the different narrators can contribute their own version of this (hi)story. Just as the Domingo’s (hi)story has been passed on over several generations so is the history of the various cultures in Trinidad still an essential part of their collective consciousness. This implies that even though cultural traditions have been transformed and creolised in the Caribbean over time the different cultural origins are still discernible. Despite these reservations regarding cultural diversity and creolisation, Divina Trace primarily constructs the transformations that different cultural traditions have undergone 86 Like in Texaco the oral tradition in the Caribbean is juxtaposed with written accounts of personal and collective (hi)stories. Just like Chamoiseau’s ‘Word Scratcher’, Pappe Vince in Divina Trace expresses some reservations as to the appropriateness of writing down stories: ‘[W]hy the ass would anybody in they right mind want to read out a story dead, that they could hear in hundred different living versions – each one better than the one before – on any streetcorner or porchstoop they happen to stumble’; Antoni, p. 368 [emphasis in original]. Creolisation 173 in the Caribbean. Such creative cultural transformation is reflected in similar ways in the narrative structures and styles of both Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s novels. Thus the narrative of Texaco encompasses mythic sections (for instance Chamoiseau, pp. 286- 296), a chant (Chamoiseau, pp. 123-132), a historical table (Chamoiseau, pp. 3-6), and references to the Bible. Like the New Testament, the novel opens with the ‘Annunciation’, proceeds to the ‘Sermon’, and concludes with the ‘Resurrection’ – in this case not of (the) Christ but of Texaco.87 Similarly, Divina Trace comprises chapters written in the form of a medical report (Antoni, pp. 26-62) and Magdalena’s recital of her Caribbeanised version of the Ramayana, which is written as a two-part verse (Antoni, pp. 169-96 and 213-24). Also, the novel includes an ‘oracular utterance’, as Patteson characterises it, of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman (Antoni, pp. 197-112), an historical account (Antoni, pp.341-98), as well as sections written in a stream-of- consciousness (Antoni, pp. 141-65, 231-74 and 224-28), to name but the most important ones. In order to reinforce the sense of diversity within Creole societies, both texts have complex, syncretic structures. Texaco and Divina Trace are primarily family sagas, which represent certain aspects of the (post)colonial histories of Martinique and Trinidad respectively through the memories of the protagonists. The inconsistencies in the plots of the texts, like the complex narrative structures which move back and forth in time, reinforce the sense of Caribbean societies as dynamic and ever-changing.88 87 Once the town planner has lost his threat as the representative of the French authorities who will order the destruction of Texaco, the common name by which the inhabitants of this quarter refer to this Frenchman, changes from ‘Scourge’ to ‘the Christ’. For a discussion of the role of the Christian references in Texaco see my master’s dissertation; Angela Brüning, ‘Imagined Realities: Magic Realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2000), pp. 51-52; and Nnadi, ‘Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique’, pp. 78, 83-84, 86-87. 88 In Antoni’s novel – as, indeed, in Chamoiseau’s narrative – the different characters all contribute to the protagonist’s retracing of his past. At the same time, however, they render the story unreliable insofar as their own memories of certain events and dates seem to contradict each other. The age at which Magdalena was supposed to have first come to St. Maggy’s in Corpus Christi varies, for instance, depending on the narrator. According to Mother Maurina, she arrived at the age of thirteen, Creolisation 174 They thus emphasize transformation and creolisation which are represented thematically in Divina Trace and Texaco.89 The polyphonic nature of both texts allows the writers further to represent Caribbean history as it has been perceived by local citizens.90 By basing the plots of the novels on the personal memories of their characters, Antoni and Chamoiseau juxtapose these stories with chronological historiography. Both novels can be regarded as complementary versions to ‘official’ historical accounts. Incorporating but simultaneously fictionalising sections which re-narrate significant events in the histories of Trinidad and Martinique, both writers embrace and creatively transform or ‘creolise’ standard history.91 Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s merging of different narrative styles reflects a productive adaptation of different influences that have shaped Caribbean societies. The narrative structures of both novels thus reinforce the emphasis on creolisation. On a thematic level, the personal story of the Domingo family in Divina Trace highlights the ethnically and culturally diverse character of the island insofar as it borrows from both the Ramayana and the legend of La Divina Pastora. It is reminiscent of the fertility of cross-cultural influences which Harris points out in his concept of the and in Papee Vince’s version of the story she was already fifteen. Similarly, the cause of Magdalena’s death remains unclear. For further details on inconsistencies see Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 152; and Hawley, ‘Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace’, p. 96. In both novels, the advanced age of the protagonists, the characters’ temporal distance from the events and the subjective character of their personal accounts lead to these contradictions. 89 McCusker argues that the non-linearity of Chamoiseau’s novel is supposed to underline the oral influence on the written word; Maeve McCusker, ‘Translating the Creole Voice: From the Oral to the Literary Tradition in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco’, in Reading Across the Lines, ed. by Christopher Shorley and Maeve McCusker (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2000), pp. 117-27 (p. 120). 90 McCusker uses the term ‘polyphonic’ to characterise the style of Texaco and, in fact, of many recent Francophone Caribbean texts; McCusker, ‘Translating the Creole Voice’, p. 118. 91 Antoni dedicates one chapter to Papee Vince’s re-narration of Trinidadian history; Antoni, pp. 341- 98; and Chamoiseau precedes his novel with a chronological table, the so-called ‘Milestones in Our Attempts to Conquer the City’, which accounts for the officially recorded history of Martinique, which he combines with references to dates that have been significant in the lives of his fictional personae; Chamoiseau, pp. 3-6. Creolisation 175 ‘limbo gateway’. In Divina Trace cultural transformation is emphasized through the intertextuality between the different stories from which the novel is composed. As was pointed out above, Antoni draws on the Indian epic of the Ramayana as well as on the legend of La Divina Pastora. He then reassembles these stories in the history of both Corpus Christi/Trinidad and the Domingo family. Through the figure of Barto, Antoni represents (cultural) recreation in his novel most explicitly. Barto, the husband of the black Madonna, is the incarnation of Shiva, the Destroyer, rather than Vishnu, the Preserver.92 Magdalena’s husband is presented as a coloniser and slave-holder who owned Evelina’s African grandmother Aiyaba.93 His characterisation as a destroyer thus alludes to colonial violence during the period of slavery. Antoni briefly refers to slavery but, unlike Chamoiseau, he chooses not to discuss the pre-abolition period of the island of Corpus Christi/Trinidad in detail. The ethnic composition of Martiniquan and Trinidadian societies is portrayed as the main reason for this difference between the two texts. As pointed out above, Chamoiseau deliberately focuses on different African groups and the development of their Creole communities since the abolition of slavery. The Francophone writer only introduces a few minor characters from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, who worked in Martinique as indentured labourers. Thus he briefly mentions the arrival of Madeirans, Chinese and East Indians at the period of gradual industrialisation (Chamoiseau, p. 138). At a later stage in the novel he refers to Horace Ferjule, whose father came from China (Chamoiseau, p. 204). However, the characters who live in the various Creole settlements represented are all of African or mixed African origin. By contrast, the parallels that Antoni establishes between the main characters of Divina Trace and the Ramayana suggest that the former are partly of East Indian descent. Unlike the African- Antillean communities in Texaco, whose ancestors have suffered from the bondage of slavery, many of Antoni’s fictional personae seem to have arrived on the island as indentured labourers. This means that the trauma of slavery has marked the primarily 92 Patteson, Caribbean Passages, p. 159. 93 Evelina is the Domingos’ black servant. Creolisation 176 Asian-Caribbean community of St. Maggy’s less than the African-Martiniquan communities portrayed in Texaco. (Admittedly, the living and working conditions of indentured labourers were hard. In contrast to African slaves, however, East Indian indentured labourers retained their official freedom rather than being legally treated like goods.) Antoni’s reference to violence and oppression during the colonial period is reminiscent of the view shared by most Anglophone and Francophone critics that this traumatic experience constitutes the basis of the collective memory of Caribbean societies. Simultaneously, however, Antoni – like Harris, Walcott, Glissant and the Creolists – emphasizes the paradoxical fertility and cultural richness to which the slave trade and colonialism have led. In Antoni’s novel the change from Vishnu, Sita’s husband in the Ramayana, to Shiva, Magdalena’s husband in Divina Trace, thus establishes a link between the ancient Indian epic and slavery in the Caribbean. Although Antoni associates Barto with Shiva, the god of destruction, rather than with Vishnu, the preserver, he foregrounds the possibility of overcoming the trauma of slavery. Barto personifies slavery and colonial oppression but, unlike Shiva, lacks the Third Eye or tilak. Consequently he can damage or destroy lives on his estate or in private relationships but not on a larger scale. In the context of Caribbean history this means that, despite its oppression and violence, slavery and colonialism have not led to an apocalypse, since continuous resistance has eventually brought about the official end of colonialism. In the novel, slavery is therefore not represented as a solely harrowing experience that has engendered amnesia, but it is insinuated that oppression and destruction can lead to recreation.94 Preservation by contrast, might, in the Caribbean context, be associated with stasis, with attempts to recuperate a lost past. Antoni’s 94 This interpretation of Barto as a destroyer figure is reinforced by the underlying positive tone of the novel and the emphasis on beginning rather than end. As Johnny points out, ‘[t]here is no end to any of this. There is only beginning, and between, and beginning again’; Antoni, p. 62. The two versions of the Ramayana as passed on by Valmiki and Magdalena respectively, as well as the contesting stories that form one of the plots in Divina Trace, illustrate the creative potential associated with myth and story making. Creolisation 177 scepticism towards notions of a fixed identity and stasis reinforces the general emphasis in contemporary Caribbean writing on the dynamic processes of recreation and transformation.95 In Texaco the gradual integration and adaptation of the various African cultural heritages can be interpreted as an example of creolisation between similar cultures which share the history of slavery and forced displacement from the African continent. Chamoiseau’s focus on cultural transformation and creolisation between several groups of African-Antilleans differs from Antoni’s fictional exploration of creolisation between entirely different ethnic and cultural communities, namely Africans, some Amerindians, Europeans and, above all, Asians. Both novels thus represent different case studies of the same process of fertile cross-cultural influences and adaptations. Just as the various critical interpretations of the concept of creolisation have shown, Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s fictional representations of different aspects of this process underscore the fluid and transformative character of creolisation. The specific manifestations of creolisation thus vary depending on the particular historical and cultural contexts. Significantly, however, the underlying ideas of fertility and transmutability are encompassed in all the different forms of creolisation. In contrast to the Francophone writer, Antoni’s portrayal of religious syncretism, diversity and cultural mixing demonstrates that the concept of a ‘creolised’ society need not be rooted in African traditions as is proposed in the Eloge de la créolité and especially in Texaco. In Chamoiseau’s novel the creation of Creole communities usually takes place in relation to French communities in Martinique. These Creole communities either attempt to set themselves apart from white settlements, or establish themselves in 95 Other contemporary writers who emphasize the dynamic nature of Caribbean societies are, for instance, Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996); Neil Bissoondath, Innocence of Age (Toronto: Knopf, 1992) and A Casual Brutality (London: Bloomsbury, 1988); Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (London: Pan Books, 1994); Maryse Condé, Traversée de la mangrove (Paris: Mercure de France, 1989) and Chair piment (Paris: Mercure de France, 2002); Edouard Glissant, Mahagony: roman (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987). Creolisation 178 the vicinity of French colonial settlements as is seen in the relationship between Texaco and Fort-de-France. This interrelation between Martinique and France is manifest throughout the novel not only with regard to settlements but also in terms of history. As pointed out earlier, Chamoiseau criticises the allegedly ‘Western’ binary oppositions such as ‘History’ and histories, French and Creole, orality and writing. At the same time the novel reveals attempts to define a cultural identity in Martinique which distinguishes itself from metropolitan French values and traditions. This ambiguity can be related to the interstitial position of the French overseas departments.96 While Antilleans voted to remain part of France in 1949 and thus ‘voluntarily rejected’ official decolonisation, the colonial past still haunts these islands and puts a considerable strain on the relationship with the former ‘mother country’.97 As McCusker explains, the relationship between the Antilles and the French ‘hexagone’ is ‘characterized more by the insidious silencing of dissident voices than by the brutal and overt repression of the decolonized state’.98 This ambivalence in Antillean societies between accepting and opposing their close economic, political and cultural connection to France is thus an underlying element in most contemporary Antillean criticism and fiction. While (re)creation as presented in Texaco is primarily based on resistance to French domination, Antoni’s novel illustrates the extent to which various cultural traditions have been transformed in the Caribbean. Displacement and rupture are not depicted as solely traumatising experiences; rather, emphasis is placed on the assumption that uprooting and destruction can engender recreation. Antoni’s view of the history of the Caribbean is thus reminiscent of Walcott’s claim that history ought to be accepted as it is without nostalgia or a sense of revenge. For Antoni this acceptance of the past seems to imply an acknowledgement of the various religious, cultural and ethnic groups that have influenced the Caribbean in general and Trinidad in particular. The ‘callaloo’-like 96 McCusker relates the interstitial nature of the Caribbean to its geography and history; McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. 97 McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. 98 McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. Creolisation 179 society portrayed in Divina Trace thus ironically illustrates the concept of a ‘creolised’ Caribbean archipelago praised in the Eloge de la créolité and, to a lesser extent in Texaco. In his representation of a culturally and ethnically creolised community on the fictionalised island of Trinidad, Antoni highlights the productive transformation of the various cultural influences in that society. By subtly merging various languages, cultural beliefs and ethnic traditions, the Anglophone writer seems to transpose some of the Creolists’ claims made in Eloge de la créolité to the Anglophone Caribbean. His novel thus indicates that the ideas developed in the discourse of créolité are not necessarily restricted to the Francophone Caribbean context. The social and cultural changes that Caribbean societies have undergone since the period of colonialism inevitably imply linguistic transformation also. In the Caribbean, linguistic transformations have occurred in the form of the development of Creole from different African and European languages (mainly French) as well as the juxtaposition of African, Asian and European languages. Within this linguistic diversity, the positions attributed to the different languages have reinforced the social strata in Caribbean societies. As I have argued in some detail in Chapter One, the imposition of the colonial language on a newly colonised territory was an important strategy used by the European colonial powers in their attempt to suppress local cultures and dissident voices. While the post-slavery British colonies in the Caribbean were governed through indirect rule which often left some constrained space for local adjustments, the French colonial policy was one of assimilation. As Adolphe Roberts argues, ‘[t]he Gallic concept of overseas territory […] sought to make each holding an integral part culturally, politically, and commercially of the homeland. The colonists in Saint Domingue and Martinique so loved their traditions that no new civilizations sprang up’.99 The imposition of the imperial language was an integral part of British and especially of French colonial policies. French was promoted as the language of ‘civilisation’ to a greater extent than the English language, especially since it was associated with the ideals of the Enlightenment, with knowledge and reason. As I have discussed in Chapter 99 Walter Adolphe Roberts, The French in the West Indies (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1942), pp. 66-67. Creolisation 180 One, the supposed ‘superiority’ of the white coloniser was principally based on the ‘progressive’ movements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the predominance of rational thinking as opposed to intuition and belief. Local languages, by contrast, were regarded as ‘inferior’, and their use (in public) was officially forbidden, again particularly in the French territories. The co-existence of French and African languages was reinforced by the fact that mulattoes rather than black slaves learned the colonial languages. Unlike slaves, many mulattoes tended to be released from bondage and could thus benefit from access to education. Constituting an ‘intermediary class’ between Europeans and black Caribbeans, many mulattoes advanced to a professional, educated elite.100 One can therefore only speak of a wider policy of assimilation through the imposition of the colonial language after the abolition of slavery. Since most non-European colonial subjects did not speak English or French respectively upon their arrival in the Caribbean, they still continued to use their local languages amongst themselves. Gradually, the various African languages merged into what became Creole. By contrast, Hindi, until the late nineteenth century, remained a largely separate language, which was only spoken within the distinct East Indian settlements in the Anglophone Caribbean.101 Only at that time did East Indians gradually become more ‘creolised’.102 These distinct historical developments have to be borne in mind when interpreting Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s representations of linguistic creolisation. While the co- existence and gradual creolisation of different languages in the individual Caribbean islands is portrayed in both novels, the specific forms of linguistic transformation are necessarily adapted to the respective cultural contexts. As such, both novels can be interpreted as responses to the linguistic situations in Martinique and Trinidad 100 Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), pp. 22, 161. 101 Hindi played such a significant role in Trinidad in the mid- to late nineteenth century that plans were developed to teach Hindi not only in schools for Indians but even in certain common schools; Wood, Trinidad in Transition, p. 287. 102 Wood, Trinidad in Transition, p. 301. Creolisation 181 respectively. Antoni fictionally accounts for the linguistic diversity which has influenced Trinidadian society in the course of its colonial history, whereas Chamoiseau focuses on the relationship between French and Creole. Texaco is not written in Creole; yet Chamoiseau does not write in ‘standard’ French, either. Instead, his fictional work displays shifts between standard French and creolised expressions which are meant to ‘sound’ Creole. In Hazaël-Massieux’s words, he ‘écrit le créole directement en français’/[writes Creole directly in French].103 As I will elaborate below in my comparison of linguistic transformation in Divina Trace and Texaco, this practice which Chamoiseau maintains throughout his fictional texts seems to contradict the praise of the Creole language in the Eloge de la créolité. In this manifesto, the authors claim that ‘Creole, our first language, we the Caribbeans, the Guyanese, the Mascarins, is the initial means of communication of our deep self; of our collective unconscious, of our common genius, and it remains the river of our alluvial Creoleness’.104 While this theoretical assertion and Chamoiseau’s choice of language in his fictional work might appear contradictory, I would argue that Texaco can, in fact, be regarded as a novel that represents linguistic creolisation. In this novel he draws on and creatively transforms different languages and linguistic registers that have shaped the current linguistic situation in the French Antilles. My comparison of Texaco and Divina Trace has thus far revealed the differences in Chamoiseau’s and Antoni’s representations of specific manifestations of cultural and ethnic creolisation in sociologically and historically different Caribbean societies. Antoni represents a cultural ‘callaloo’ in which many different cultural influences blend together, whereas Chamoiseau focuses to a greater extent on the ambivalent relationship between African and French Martiniquans. While the writers’ transformation of language is still closely related to the specific societies represented in the novels, it 103 Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux, ‘Chamoiseau, cet écrivain qui écrit le créole directement en français’, Portulan, issue ‘Esthétique noire?’ (October 2000), pp. 189-202 (p. 199). 104 Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 104. Creolisation 182 constitutes a similarly affirmative approach towards the creolisation of the languages of both the (former) colonisers and the colonised. Chamoiseau’s use of language suggests the possibility of transformative processes that take into account the language and structures of both the former coloniser and the colonised. I would argue that Chamoiseau’s ‘creolisation’ or, as Milan Kundera calls it, his ‘chamoisification’ of the French language reflects transformation that has led to the formation of a cultural identity in the French Antilles.TP105 PT In his fiction Chamoiseau incorporates and plays on the different linguistic registers that are available to him.TP106 PT Although the Creolists stress the significance of Creole − as opposed to French − for establishing a cultural identity in the Francophone Antilles, Chamoiseau, especially in his fiction, emphasises the creative potential of a supposedly bi- or multilingual society. He states that ‘[o]ur primary richness, we the Creole writers, is to be able to speak several languages’.TP107 PT Drawing on both Creole and French allows the Martiniquan writer to explore the linguistic fertility of the individual languages or, as he calls it, ‘mobiliser la totalité qui [lui] est offerte, tant du point de vue de l’oralité que de l’écriture’/[to mobilise the totality that is offered to him, both from the point of view of orality and of writing].TP108 PT In contrast to Chamoiseau’s emphasis on cultural recreation, which largely rejects French influences, and on the establishment of new, ‘Creole’ societies, his use of language represents a form of transformation that combines Caribbean and ‘Western’ elements. His drawing on Creole as well as French words and sentence structures P 105 P Frédéric d’Oran, ‘Le Marqueur de Mémoire’, France Iles, 12 (Dec 1992, Jan and Feb 1993), p. 28. P 106 P As McCusker points out, Chamoiseau resorts to several oral elements such as ‘folk tales, songs and proverbs’ in order to adapt the language in Texaco to the oral register; McCusker, ‘Translating the Creole Voice’, p. 119. McCusker refers to further linguistic features to which Chamoiseau resorts so as to create an ‘orality effect’, for instance deictic references, the repetition of words, onomatopoeia, incomplete sentences as well as local proverbs and sayings; McCusker, ‘Translating the Creole Voice’, pp. 120-21. P 107 P Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 104. P 108 P Chamoiseau, ‘Que faire de la parole?’, p. 158 Creolisation 183 suggests a productive transformation of various linguistic elements that reflect the different ethnic, social and cultural influences in the Francophone Caribbean. This means that Chamoiseau neither imitates French and Creole nor ‘writes back’ against French literature and language but rather transforms various linguistic elements in order to create a ‘creolised’ language.109 In his fiction Chamoiseau thus tries to foreground what he calls a ‘corrélation aimante [de sa propre langue] avec les autres langues’/[a loving correlation of one’s own language with the other languages].110 As is generally acknowledged in Francophone Caribbean criticism, Chamoiseau switches codes between and within paragraphs and sentences which has the effect of dramatising and exploiting the ‘full heteroglossic potential of contemporary Martinique’.111 If the author translates Creole phrases, he usually inserts the French version directly in the passage and not in a footnote. To give but one example, he juxtaposes the two languages with each other in the following sentence: ‘Alors elle m’abaissa la tête et me dit: Prédié ba papa’w ich mwen, Prie pour ton papa, mon fils…’ (Chamoiseau, p. 53). This repetition in the form of a translation evokes an echo effect and consequently reinforces the message of the particular statement.112 At other times, however, no literal or other form 109 I use ‘creolisation’ in inverted commas here because Chamoiseau does not transform French into Creole, in other words creolise the French language; rather, he creates a language of his own in which he juxtaposes various linguistic registers and styles of French and Creole. In Ecrire en pays dominé Chamoiseau points out that ‘Deviner en langage une parole mienne n’est pas créoliser les langues, les jouer en mécanique de petits mélanges, ni même oraliser l’écrit’./[To imagine in a language my own word is not to creolise [different] languages, to play them through a mechanic of small mixtures, nor even to oralise the written word.]; Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, p. 256 [emphasis added]. 110 Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, p. 253. 111 Richard D.E. Burton, ‘Débrouya pa peché, or il y a toujours moyen de moyenner: Patterns of Opposition in the Fiction of Patrick Chamoiseau’, Callaloo, 16:2 (1993), pp. 466 - 481 (p. 478). See also Hazaël-Massieux, ‘Chamoiseau, cet écrivain’, p. 191, p. 199. 112 Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, ‘Littérature et diglossie: créer une langue métisse ou la «chamoisification» du français dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau’, Traduction, terminologie, rédaction: études sur le texte et ses transformations, 9: 1 (1996), 155-76, (p. 161); and Pascale DeSouza, ‘Inscription du créole dans les textes francophones: de la citation à la créolisation’, in Maryse Condé et Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds, Penser la créolité (Paris: Karthala, 1995), pp. 173- 90 (p. 182). Creolisation 184 of translation is given. This technique of free paraphrasing constitutes a means of guiding the reader. The writer thus discloses what he or the narrator considers relevant and an adequate translation in the specific context of the novel. In the following sentence, for instance, Chamoiseau adapts the French translation to the meaning he wants to give the passage: ‘Man Ibo ho, Man Ibo, sa tala té yé’ (Chamoiseau, p. 127). Literally this sentence means ‘Hé Mère Ibo, Mère Ibo: qu’est-ce que c’était?’, but the author transforms it into ‘Madame Ibo qu’est-ce que c’était dites donc hé bien bon dieu…?’113 Inserting Creole sentences in the novel without translating them into French or paraphrasing them emphasizes the gap that exists between Creole and French.114 Some critics apply Kundera’s notion of ‘chamoisification’ to the liberties which Chamoiseau takes with language and style.115 The ‘chamoisified’ expressions in his fiction allude to the establishment of ‘creolised’ societies celebrated in the Eloge de la créolité. The ethnic and cultural diversity which, as the manifesto suggests, characterises Martiniquan societies thus seems to be best reflected in Chamoiseau’s linguistic creativity. The writer claims that the expressions he uses in his fiction correspond to an essentially Martiniquan view of reality, namely to an understanding of life in the Caribbean that resembles a vision rather than reality. In his words, ‘il y a un lexique qui est le nôtre, qui correspond à une vision des choses, à une désaliénation aussi, que j’utilise’/[there is a lexis [which he uses] that is ours [i.e. black Martiniquan], which corresponds to a vision of things and also to a desalination].116 Chamoiseau modifies French terms that resemble or are based on Creole expressions in order to represent this vision of Martiniquan culture and society.117 In other words, he underlines the fictional character of his novels, texts which are not meant to merely reflect 113 N’Zengou-Tayo, ‘Littérature et diglossie’, p. 161. 114 N’Zengou-Tayo, ‘Littérature et diglossie’, p. 161. 115 N’Zengou-Tayo, ‘Littérature et diglossie’, p. 155. As I have explained above, this classification implies that the author uses neologisms which he passes off as Creole. 116 Delphine Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’ (Martinique, 2 August 1995),, quoted in Perret, p. 166. 117 Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 166. Creolisation 185 Martiniquan reality. In addition, his portrait of his ‘vision’ of Martinique and, above all, his particular playing with language makes his fiction difficult to access for both Francophone and Creolophone readers. As Hazaël-Massieux points out, ‘[i]l s’agit pour l’auteur martiniquais d’essayer de faire entrer le lecteur dans un univers culturel particulier dont les significations véritables échapperont en grande partie à celui qui ne se soucie au mieux que de la signification immédiate d’un mot’/[the Martiniquan author tries to make the reader enter a particular cultural universe the real meanings of which will escape those who only pay attention to the immediate meaning of a word].118 A deeper knowledge of and investigation into Chamoiseau’s imaginative and cultural universe is thus required to understand the various layers of his fiction. Chamoiseau’s choice of language is interrelated with aesthetic principles that determine his particular style. While he gives prominence to words and constructions that are used by Martiniquan speakers of Creole, he simultaneously pays attention to the resonance of the respective expressions and the musicality of the overall sentence and text. In his choice of language Chamoiseau thus takes aesthetic aspects into consideration.119 He states that he ‘change le sens d’une phrase pour la musique’/[changes the sense of a sentence for reasons of its musicality].120 In Chamoiseau’s fiction the sound of the words and phrases engenders different associations, depending on the reader’s culture and personal experience. As Hazaël-Massieux analyses in detail, the precise meaning of terms such as ‘chabin/chabine’ or the archaisms ‘lianes mibi’, ‘siguine’ and ‘fil-mahot’ are difficult to establish for Creolophone and Francophone readers. In order to understand such expressions, the reader needs to be familiar with their literal meaning but also with their connotations and the exact literary context in which they appear.121 The meaning of the individual words is therefore not precisely fixed but fluid. 118 Hazaël-Massieux, ‘Chamoiseau, cet écrivain’, p. 200. 119 Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 166. 120 Perret, ‘Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau’, p. 166. 121 Hazaël-Massieux, ‘Chamoiseau, cet écrivain’, 194-96. Creolisation 186 Chamoiseau’s creative use of language can be interpreted as a sign of literary emancipation.122 In other words, rather than imitating or rejecting the influences of French literature and language in the Francophone Caribbean, he plays on the co- existence of French and Creole, adapting both languages to his own style. The ‘chamoisified’ language manifest in his fiction suggests a productive bridging of the gap between French and Creole.123 By emphasising the painful ruptures in the history of Caribbean societies, Chamoiseau hints at difficulties implied in (forced) cross-cultural encounters, especially of those between (former) colonisers and colonised. His rewriting of Antillean histories thus indicates a certain scepticism as to cultural creolisation that has characterised the relationship between African-Antilleans and metropolitan French. His transformation of the French and Creole language, by contrast, suggests a more affirmative approach towards creolisation. The creative use of language that refutes the establishment of binaries between different languages and between the Caribbean and the metropolises is manifest in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction. With regard to language there seems to be a general tendency in Caribbean literature to focus on transformation and recreation rather than on rupture. Like the Francophone writer, Antoni coins neologisms by merging words from the same or different languages, exploiting a range of linguistic registers.124 Both writers thus emphasise transformation and recreation rather than rupture. However, while Texaco represents transformation primarily in terms of 122 His juxtaposition of French and Creole can be regarded as innovative, especially since Creole has hardly been considered adequate for literary purposes until recently. The author does not closely follow any particular writing tradition; rather, he chooses to establish his own discourse. Instead of simply writing back against colonialism, for instance by plainly opposing Western prejudices against black people, he creates his own literary form with which he questions the supremacy of the world’s super-powers. 123 ‘Creolised’ language is characteristic of most of Chamoiseau’s fictional texts and of Solibo Magnifique in particular; Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1988). 124 Apart from Divina Trace, Antoni’s short stories convey his playing on language; Robert Antoni, Blessed is the Fruit and My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales. Creolisation 187 language, Antoni’s linguistic creativity reinforces the ethnic and cultural diversity of Corpus Christi/Trinidad that is highlighted throughout his novel. To an extent, the linguistic characteristics of Texaco and Divina Trace seem to reflect the ethnic situation of the individual islands as well as their diverse cultural influences during the period of slavery and colonialism. While Chamoiseau creolises French which has been the dominant language in Martinique since 1635, Antoni’s transformation of a range of European languages accounts for the various colonising powers that have influenced Trinidad during colonialism. Trinidad’s cultural diversity addressed in Divina Trace is alluded to in terms of language in Hanuman’s ‘monkey talk’. In this chapter, Antoni modifies English, French, Spanish and, hinting at their common linguistic origin, Latin expressions (Antoni, pp. 197-212). The following quotation from Hanuman’s ‘writeread[ing]’ exemplifies his juxtaposition and transformation of various languages: Haya paz then assamensis, you monkeygrammarying, you raja urogale he boldface: ‘Guantibo fa Rama here if you wajank, he potto he head ocupado, muy! Aye-aye Kishkindha me guenon quadrapeddaling, Bali mekaponkleme solo! Cromagnum me too sweet Tara doodoo, macaque unpeu zinganthropussy beaucoup, ouioui?’(Antoni, p. 198) In this quotation the predominant language of the novel, English, is broken up by Spanish and French words as well as by ‘monkeytalk’ such as ‘assamensis’ or ‘mekaponkleme’. ‘Haya paz’/[have peace], ‘ocupado, muy’/[very busy] and the neologisms ‘guantibo’ [first person future of ‘guantir’] and ‘me guenon’ [‘me’ and third person present tense of ‘guenar’ or ‘guaner’] can be identified as Spanish words, and ‘macaque unpeu’/[macaque a bit] as well as ‘beaucoup, ouioui’/[much, yes yes] as French terms that are spelt differently (the standard French forms ‘un peu’ and ‘oui oui’ are written in one word). While the meaning of the individual terms can be understood, they only clarify the sense in this section to a minor extent. Most of Hanuman’s ‘monkeytalk’ is therefore based on associations. Antoni’s display of a variety of European languages is reminiscent of the fact that Trinidadian language – just like its culture – has been influenced by a number of different colonising powers. The link between language and colonialism is reinforced by the writer’s allusion to social Creolisation 188 Darwinism in expressions such as ‘[d]arwining’ (Antoni, p. 197), ‘[s]urvivalofdefittest’ (Antoni, p. 199) and ‘[h]umannature: you forget you a monkey’ (Antoni, p. 204). Similarly the terms ‘Cromagnum’ and ‘zinganthropussy’ (through the stem ‘anthro’) in this quotation refer to social anthropology, to the development of human kind. As the novel reminds us, the ‘theory’ of social Darwinism was posited as a ‘justification’ for colonisation by all European powers. As many European languages can be traced back to Latin, their common root, so the colonial history of Trinidad has to be seen not only in the context of colonising practices of a particular country but also of European colonialism in general. This means that Antoni presents colonialism as a European phenomenon rather than singling out one particular nation. In contrast to Texaco in which the preponderance of the French influence on Martinique is evident in terms of culture and language, the fictionalised Trinidadian societies represented in Divina Trace convey the plurality of cultural and linguistic influences on the island. While Chamoiseau only creolises one European language (French) Antoni draws on a variety of languages out of which he coins neologisms. Although the ‘chamoisification’ evident in Texaco suggest literary emancipation rather than resistance against French literary influences, even Chamoiseau’s creative use of language indicates the interrelation between France and the Francophone Caribbean. Chamoiseau thus seems to embody the very contradictions that are characteristic of Antillean (cultural) identity.125 The Anglophone writer does not always creolise European expressions but uses a variety of languages and registers side by side. Neither the languages of the former colonisers nor of the colonised are privileged, but rather they co-exist and influence each other. Antoni’s creolisation of various cultures in his ‘callaloo-like’ Trinidadian society, cultures which include those of the different former colonisers, is paralleled by his transformation of the various languages mentioned above. 125 McCusker makes this point with regard to the ‘contradictions and internal incoherences’ of Eloge de la créolité; McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 114. Creolisation 189 My analysis has thus far concentrated on different forms of creolisation as expressed through cultural and linguistic transformation. As my comparison of Texaco and Divina Trace has revealed, the specific socio-historical, linguistic as well as narrative contexts have to be taken into account in order to assess the different representations of distinct forms of creolisation. In this final section I would like to explore further potential problems of creolisation which result from cultural heterogeneity. Such latent difficulties implied in cross-cultural encounters indicate the need to rethink contemporary interpretations of creolisation. While it certainly holds true that the various ethnic groups which have settled in the Caribbean have influenced each other, this social and cultural heterogeneity has simultaneously led to ethnic conflicts. In Chamoiseau’s novel as well as in most of his other fictional texts such tensions are most explicitly manifest in the tensions between ‘Creole’ and French Antilleans.126 As I have pointed out throughout this chapter, Chamoiseau’s writing displays, in fact, a far more sceptical view of ethnic and cultural creolisation than the theoretical manifesto Eloge de la créolité suggests. Despite his principal focus on transformations which different cultural traditions have undergone in the Caribbean, Antoni, too, expresses reservations regarding cultural diversity and creolisation. As I will show below, he refers to rivalries between different cultures. This means that the idea of a harmonious creolisation of Caribbean societies has to be attenuated. Greater significance has to be attributed to the distinct socio-historical characteristics of the various ethnic groups in the Caribbean in order to reconsider the benefits of the notion of creolisation. In order to avoid some of the slippages that exist in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial discussions about creolisation and, more generally, hybridity, the complexity of relationships between the various cultural and ethnic groups in the archipelago needs to be taken into consideration. 126 While Solibo Magnifique, for instance, incorporates various characters who are of mixed ethnic origin and thus displays a greater degree of creolisation between different cultural groups, there is still a cultural and emotional gap between the former colonisers and colonised, which leads to misunderstandings; Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1988). Creolisation 190 While in Texaco the ambivalent relationship between Creole and French Martiniquans is an underlying theme throughout the novel, Antoni illustrates conflict between different cultures in one exemplary passage. Even though the novel suggests that Magdalena Divina represents creolisation, it is worth pointing out that she has not always been universally accepted by the various religious groups. The figure caused animosity between Christians, Moslems and Hindus, and only a decree issued by Church and Government officials could solve this conflict (Antoni, pp. 379-80). It had to be officially stated that ‘[p]eople of all races and religions will be allowed entrance to the cathedral, all permitted to offer homage to LA DIVINA PASTORA’ (Antoni, p. 380) [emphasis in original]. Antoni thus refrains from any idealisation of either past or present of Corpus Christi/Trinidad. Towards the end of the novel it is emphasized that the peaceful co-habitation and the mixing of different social, cultural, ethnic and religious groups represents certain periods in history but no longer reflects the present- day situation of the island. Now that Corpus Christi/Trinidad is marked by various social problems and racial conflicts, the former peaceful mixing of cultures occurs only once a year, on Corpus Christi Day (Antoni, p. 395). While the island ‘managed to come back to life every year fa one day’, the population eventually ‘wouldn’t remember what [they] were celebrating’ (Antoni, p. 395). The transformation of the belief in La Divina Pastora alludes to the creative potential of the religious, ethnic and cultural diversity of Corpus Christi and the entire Caribbean, whereas the loss of traditions suggests that creolisation may, at the same time, lead to a loss of one’s ancestral cultural identity. This implies that cross-cultural encounters and influences are not always as fertile as the Creolists suggest in Eloge de la créolité. This praise of cultural diversity in Eloge de la créolité is, to some extent, attenuated not only in Divina Trace but also in Texaco. The risk that one particular culture dominates the others in culturally diverse societies is alluded to in Chamoiseau’s juxtaposition of Texaco and Fort-de-France. Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, represents the French administrative, political and cultural influence. As a French overseas department, Martinique is governed by and thus interconnected with the French metropolis. This link is reinforced through the figure of the town planner, who was sent Creolisation 191 by the French authorities to rebuild Texaco. The sustained struggle of the inhabitants of this quarter, led by its founder Marie-Sophie Laborieux, against the destruction of their settlement is a sign of resistance against ‘foreign’ domination. While the city in general is regarded as a menace to the town, the risk of the loss of its Creole characteristics is the most imminent threat to Texaco.127 Marie-Sophie considers the victory to be won when the town planner agrees to keep the distinct nature of this quarter and not to impose the French character, represented by Fort-de-France, on the town. Even though Texaco is eventually incorporated into the capital – a change from which the inhabitants profit in economic terms – the Creole cultural identity of its inhabitants will no longer be threatened: ‘that City would integrate Texaco’s soul, […] everything would be improved but […] everything would remain in accordance with its fundamental law, […] with its so old memory which the country needed’ (Chamoiseau, p. 381). The appreciation of an amelioration of their living conditions by the inhabitants of Texaco and their simultaneous struggle to retain the particular characteristic of their ‘Creole’ culture is, once again, a sign of the ambiguous relationship between Martinique and France. It is reminiscent of the general appreciation in the Antilles of the benefits gained through the status as an overseas department (for instance economic support, a European passport, access to higher education in France) and the simultaneous attempt to assert one’s specific Antillean cultural identity.128 127 ‘But the city is danger; she becomes a megalopolis and doesn’t ever stop; she petrifies the countryside into silence like Empires used to smother everything around them; on the ruins of the Nation-state, she rises monstrously, multinational, transnational, supranational, cosmopolitan – a real Creole nut-case in a way, and becomes the sole dehumanized structure of the human species’; Chamoiseau, p. 356. As is explained in Eloge de la créolité, Chamoiseau and his colleagues oppose any form of globalisation and the domination of one particular culture over others as it would prevent the development of cultural diversity and creolisation: ‘Creoleness is an annihilation of false universality, of monolingualism, and of purity. It is in harmony with the Diversity which inspired the extraordinary momentum of Victor Segalen’ (Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 90) [emphasis in original]. I will return to the significance of the Creolists’ reference to Victor Segalen shortly in my discussion of the concept of exoticism. 128 See also McCusker, ‘“This Creole culture”’, p. 113. Creolisation 192 Moving beyond this interpretation, this duality between an embracing of the ‘new era’ (Chamoiseau, p. 381) of a mixing of cultures and a retaining of old traditions indicates, in theoretical terms, the interrelation between the concepts of creolisation and exoticism. In my interpretation of exoticism I follow Forsdick, who shows that there are various context-specific interpretations of this concept and that its connotations and evaluations differ greatly between Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial criticism.129 Basing his argument on Said’s notion of travelling theory, he scrutinises the development of exotisme/exoticism in the Anglophone and the Francophone context since the coining of the term in the first half of the nineteenth century.130 Forsdick shows that several Anglophone postcolonial intellectuals such as Spivak and Bhabha have dismissed the concept as an ‘instrumentalization of otherness’ and as an essentialisation of ethnic and cultural difference.131 However, in Francophone theory exotisme tends to be understood in more positive terms. In the context of ‘translation, transportation and representation’ it has been interpreted as a process (‘the process whereby such radical otherness is either experienced by a traveller or translated, transported, represented for consumption at home’), and since Segalen’s interpretation of this concept it has also been associated with an evaluation of cultural diversity as opposed to hybridity or universality.132 As Forsdick explains, Segalen focuses his attention on ‘the contrasts between culture and […] the tensions inherent in their initial contact’.133 He opposes ‘the homogenization of different cultures’, their ‘actual hybridization’.134 Understood in that way, exotisme problematises the concept of hybridity and its assumption of a potential – albeit uneven – ‘synthesis’ of different 129 Charles Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 24: 3 (Nov 2001), 12-29. 130 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 14. 131 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, 22 and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 31 and 34. 132 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 14, p. 17-20. 133 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 19. 134 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 18 and p. 14. Creolisation 193 cultures.135 Forsdick points out that Segalen’s Essai sur l’exotisme can be regarded as a seminal text for the (post)colonial interpretation of exoticism.136 This unfinished text represents Segalen’s criticism of colonial literature and the colonial association of exoticism with otherness, whilst also laying the foundation for his interpretation of diversity. Segalen dismisses colonial exoticism as it was understood by imperialist writers for its assimilationist tendencies and its stereotypical representations of otherness.137 His definition, by contrast, is based on a celebration of diversity: ‘[e]xoticism […] [is] the feeling we have of Diversity’.138 It is this focus on cultural diversity on which the Creolists draw in their definitions of creoleness and creolisation.139 As Forsdick explains, Segalen’s understanding of exoticism implies mutual exoticism, in other words ‘an anti-assimilationist project whereby the Western traveller not only experiences (and represents) elsewhere as radically other, but is also himself exoticized in the eyes of the indigenous travellee’.140 It is important to bear in mind the nostalgic underpinnings of Segalen’s interpretation, which Forsdick mentions. Being held at a geographical and, simultaneously, temporal distance, the exotic other seems to be denied the potential to mix with cultures other than their own; rather, the different cultures merely co-exist.141 This is the point where the Creolists diverge from 135 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 13, pp. 18-19. 136 Victor Segalen, Essai sur l’exotisme, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. by Henry Bouiller, 2 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 745-81; and Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 16. For a lucid discussion of the major trends in early twentieth-century French colonial writing as well as an analysis of Segalen’s Essai sur l’exotisme see also Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, 17. 137 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, 17. 138 Segalen, Essai sur l’exotisme, p. 765, quoted in Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, 18. 139 It is worth pointing out that the following quotation from Segalen is the first epigraph of Eloge de la créolité: ‘C’est par la différence et dans le divers que s’exalte l’Existence. Le Divers décroit. C’est là le grand danger’, quoted in Bernabé et al., Eloge de la créolité, p. 11. In the English version In Praise of Creoleness, Segalen’s quotation is translated as follows: ‘It is through difference and in diversity that Existence is elated. Diversity decreases. That is the great danger’, Bernabé et al., In Praise, p. 73. 140 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 18. 141 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 18. Creolisation 194 Segalen’s concept of exoticism and the other’s ‘droit à la différence’/[right to difference] and return to their focus on creolisation.142 It has to be emphasized that Segalen’s focus on difference (implicit in the notion of an exotic other or as difference in diversity) clearly distinguishes colonial interpretations of exoticism from contemporary notions of hybridity and creolisation. Nevertheless, new postcolonial interpretations of exoticism could rehabilitate the usefulness of the idea of exoticism. Since exoticism is interrelated with notions of hybridity and creolisation but simultaneously interrogates an unreserved praise of multi-cultural mixing, it highlights the need for differentiated, context-specific interpretations of these concepts. As Forsdick rightly argues, there is currently a need in postcolonial criticism to reconsider the versatility of the concept in order to explore its suitability in the context of postcolonial literature and criticism while simultaneously accounting for the ‘(un)translatability as th[is] term travel[s] between contexts’.143 I would argue that, by underlining without essentialising cultural specificities and diversity, this concept has the potential to interrogate the notions of hybridity and creolisation. Unlike hybridity and creolisation, exoticism foregrounds the ‘inevitable ambiguities of contact between different cultures’ and can thus serve as a ‘mode of resistance’ to homogenising tendencies in discourses of hybridity.144 This productive reading of exoticism can be interpreted as a ‘privileging of diversity and of the irreducible difference of the other’, which are the key concepts of Glissant’s version of the idea of exoticism.145 If we take Ella Shohat’s critique of the emphasis on hybridity in postcolonial criticism further, the notion of exoticism could re-evaluate the need of fragile communities (such as Amerindian or Creole communities) to assert their specific cultural traditions in order to ‘fight against continuing forms of annihilation’.146 Pauline 142 Segalen, quoted in Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 18. 143 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 22 and p. 15. 144 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 26 and p. 24. 145 Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts’, p. 23. 146 Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, Social Text, 31-32 (1992), pp. 99-113 (p. 110). Creolisation 195 Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale could indicate the direction in which contemporary postcolonial understandings of exoticism might develop and the extent to which such interpretations could shed some new light on the concept of creolisation. As was mentioned briefly above, a significant aspect that has so far largely been neglected in debates about creolisation is the specific situation of Caribbean Amerindian peoples and the influence of their cultural heritage on contemporary heterogeneous Caribbean societies.147 I will use Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale to contrast with Antoni’s and Chamoiseau’s texts and thus to shed a new light on the issue of creolisation. Melville’s novel interrogates the fertility of ethnically diverse societies without reverting to the interpretation of cultural heterogeneity as a sign of fragmentation. The underlying tone of The Ventriloquist’s Tale seems to express doubt about the possibility of cultural dialogue. Throughout the novel Melville concentrates on a representation of the ambiguous relationship between Amerindian communities and their traditions on the one hand, and ‘Western’ influences on the other. This ambivalence is exemplified by the differences between Christianity and the Amerindian cosmological myth. Like the Ramayana, which is also central to the plot of Divina Trace, the retelling of the Amerindian cosmological myth in The Ventriloquist’s Tale mirrors the story of Danny and Beatrice McKinnon’s relationship. Antoni foregrounds the influence that East Indians have had on Trinidad’s society in general and on the development of cultural and religious traditions in particular by linking the Indian epic 147 Most tribes underwent some geographical displacement insofar as they were driven away from almost all Caribbean islands to the coastal areas of the Central and South American continent. Compared to the movement between different continents undergone by African slaves and Asian indentured labourers, indigenous people faced minor geographical changes. The largest Amerindian communities in the Caribbean now live on the South American continent, particularly in the Guianas; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 182. Few indigenous people, who mainly live in reserves as is the case in Dominica, have remained on the islands. By contrast, the Amerindians in the mainland Caribbean constituted in the 1960s approximately three per cent of the population and thus have a much more visible presence; Lowenthal, West Indian Societies, p. 179. Creolisation 196 to the Christian legend of La Divina Pastora and to the story of Divina Trace. He thus points out the cultural diversity of Trinidadian society. Melville’s approach, by contrast, can be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the significance of rootedness in specific cultural traditions for Amerindian communities. In the novel Amerindian cultural identity is threatened by neo-colonialism and Amerindians’ contact with other cultures. Bearing in mind that the heterogeneous Amerindian communities are far more marginalized in the Caribbean archipelago than most other ethnic groups, they attempt to preserve their cultural traditions. At the same time, though, it reveals an awareness of the societal changes these communities undergo.148 The recurring motif of the cosmological myth in the novel simultaneously alludes to the ambivalent relationship between Amerindians and ‘Western’ cultures. Melville indicates this ambiguity by juxtaposing an Amerindian with a European interpretation of this myth without clearly siding with either version. As the similarities between the cosmological myth and the story of the McKinnons suggest, the Wapisianas believe that the creation of the cosmos parallels, to an extent, human society and social behaviour. This conviction inscribes the Wapisiana culture into Caribbean and world history. The name of the myth already hints at the extremely long history onto which the Amerindians can look back. Through this myth they can relate back to the creation of the cosmos, to a period of time when 148 The core of the Amerindian cosmological myth serves as a traditional explanation of incest and thus mirrors the focus of Melville’s story. As the title of the book suggests, the story of the siblings’ love affair is essentially another version of the myth, presented as a tale. The main parallel between Danny’s and Beatrice’s relationship and the cosmological myth centres on the solar eclipse that occurs when the incestuous love act takes place; Melville, pp. 208-09; François, p. 40. François provides a clear outline of the cosmological myth and links his interpretation of details of the eclipse to the theme of vision and blindness addressed in the novel. Prior to the mortal sins of killing a deer and felling a tree, in other words of destroying nature, people lived in harmony with nature and could speak the language of flora and fauna; François, p. 41. In contrast to the Biblical Fall, of which this episode is reminiscent, people can re-establish a connection to the cosmos through their memory; François, p. 41. Dreams, memory and imagination are therefore essential constituent parts of everyday life which help to reconnect people to nature, their ancestors and the past in general; François, p. 41. As the story of Danny’s and Beatrice’s incest reveals, individual and collective history is related to nature and the cosmos. This implies that the past of Amerindian societies cannot be adequately explained in a purely rational approach. Creolisation 197 people and nature were in balance with one another. The Wapisianas believe, for instance, that ‘[a]nimals are people in disguise’ (Melville, p. 122). Likewise, ‘a long time ago we could all speak the language of plants and animals. Animals were people like we. No difference between us’ – until mankind committed the mortal sin of killing a deer, ‘a creature’ (Melville, p. 122). It is worth pointing out that through this myth Melville raises animals to the status of human beings rather than associating mankind with animals. She thus reverses the degrading imperialist concept of the colonial ‘savage’, who is said to have the status of a non-human being. The link that Melville establishes between the creation of the cosmos and the history of the Wapisianas simultaneously emphasizes their sense of rootedness in time and place, which counters the colonial idea of a ‘historyless’ Caribbean and the concomitant tendency of some European historiographies to write Amerindians out of history. Melville’s juxtaposition of Amerindian and European interpretations of the cosmological myth fictionally illustrates the ambiguities and difficulties implied in cross-cultural encounters. Throughout the novel the tension between cultural opening towards external influences and the retaining of traditions is indicated. The Wapisianas are torn between preserving their culture and opening themselves towards foreign, notably ‘Western’ influences. While cultural preservation implies stasis, openness may result in a loss of traditions. The Ventriloquist’s Tale deliberately does not provide any solution to this dilemma. Melville emphasizes the problems involved in cultural isolation and the preservation of – obsolete – traditions. On a more theoretical level, the cultural tensions indicated by the different readings of Amerindian mythology as well as in cross-cultural personal relationships can be understood in light of the tension between the concepts of creolisation, or, in broader terms, cultural hybridity and exotisme/exoticism. As the incompatibility between the Amerindian and Lévi-Strauss’ Euro-centric understandings of the cosmological myth show, the notion of exotisme might be read as pointing towards the untranslatability of certain cultural concepts which define social interaction and personal relationships. In The Ventriloquist’s Tale this cultural untranslatability or opacity is alluded to in the different interpretations of the cosmological myth. Although Michael Wormoal scientifically analyses the structure Creolisation 198 of the myth and points out divergences between the versions of different Amerindian tribes, he ultimately cannot grasp the deeper meaning that this myth has for the life of the Wapisianas. Serving as a natural justification of incest, this myth strikingly conveys the different and largely incompatible social values that cause the ultimate failure in the encounters between Wapisianas, Europeans and North Americans. Focusing on the distinct cultural characteristics of the Wapisianas, Melville hints at the limits of creolisation and interrogates the Creolists’ assertion of an allegedly worldwide tendency towards creolisation. Her novel thus suggests the need for a re-evaluation of the concept of exotisme/exoticism in Anglophone postcolonial literature and criticism. A redefinition of this term in the context of postcolonial writing could help scholars to engage critically with the ideas of hybridity in general and créolité in particular which have been at the forefront of Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial criticism since the publication of Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and the Creolists’ Eloge de la créolité. Even so, it has to be pointed out that references to ethnic friction and cultural specificity represented in Divina Trace and Texaco also indicate the need for a more critical interpretation of the notion of creolisation than Eloge de la créolité suggests. In fact, Chamoiseau’s emphasis on the development of ‘Creole’ (African-Antillean) cultural values and a ‘Creole’ Caribbean cultural identity seems to hint at the cultural specificity of this admittedly heterogeneous ethnic group which does not ultimately merge entirely with other cultures. The untranslatability of some of Chamoiseau’s linguistic neologisms as well as the distinct ‘Creole’ character of the quarter of Texaco could be stated as examples of such cultural specificity which Melville illustrates in terms of untranslatable myths. As my comparison of The Ventriloquist’s Tale, Divina Trace and Texaco has shown, the concepts of creolisation and exoticism can productively be re-interpreted as interrelated notions. In their postcolonial interpretations, both concepts refer to the interaction between different cultures which are characterised by a close and yet ambivalent relationship. Having originated during colonialism, this multi-cultural encounter has been marked by the imperial discourses of power and domination, of racial Creolisation 199 hierarchisation and inferiority complexes. Ethnic tensions have additionally been caused by cultural clashes as well as by cross-cultural misunderstandings. These issues indicate that cultural specificities play an important role even within ‘creolised’ societies and that they have to be accounted for in interpretations of the different strands of creolisation. In the novels discussed the culturally heterogeneous Caribbean societies have been characterised by different forms of creolisation and different representations of it, within and across different ethnic groups. I would contend that this ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies has to be accounted for by literary critics in a more sustained way than has so far been the case in most contemporary literary criticism. By situating the novels in the specific cultural contexts and by addressing problems implied in cross-cultural encounters I hope, through my comparative approach, to have avoided some of the slippages that exist in contemporary postcolonial discussions about hybridity and creolisation. Because of the heterogeneity of the Caribbean archipelago it would be an over-generalisation to speak of ‘a’ Caribbean creoleness. This means that there is a need to differentiate between the creolisation that has taken place between the various ethnic groups of highly diverse societies such as the ones represented in Divina Trace and that within culturally similar groups as portrayed in Texaco. I would argue that the concept of exoticism helps to focus more closely on the specificities of the different cultures in the Caribbean. It can thus contribute to a differentiation between several strands of Caribbean creolisation and to an acknowledgement of the specific cultural heritages of the various ethnic groups and the different islands. I would argue that exoticism can be a strategic assertion of the (necessary and deliberate) opacity or untranslatability of certain cultural groups such as Amerindian and Creole cultures. As such it can serve as a means to Creolisation 200 protect cultures that are portrayed as fragile and delicate, cultures that feel threatened by the current trend of hybridity and creolisation. Chapter Four Uncovering Trauma in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam The previous chapter explored different representations of Caribbean creolisation as one of the consequences of the history of slavery and colonisation. In this chapter I will centre my attention on the traumatic impact that violence has had on Caribbean societies. Violence has been widely regarded as a legacy of European colonialism. With specific focus on trauma this chapter will investigate the extent to which the heritage of violence has been internalised in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean communities represented in Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) by Shani Mootoo and L’Espérance-macadam (1995) by Gisèle Pineau.1 As my comparison of these two novels will reveal, there are striking continuities in Mootoo’s and Pineau’s representations of trauma, which can be imputed to violence in the history of the Caribbean. These continuities can be related to a wider trend in contemporary women’s writing that foregrounds shared experiences of female suffering and/or solidarities among women.2 Mootoo and Pineau both focus on women’s experiences of domestic violence, a problem which they situate in the wider social context of reiterated colonial 1 Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996) and Gisèle Pineau, L’Espérance- macadam (Paris: Stock, 1995). 2 While some male writers also represent male violence against women, this problematics has, during the 1990s, become an important issue for Caribbean women writers. See, for instance, Joan Riley, The Unbelonging (London: Women’s Press, 1985), Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Dutton, 1987), Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Knopf, 1996). Uncovering Trauma 202 oppression. My focus will be on the specific connection between different forms of collective, individual and historical trauma that is portrayed in Mootoo’s and Pineau’s novels. I will examine the extent to which female experiences of male violence are represented as a reiteration of physical or psychological colonial oppression, and I will analyse different forms of escape from the trauma of sexual abuse. In Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam fantasies as well as various facets of language play a major role in contesting violence and occluding painful memories. In both novels representations of disturbing memories by women who have been victims of male aggression are related to the treatment of domestic violence as a taboo. The novels concentrate on different escape strategies to which these characters resort in their attempts to forget their traumatic experiences and to lead ‘ordinary’ lives. In their interrogation of the taboo of domestic violence, both texts focus on language and communication. The protagonists of L’Espérance-macadam, Eliette and Angela, internalise the socially imposed silence, become taciturn, morose and socially withdrawn. While Mootoo’s protagonist Mala, too, stops speaking to most other human beings, she additionally develops her own form of non-verbal communication, one which is largely based on sounds drawn from her natural environment. In her social seclusion she nurtures the illusion of being able to create an alternative community, one that is qualified to communicate without verbalised language. Mala’s linguistic escape from the social norms implied in the coloniser’s language and her illusory creation of an alternative community of flora and fauna is reinforced by her fantasy of imagining herself as a Caribbean Sleeping Beauty. Both Mala in Cereus Blooms at Night and Angela in L’Espérance-macadam have suffered from repeated sexual assaults by their fathers – fathers, who, be they dead or alive, still exert their influence. Since their abusive fathers occupy the same space as the female victims (Mala hides Chandin’s corpse in a locked room in the centre of the house, and Rosan continues living with his family until his capture by the police) neither character can forget their traumas but rather they try to overcome them. In contrast to Mala, Angela eventually opens herself to other characters. With her father’s haunting presence and his growing sexual interest in his second daughter Rita, Angela Uncovering Trauma 203 cannot close her eyes in front of Rosan’s aggression or flee into a fairy tale world like Mala. In order to protect herself and her sister she has to disclose the truth. By noticing and revealing the imminent danger that her father’s aggression poses, Angela unknowingly leads her aunt Eliette as well as her mother Rosette to confront their own past situations. For all three characters a particular trigger – Rosan’s interest in Rita and his continued abuse of Angela on the one hand, and Angela’s self-disclosure on the other – leads to their introspection and provides the ground for potential healing. On a metaphorical level, these catalysts represented in L’Espérance-macadam are reinforced by the image of the cyclone, which suggests not only destruction but also the possibility of reconstruction in the wider community. I will investigate the significance of this metaphor in terms of structure, style and themes in my textual analysis of Pineau’s novel and compare it to Mootoo’s use of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The metaphors of the cyclone and the Sleeping Beauty are interrelated with fantasies which serve as mechanisms of both escape from and resistance to social norms and constraints. Already, this basic account of the relationship between domestic violence, language and imagination sheds new light on the existing criticism on these two novels. Both novels have been discussed from the vantage point of one specific academic field (Anglophone postcolonial or Francophone studies), which means that work from each linguistic area has been assessed in isolation. As this chapter will reveal, thematic and stylistic connections between the two novels can, however, only be established in a comparative reading. Pineau’s texts have been situated in relation to the masculinist discourse of créolité and thus read in a clearly French Caribbean literary context.3 By contrast, in my reading of the novel I will foreground specific female experiences of suffering which seem to transcend the Antillean context. Other critical discussions of Pineau’s writing centre on the inscription of the female body in the Antillean landscape, shedding some light on the relationship between the Antilles and the French ‘metropolis’.4 While 3 A. James Arnold, ‘The Erotics of Colonialism in Contemporary French West Indian Literary Culture’, New West Indian Guide /Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 68: 1-2 (1994), pp. 5-22. 4 Joëlle Vitiello, ‘Le Corps de l’île dans les écrits de Gisèle Pineau’, in Suzanne Rinne and Joëlle Vitiello, eds, Elles écrivent des Antilles: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique (Paris : L’Harmattan, 1997), Uncovering Trauma 204 Arnold, Vitiello and Suárez concisely analyse women writers’ representations of Caribbean histories and compare them to contemporary male writing, these scholars do not situate Pineau’s writing within the wider context of Caribbean literature beyond the Antilles.5 This means that they overlook continuities between Francophone Caribbean fiction and texts from the other linguistic areas in the archipelago. My comparison of Pineau’s and Mootoo’s novels seeks to contribute to a bridging of this institutional gap. Critics have further discussed the issues of violence and colonialism, which constitute a prominent thematic focus in Pineau’s novel.6 Ormerod thoroughly examines different forms of displacement as they recur in Pineau’s fiction. Moving on from her analysis I will more specifically concentrate on the effects that physical and psychological uprooting has on Pineau’s female characters. In Cereus Blooms at Night, Mootoo uncovers the taboos of domestic violence, sexuality and gender in a frank and innovative way. This novel has therefore received critical attention primarily with regard to Mootoo’s fictional interrogation of gender categories and boundaries, and it has been compared to texts by other lesbian writers such as Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Other criticism includes analyses of sexuality in the context of homophobia in West Indian societies.7 Critical attention has also been paid to issues of pp. 243-63; Sarah Phillips Casteel, ‘New World Pastoral: The Caribbean Garden and Emplacement in Gisèle Pineau and Shani Mootoo’, Intervention: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 5: 1 (2003), pp. 12-28. 5 Lucía M. Suárez, ‘Gisèle Pineau: Writing the Dimensions of Migration’, World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, 75: 3-4 (2001), pp. 9-21. 6 Beverley Ormerod, ‘Displacement and Self-Disclosure in Some Works by Gisèle Pineau’, in Mary Gallagher, ed., Ici-Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 211-26; Lorna Milne, ‘Violence and Gender Relations in the Work of Gisèle Pineau’ (unpublished paper presented at the University of St. Andrew’s, 3 November 2004). 7 Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Knopf, 1996); and Heather Smyth, ‘Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (April 1999), 30: 2, pp. 141-60. Donnell provides an excellent analysis of different forms of sexuality (homo-, hetero-, transsexuality), which she investigates against the backdrop of homophobic legal discourses, social intolerance as well as the continuation of colonial ‘racial classification, gender socialisation and moral rectitude’; Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 232-45 (p. 243). Uncovering Trauma 205 transgression, transformation and mutability with regard to the structure of the novel and the themes addressed in it. The connection between trauma, language and imagination has, however, largely been overlooked, and the only comparative study on fiction by Mootoo and Pineau focuses on the garden metaphor in Cereus Blooms at Night and Pineau’s earlier novel La Grande drive des esprits (1993).8 While Cereus Blooms at Night interrogates boundaries (ethnic, cultural, sexual and literary, to name but a few), critics have situated the novel within an Anglophone literary tradition and thus imposed a rigid literary-critical framework on the text. By juxtaposing Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam I aim to show that both texts interrogate the literary categories of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing even as they locate women’s experiences of violence and trauma within specific cultures. This chapter, then, will bring to light the thematic and structural similarities between Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam and suggest that the uncovering of women’s silenced stories about trauma – trauma which tends to be embedded in the wider context of reiterated colonial violence – constitutes a common theme in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean women’s writing. Obviously, Mootoo and Pineau portray specific geographical, historical and social contexts in their novels. Ultimately, however, they represent similar traumatic experiences of women which are related to the history of slavery and colonialism. Interpretations of Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam within the academic disciplines of either Anglophone or Francophone postcolonial literature risk overlooking these underlying connections between these literary traditions. Juxtaposing the specific historical and literary contexts of these two novels allows me to concentrate on continuities in Caribbean women’s writing without conflating the different literary traditions. In my analysis of Mootoo’s and Pineau’s literary representations of reiterated colonial violence that is inflicted upon female characters, I will refer to the psychoanalytical concepts of trauma, healing and fantasy. Psychoanalysis was developed in Europe and initially based on the ‘Western’ social context; yet, this theory has travelled and has 8 Gisèle Pineau, La Grande drive des esprits (Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1993). Uncovering Trauma 206 been adapted to the Caribbean context. Francophone Caribbean intellectuals in particular have transformed specific concepts such as the Oedipus complex, notions of repression and the unconscious in light of issues of race and colonialism. To give some examples, the founders of the review Tropiques (Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil), Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant have drawn on and considerably modified psychoanalysis in their studies of colonial and postcolonial Antillean societies.9 In fact, as Britton points out, few Antillean critics ‘reject psychoanalysis outright, at least over the course of their whole careers’.10 While Anglophone scholars have also resorted to psychoanalytical concepts in literary criticism, some reservations as to the appropriateness of using such a ‘Western’ theory in the context of Caribbean literature have been expressed during the last ten years. Scepticism as to the interpretation of Caribbean fiction through ‘Western’ theories has, for instance, been expressed by Alison Donnell. In her discussion of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy she focuses on the limits of feminist and psychoanalytical theoretical models.11 I agree with Donnell’s assertion that ‘a Caribbean or a postcolonial female subjectivity is too complex to be articulated simply by feminist or colonial discourse theories’.12 However, I would also agree with Britton who argues that ‘[t]he Caribbean experience seems to create an extremely profound, constantly recurring need for some conception of the unconscious, which overrides the limitations of the theory in its more precise formulations’.13 While referring to the Freudian psychoanalytical notions of trauma, healing and fantasy I will investigate the extent to which Mootoo’s and Pineau’s novels interrogate these concepts. 9 For a lucid and detailed analysis of critical engagement of major Antillean intellectuals with psychoanalysis see Celia Britton, Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought (Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, 2002). 10 Britton, Race and the Unconscious, p. 105. 11 Alison Donnell, ‘Dreaming of Daffodils: Cultural Resistance to the Narratives of Theory’ in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds, The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). pp. 487-93. 12 Donnell, ‘Dreaming of Daffodils’, p. 493. 13 Britton, Race and the Unconscious, p. 105. Uncovering Trauma 207 Both novels are certainly innovative with regard to their particular treatment of the themes of sexuality and domestic violence. Nevertheless, they should also be considered in the wider discursive context of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. Indeed, both texts are part of a wider literary zeitgeist in contemporary Caribbean writing, one which is characterised by the revelation of hidden stories that deal with both the individual and the communal past. As I have mentioned in the Introduction, the period of the 1980s and 1990s was marked by a heightened preoccupation with the Caribbean past.14 Many critical as well as fictional Caribbean texts written and published during this period have represented the colonial history of the archipelago in terms of trauma which has been at the origin of the wide-spread repression of memories of this past.15 This zeitgeist in West Indian and Antillean literature of the 1980s and 1990s, namely the literary and literary-critical confrontation with the Caribbean past, can be related to a wider literary trend of that period. There was a common tendency among Caribbean as well as African-American writers to address the issue of violence within a particular community as Toni Morrison does in Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992) or as caused by a natural phenomenon, which is the case in Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit (1995).16 14 In the Introduction I referred to Maeve McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”: Memory and Forgetting in French Caribbean Autobiography of the 1990s’, Forum for Modern Language Studies (October 2004), 11: 4, 438-50 (pp. 440-41). 15 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 440; and my analysis of critical approaches towards as well as fictional representations of Caribbean history in Chapter Three. 16 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987) and Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1992). Daniel Maximin’s novel L’île et une nuit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995) was published the same year as L’Espérance-macadam, and both novels address very similar issues, namely the relationship between destruction and renaissance in the context of the devastating cyclone Hugo in 1989. Their novels were obviously inspired by the same incident, as Pineau confirms: ‘Les deux romans, écrits en même temps, adoptaient la même problématique, étaient nourris d’un même fonds commun’/[The two novels, written at the same time, dealt with the same problems, had the same inspirational basis]; Biringanine Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau: au nom du passé. Entretiens avec Biringanine Ndagano’, in Ecritures caraïbes, ed. by Georges Voisset and Marc Gontard (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), pp. 145-63 (p. 163). Unlike Maximin, however, Pineau relates this communal Uncovering Trauma 208 Pineau alludes to such a literary connection when she argues that there are thematic similarities between her fiction and texts by other contemporary Antillean writers, notably Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Daniel Maximin.17 While Pineau’s novels resemble fictional representations of Antillean history and society by some of her compatriots, she also recognises the history and problems of her people in texts by other ‘black’ writers, notably African-Americans. She admires African-American writers such as Richard Wright and, above all, Toni Morrison, both of whom she regards as ‘models of courage and audacity’.18 While these African-American and Antillean texts emerged from specific cultural and literary contexts, the shared experience of slavery and colonial oppression seems to connect writers across this geographical and academic divide.19 I would suggest that Pineau’s literary influences can be regarded in light of a travelling of ideas rather than as direct or conscious literary connections. North American and Caribbean women writers have tended to represent similar literary tropes – the themes of violence and trauma – at the same period of time without intentionally incorporating intertextual references. The concern with the repression of personal memory is a major trope in Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam. In both novels the respective protagonists temporarily avoid confrontation with the painful experiences of their past through social seclusion, through the refusal to communicate, and through their flight into imaginary worlds of their own construction. Both Mootoo and Pineau relate the traumas of their suffering from devastation to the theme of domestic violence and thus adds another dimension to the story. 17 ‘Nous avons un imaginaire commun’ ; Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau, p. 163. 18 Gisèle Pineau, ‘Ecrire en tant que noire’, in Penser la créolité, ed. by Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Maryse Condé (Paris: Karthala, 1995), pp. 289-95 (p. 291). 19 Similarly, in the context of experiences of racism in North America and the Caribbean, connections can be made between Frantz Fanon’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’ writing. Parallels in their work were pointed out in the various papers presented at the conference ‘W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon: Postcolonial Linkages and Transatlantic Receptions’ (University of Stirling, 15-17 March 2002). Equally, links between political and literary movements such as négritude and Pan-Africanism are discussed in Chapter One. Uncovering Trauma 209 fictional characters to the historical context of reiterated colonial oppression, thus establishing a direct link between the individual and the collective past. In much the same way that the history of slavery and colonialism has been largely repressed in the Caribbean, so the fictional personae in these two novels have to overcome the taboo that conceals the issue of domestic violence in order to uncover their past. Mootoo’s and Pineau’s representations of trauma, language and healing seem to illustrate the development of a trans-Caribbean trend in contemporary women’s writing, one in which context-specific differences between Anglophone and Francophone texts are subsumed by broader structural and thematic similarities. While this heightened awareness of the lacunary state of Caribbean history and the repressed traumas of displacement and oppression have widely been addressed by Caribbean writers and critics of both sexes, several women writers have emphasized the interrelation between the collective trauma of the colonial past and women’s suffering from reiterated colonial violence. During the 1990s – and to some extent already during the previous decade – many Caribbean women writers suggested links between the colonial past and the issues of sexuality and violence in their fiction. Several novels by Anglophone as well as Francophone Caribbean women writers deal with the themes of sexuality and violence, for instance Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Simone Schwarz- Bart’s Ton beau capitaine (1987) and, in its suggestion of a homosexual relationship between Tituba and Hester, Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière… noire de Salem (1986).20 Such feminist representations of sexuality and violence contrast with male and masculinist portrayals of Caribbean histories. The following discussion of Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night will concentrate chiefly on the character of Mala Ramchandin. Mala is the daughter of Sarah and Chandin Ramchandin. Sarah leaves her husband when she becomes aware of her 20 Simone Schwarz-Bart, Ton beau capitaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987); Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba, sorcière… noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986). Uncovering Trauma 210 homosexuality. After her best friend from school, Lavinia Thoroughly, has returned to Lantanacamara, the two women develop a sexual relationship; Sarah eventually finds it impossible to continue being Chandin’s wife and Lavinia’s lover at the same time. She tells Lavinia that ‘[they] have no choice but to make a decision’, which is to continue their relationship and elope together (Mootoo, p. 59). Chandin never recovers from his wife’s departure or the fact that he has been married to a lesbian. He starts drinking, becomes violent and manipulates his children, especially the older girl Mala, to serve as a replacement for his wife. Not only must Mala or Pohpoh, as she is called as a child, maintain the household, but she is also regularly forced to have sexual intercourse with her father.21 Incestuous sexual abuse within the family is also a central concern in Gisèle Pineau’s novel. As in Cereus Blooms at Night, two female protagonists, Eliette and her niece Angela, are the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers. Eliette, the principal narrator of the story, was raped by her father on the eve of the cyclone of 1928. This crime of domestic violence is repeated in the family when Rosan abuses his daughter Angela approximately fifty years later. Mootoo chiefly focuses on one particular incident of aggression, whereas Pineau links domestic violence to crimes that are committed in a broader social context. In L’Espérance-macadam Pineau represents the cycle of violence, shattered hopes and despair that characterises a community of deprived Caribbeans in the ghetto-like settlement of Savane Mulet in Guadeloupe. Spanning the period of sixty-one years between the two cyclones of 1928 and 1989, the text connects the characters’ memories of past traumatic experiences with the present. Simultaneously, Pineau links 21 During her youth Mala tries to detach herself from the sexually abused part of her personality, as represented by Pohpoh, in order to be able to bear her father’s aggression and to grow up like other adolescents. Her change of name from Pohpoh, as her father nicknames her, into Mala, her original name and the name she wants to be called by her lover, Ambrose E. Mohanty, is an expression of her attempt to separate herself from the violated body. Mala intends to keep both parts of her personality separate, precisely because the abused body named Pohpoh and the adolescent Mala exist side by side. Uncovering Trauma 211 Guadeloupe’s colonial era with its status as a French overseas department. Her novel reveals the impact of colonial oppression on locals both under French domination and in contemporary society. Mootoo’s text, by contrast, is set entirely in the colonial period of the early and mid-nineteenth century. In Cereus Blooms at Night Mootoo represents the imaginary island called Lantanacamara.22 While the shifting between a real and an imaginary place is not an innovative stylistic device, this technique reinforces Mootoo’s subversion of socially imposed boundaries in her novel. The combination of ‘fact’ and fiction allows her to address problems and taboos such as domestic violence which are still present in contemporary Caribbean societies. Through this literary technique as well as through her repeated allusions to dream and fairy tale worlds Mootoo questions social, ethnic and cultural categories throughout her novel. She transfers the story of Sleeping Beauty to the Caribbean setting of the fictional island of Lantanacamara, thus merging different cultures in her writing. Mootoo’s transposition and adaptation of certain elements of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty such as the motifs of rivalry, violence and rape to the Caribbean suggests a further crossing of boundaries, namely boundaries between different literary and cultural traditions. Her merging of ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Western’ myths simultaneously attempts to disrupt dominant discourses of racism, homophobia or, as Condé briefly indicates, exoticism.23 This approach allows her to accentuate the interrelation of various cultural traditions and beliefs that have influenced Caribbean societies. Basically, Mootoo incorporates the literary motifs of rivalry, violence and rape from a European tale in her novel, yet she highlights the Caribbean context and problematises the specific form of violence, namely (reiterated) colonial violence. As Mootoo’s transformation of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty indicates, this confrontation between and combination of European and Caribbean cultural beliefs and social values can be problematic. As is revealed in the course of the novel, the fairy tale primarily represents male violence which is inflicted 22 The fictional island of Lantanacamara resembles the real island of Trinidad. 23 Mary Condé, ‘The Flight from Certainty in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night’ in Flight from Certainity: The Dilemma of Identity and Exile, ed. by Anne Luyat and Francine Tolron (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 63-70 (p. 69). Uncovering Trauma 212 upon female colonial subjects. While both the metaphor of Sleeping Beauty in Cereus Blooms at Night and Pineau’s image of the cyclone refer to socially inflicted rather than internal forms of violence against women, Pineau’s metaphor additionally brings to light the circularity of aggression against her female characters. As I will explain later, Pineau foregrounds the apparent inescapability of male oppression of women. Mootoo, by contrast, situates Mala’s suffering in the wider context of discrimination and aggression against those who do not conform to social norms.24 In Cereus Blooms at Night the reiterated male, colonial violence, which is implied in the adapted tale of Sleeping Beauty, is juxtaposed with a metaphor from the Caribbean natural surroundings, the cereus plant. As Mootoo’s frequent references to the scent and blossom of this plant suggest, the cereus is a metaphor for love, beauty and growth. It thus starkly contrasts with the oppression and violence which Mala experiences from most male inhabitants of Lantanacamara. This metaphor seems to suggest that there is hope for a West Indian society in which solidarity and love prevail over marginalization and violence. While Mootoo adapts a basically European fairy tale to the fictional setting of her novel, merging different cultural elements and literary motifs, Pineau emphasizes the Antillean setting of her text, especially through the recurring motif of the cyclone. Like several other Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Daniel Maximin, Pineau signals the Antillean context in L’Espérance-macadam by relating the narrative to a natural phenomenon that repeatedly occurs in the Caribbean.25 This fictionalisation of 24 As Donnell asserts, transsexual and homosexual characters are represented as transgressing social norms, which leads to their marginalization within Lantanacamaran society; Donnell, Twentieth- Century Caribbean Literature, pp. 232-44. 25 The cyclone metaphor is used by various Caribbean writers. For fictional representations of the cyclone see, for instance, Daniel Maximin, L’Ile et une nuit as well as his novel L'Isolé soleil (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981); Raphaël Confiant, Eau de café (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991). In History of the Voice Brathwaite highlights that the metaphor of a hurricane constitutes an emblematic marker of the Caribbean environment; Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: the Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), pp. 6, 10, 12, 23. In his discussion of national and cultural identity, Bhabha similarly asserts that weather can be interpreted as a cultural marker; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Uncovering Trauma 213 local climate and geography in contemporary Francophone Caribbean texts signifies attempts to reclaim the landscape and to inscribe Antillean identity and history within it.26 At the same time, however, it moves beyond the Guadeloupean context. Like the cereus plant the cyclone is an ecological metaphor. In addition, the latter refers to a characteristically, albeit not exclusively Caribbean meteorological phenomenon. Extending Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the weather, I would argue that both metaphors can be read as cultural markers of the Caribbean space. While the cereus plant is represented as a distinct Lantanacamaran species, this specific setting is juxtaposed with the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, which has travelled between different cultural and literary contexts. Just as Mootoo’s combination of these two literary images exceeds the West Indian context, so does Pineau’s use of the cyclone metaphor refer to a meteorological phenomenon that affects not only the Francophone Caribbean but the entire archipelago. Even though L’Espérance-macadam focuses on Guadeloupean society, the cyclone metaphor suggests that there are connections to other Caribbean islands beyond the Francophone context. This metaphor draws attention to the interrelation between destruction and reconstruction, the connection between (reiterated) colonial violence and attempts to overcome trauma. In the logic of the novel, natural and human violence thus appear to be interconnected. narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139-70 (p. 169). 26 In most of her texts Pineau fictionally explores the various facets of this interrelation between island and individual, and the female body in particular, by ‘faire ressortir l’île natale comme un corps marquée dans la conscience des personnages, constitutrice de leur identité’/[evoking the native island as a body marked in the consciousness of the characters and constituting their identity]; Vitiello, ‘Le Corps de l’île’, p. 243. As Vitiello demonstrates in her article, Pineau uses and simultaneously disrupts imperialist and Euro-centric characterisations of the Antilles as an ‘exotic’ place by underlining the ambiguities implied in cultural icons and by representing different aspects of the significance of the place for cultural identity in her fiction. For a discussion of the significance of the garden metaphor and Pineau’s interrogation of the notion of the pastoral landscape as well the colonial dualism between nature and culture associated with the colonial garden see Casteel, ‘New World Pastoral’, pp. 12-28. Uncovering Trauma 214 As my comparison of Pineau’s and Mootoo’s use of imagery has revealed, both writers emphasize the interrelation between violence and hope. Through her allusions to the tale of Sleeping Beauty, Mootoo hints at the violence within imperialist theory and colonial practices in the Caribbean. This aspect of oppression – oppression which has been internalised by most of her (male) Lantanacamaran characters – is juxtaposed with the hope for the growth of a society in which love rather than violence prevails. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, Mootoo – like Pineau – does not provide any answer as to the development of West Indian societies. Rather than directly portraying violence as inflicted by French colonisers in L’Espérance-macadam, Pineau focuses more explicitly on the legacy of colonialism in Guadeloupean society. Therefore her imagery, too, remains embedded within the Caribbean, albeit not exclusively Antillean, context. The elements of destruction and reconstruction, which Mootoo represents through Sleeping Beauty and the cereus plant, are juxtaposed in Pineau’s novel within the metaphor of the cyclone. Apart from underlining the specific Antillean context, Pineau’s fictional localisation of the natural phenomenon of the cyclone serves as an important thematic and structural metaphor in these texts. While the two major hurricanes of 1928 and 1989 constitute the temporal framework of the novel, references to other cyclones which had less devastating effects on Guadeloupe and its society reinforce the sense of inevitability that this natural form of violence conveys. Throughout the story the colonial legacy of oppression and fractured families is reiterated by the local community where crimes such as murder and sexual abuse occur in cycles. Only the two central incidents of sexual abuse coincide with the passage of the most violent cyclones of 1928 and 1989. Within the logic of the narrative they are thus related to the inescapable fate of formerly colonised Caribbean societies of reiterating colonial violence. However, most of the other acts of aggression occur independently of particular natural or social catalysts and are thus represented as self-perpetuating. Certain characters like Rosan seem to have interiorised violent behaviour to such an extent that they inflict pain and suffering on their compatriots even though their behaviour cannot be imputed to any obvious Uncovering Trauma 215 trigger.27 Read in light of the wider historical context in which the novel is set, this apparently inexplicable aggression can be related to violence in postcolonial Caribbean societies that seems to lack any obvious catalysts. The general atmosphere of violence and despair is represented from the perspectives of several female characters, each of whom tries to escape from reality into imaginary worlds. Eliette and her niece Angela share the memory of sexual abuse during their childhood and completely withdraw from social interaction. The monstrosity of domestic violence is reinforced by Eliette’s comparison of rape with murder: ‘[a]vec son histoire, Angela avait allumé des torches qui voulaient animer la poutre assassine d’un visage terrifique. Le Passage de la Bête ’/[with her story Angela had brought some clarity to Eliette which wanted to animate the murderous beam with a terrifying face. The Passage of the Beast] (Pineau, p. 231). While their social seclusion is the result of a particular incident of male aggression, Angela’s mother Rosette tries to escape more generally the violent surroundings of Savane. She feels equally abandoned by her husband Rosan, whose sudden emotional withdrawal coincides with his sexual interest in his daughter, and by the wider community: ‘Rosette n’avait personne à causer. […] Quand Rosan s’en allait sur les chantiers et qu’elle se retrouvait face à elle-même dans sa case, elle fermait toutes portes et passait des disques de Reggae qui, seuls, avaient le pouvoir de lui faire oublier Des-Ramiers’/[Rosette had nobody to chat with. When Rosan went off to the building sites and when she was alone, confronted with herself in her small house, she locked all the doors and played Reggae discs, and only these had the power to make her forget Des-Ramiers] (Pineau, p. 165).28 In order to escape her social isolation she flees into an idealised world reminiscent of the Rastafarian vision of Paradise and their illusory hope of a return to an Edenic Africa. References to this second community of marginalized individuals allow Pineau to set up and simultaneously question the binaries of paradise and hell, illusion and reality, as well as hope and despair. In the fragments of her tale which Rosette dictates to Angela she 27 I will elaborate on Rosan’s violent behaviour which seems to lack any immediate motivation below. 28 Rosette and Rosan led an harmonious life at Des-Ramiers during the first years of their marriage. Uncovering Trauma 216 refers to the Rastafarian community as ‘un jardin magique de l’autre côté d’un pont’/[a magic garden on the other side of a bridge] (Pineau, p. 199). (I will return to Pineau’s representation of Rosette’s vision of a paradisiacal community in my discussion of this form of escape from reality in the final section of this chapter.) Rosette’s half-hearted and somewhat futile attempts to join the Rastafarians symbolise her longing for solidarity, her need to belong to a community as well as an attempt to escape crime and oppression in Savane Mulet. By introducing the Rastafarians into the story Pineau establishes a link between the sense of displacement and the search for a collective memory and identity in contemporary Guadeloupean society. This sense of uprootedness stems from the period of slavery when Africans were forcibly transported to the Caribbean. The Rastafarians emphasize their ancestors’ African origins, claim that Africa is the continent where the roots of their people lie, and consider the Caribbean as a temporary place of dwelling.29 While Pineau’s representation of the Rastafarian community reinforces the link between the colonial history of the Antilles and the novel’s temporal present, it does not suggest any sense of nostalgia for the past. On the contrary, it underlines the cyclical repetition of violence since slavery, as well as its perpetuation in contemporary Antillean society. Her references to Antillean history differ from Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphaël Confiant’s representations of the colonial period in novels such as Texaco (1992) and Le Nègre et l’amiral (1988) where the Caribbean past is, at times, portrayed either in a nostalgic or in an heroic manner.30 While the Creolists, and Chamoiseau in particular, emphasize the sense of solidarity that seems to have characterised communities of maroons and freed slaves, Pineau gives a rather bleak picture of colonial and postcolonial Guadeloupean society. The misery that characterises Savane affects several generations, and does not spare children, either. As is suggested by the syntactically 29 For a discussion of the relationship between the displacement of slaves from Africa and the marginalization of Rastafarian community and of Savane see Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, pp. 219-20. 30 Raphaël Confiant, Le Nègre et l’amiral (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1988). While certain passages in Chamoiseau’s fiction convey an underlying sense of nostalgia for the past, this very nostalgia is interrogated in the texts and juxtaposed with the hardship of slavery and colonialism. Uncovering Trauma 217 unlinked sentences and the enumeration of negative factors that influence people’s lives in Ti-Ghetto, there seems to be little hope of an escape from misery in the community portrayed in the novel: Des hommes les prenaient, de la même façon qu’ils avalaient le rhum, grignant dans le plaisir brûlant. Et puis les jetaient, pleines. […] Quand elles [les femmes] cherchaient la paix, qu’elles voulaient plus voir le portrait d’un homme, y avait déjà quatre-cinq enfants dans leurs pieds. Ventres et cartables vides. Patience des misérables et mâchoires contractées au guichet des Allocations familiales./[Men took them, in the same way as they downed the rum, frowning in burning pleasure. And then they threw them away, full. […] When they [the women] were looking for peace, when they no longer wanted to see the portrait of a man, there were already four-five children at their feet. Empty bellies and empty schoolbags. Patience of the poor and stiff jaws at the social security counter.] (Pineau, pp. 19-20) The dependence of these socially deprived women on men on the one hand and social security on the other seems inevitably to lead them into greater misery. As single mothers they have to raise their numerous children in a society that is marked by an atmosphere of ignorance, indifference and a lack of humanity and in which men escape from harsh reality into short-term sexual pleasures. Women tend to be treated like goods that can easily be disposed of (‘in the same way as they downed the rum […] [t]hey threw them [their women] away’). In the context of Caribbean history this attitude towards other people is reminiscent of the treatment of slaves, when Africans were considered property rather than human beings.31 In L’Espérance-macadam, as in Cereus Blooms at Night personal experiences of traumatic incidents in the past are related to the legacy of colonial violence of the Caribbean archipelago. Pineau refrains from pointing out any specific catalyst for the continuous increase in criminal acts in the community of Savane Mulet. In Pineau’s 31 For a further discussion of the treatment of slaves as chattel see John F. Campbell ‘Textualising Slavery: From “Slave” to “Enslaved People” in Caribbean Historiography’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. by Sandra Courtman (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. 34-45 (p. 34). Uncovering Trauma 218 novel an indirect link between personal trauma and Caribbean history is established by Séraphine’s oral accounts of Eliette’s painful past, which is related to the wider context of misfortune in the Caribbean archipelago: ‘De part ces récits effroyables, Eliette connaissait toutes les misères et avanies qu’avaient subies la Guadeloupe, ses dépendances, ses îles proches et lointaines: Haïti, Puerto Rico, les Bahamas…’/[Through these appalling tales, Eliette knew all the misery and snubs which Guadeloupe, its dependencies, its close and far islands had undergone: Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas…] (Pineau, p. 125). It is significant that the period of slavery is not evoked until the penultimate chapter of the novel. In this chapter Angela’s self- disclosure triggers Eliette’s, Rosan’s and Rosette’s confrontation with their own situations. As Rosette reflects on her reaction towards crime and aggression in Savane, she becomes aware of the long history of violence. The coincidence of the disclosure of the individual and the collective past at the end of the novel reinforces the sense that the Caribbean history of slavery has been as much a taboo in the Antilles as the issue of violence in the family and community. Neither topic is openly addressed in the novel until Angela reveals the family ‘secret’ of sexual abuse, in other words until a specific catalyst forces the characters to confront their past and present situations.32 In retrospect, Rosette acknowledges the interrelation between the violent history of slavery and the cyclical recurrence of violence in contemporary Antillean society: Non, rien n’avait changé depuis qu’on avait transbordé les premiers Nègres d’Afrique dans ce pays qui ne savait qu’enfanter des cyclones, cette terre violente où tant de malédiction pesait sur les hommes et femmes de toutes nations./[No, nothing had changed since the first Negroes were brought from Africa to this country that only knows how to give birth to cyclones, that violent place where a great curse weighed on men and women from all nations.] (Pineau, p. 241) The link that is established between the returning passages of cyclones in the Antilles and the cycle of violence is underlined in the following scene in which Rosette’s dream- 32 In a wider historical-literary context the two anniversaries of 1992 and 1998, which I mentioned in my introduction, constituted such a catalyst for Caribbean writers to fictionally represent the violent history of the Caribbean. See McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 440. Uncovering Trauma 219 world sharply differs from the violent reality in Savane: ‘La vie au-dehors de ces pages [du conte que Rosette a dicté à Angela] grondait dans la violence. Et tous les jours, c’était cyclone. Tous les jours que Dieu faisait pour le malheur des femmes et des hommes de Savane…’/[Life outside these pages [of the tale that Rosette dictated to Angela] was roaring with violence. And every day it was cyclone. Every day that God made for the misfortune of the women and men of Savane…] (Pineau, p. 240). Pineau’s references to the violent legacy of slavery can be related to the discursive and historical context of the 1990s, particularly with its heightened awareness of the colonial history of the Caribbean. As Pineau’s novel suggests, violence did not end with the abolition of slavery nor with the official end of Guadeloupe’s colonial status. Aggressive behaviour seems to have perpetuated itself in Caribbean societies because memories of the traumatic past of slavery, displacement and colonial oppression were largely suppressed until the last decade. Insofar as the traumas of history were not consciously faced, violence and counter-violence constituted a way to cope with the ancestral past. The legacy of (colonial) violence still haunts Antillean societies, and, as most contemporary writers and intellectuals argue, Caribbean history needs to be confronted in order to overcome the traumatic past.33 In L’Espérance-macadam the repetition of inescapable violence is indicated through a number of crimes including murder that occur in Savane Mulet. A part of this community is commonly labelled Ti-Ghetto, which suggests that those who are 33 As McCusker highlights, the trauma of slavery is an important theme in many Antillean autobiographies: ‘slavery […] is often a pivot of the autobiography, a haunting primal scene figured in a strikingly similar way from one author to another’; McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 441. McCusker analyses autobiographical fiction that emerged during the 1990s such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Antan d’enfance (Paris: Hatier, 1990) Raphaël Confiant, Ravines du devant-jour (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995); Ernest Pépin, Coulée d’or (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995); Gisèle Pineau, L’Exil selon Julia (1996); Maryse Condé, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (Paris: France Loisirs, 1999); and Emile Ollivier, Mille Eaux ( Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999). Since the violence of slavery has become a taboo and has (therefore) been suppressed by the protagonists of many autobiographies, it has become ‘transformed into a powerful absence-presence’ and has come to haunt Caribbean societies; McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 443. Uncovering Trauma 220 marginalized by society live there, including the poor or those who have lost hope (Pineau, pp. 33-34). Savane Mulet is characterised by a reiteration of different forms of psychological and physical violence, most of which can be regarded as a result of the characters’ futile attempts to escape their bleak every-day lives. Glawdys’ desperate act of killing her own baby by throwing it from the ‘pont des Nèfles’ in Savane represents the culmination of this physical violence within the community (Pineau, pp. 65-73, 75- 76). Murdering her newborn baby is a sign of Glawdys’ own misery and confusion. This act of despair is result of various traumatic experiences: she was abandoned by her mother, mistreated at the ‘Assistance Sociale’, a governmental social institution, and marginalized in Savane. Ironically, it simultaneously constitutes an act of violence intended as a means of halting the perpetuation of violence. The very lack of a next generation implies that, once the present generation has passed away, the self- perpetuating aggression that characterises the community of Savane will come to an end. Yet, as an act of despair, Glawdys’ infanticide does not represent any solution to the social problems of that society. In a more figurative sense her infanticide seems to be her last resort as she tries to spare the child from a future life in misery.34 This reasoning parallels early African slave mothers who preferred killing their offspring to subjecting it to their new masters.35 As Pineau argues, Glawdys ‘renouvelait ainsi le geste du premier voyage’/[thus renewed the gesture of the first voyage].36 The return of the violent past of colonialism in general, and slavery in particular, seems to be inevitable. The accumulation of various criminal acts in L’Espérance-macadam thus reinforces the sense of a Guadeloupean society that has been marked by violence for centuries. 34 This incident of infanticide is highly reminiscent of Morrison’s portrayal of the central child murder in Beloved, pp. 157-58. With this particular scene Pineau seems to have transferred such a violent act of despair to the Antillean context. 35 The saying ‘No children in slavery’ was a common concept among African slaves. Geneviève Beluge, ‘Entre ombre et lumière, l’écriture engagée de Gisèle Pineau’, Notre Librairie: Revue des littératures du sud, 138: 13 (1999), pp. 84-90 (p. 89). 36 Beluge, ‘Entre ombre et lumière’, p. 89. Uncovering Trauma 221 In her novel Pineau juxtaposes several forms of violence from which her female characters suffer. Shifting between Angela’s and Eliette’s stories, the writer establishes a link between the destruction caused by the cyclones of 1989 and 1928 and the physical as well as psychological wounds that result from paternal sexual abuse. Pineau deliberately blurs the line between the natural disaster and human violence in order to show that both have similar effects on the victims and that they are similarly unpredictable. Like the cyclone that unexpectedly sweeps over the country Rosan’s paedophilia was unforeseen. At the same time it is certain that both kinds of disaster occur repeatedly. A close link between natural and domestic violence is established in Eliette’s personal history. The beam that her mother Séraphine argues harmed Eliette’s stomach was, in fact, her father’s member. Bonnet asserts that the pillar, which destroys Eliette’s stomach, serves as a ‘métaphore d’un sexe masculin condamné à déchirer le ventre des femmes’/[metaphor for the masculine member that is condemned to tear a woman’s stomach].37 In order not to express the unspeakable and to further upset Eliette during her slow recovery from the wounds caused by the cyclone, Séraphine merges the two incidents, referring to both simply as the cyclone or ‘The Passage of The Beast’ (Pineau, for instance pp. 219, 231, 232). As the connection between violence in the present community of Savane and the past of slavery is not explicitly addressed until the last two chapters of the novel, so has Eliette’s traumatic experience of sexual abuse during her childhood been covered up by her mother and treated as a taboo. Eliette’s past has become as much a family secret as Angela’s similar experience a generation later. On a structural level, too, this link between violence that has marked Antillean societies in different historical periods is occluded until the penultimate chapter where Eliette, Rosette and Rosan confront their past. As mentioned above, Rosette explicitly addresses the link between past and present violence when she points out that nothing had changed since the days of slavery (Pineau, pp. 241-42). Throughout the novel Pineau switches between the different first-person narrators. This implies that the 37 Véronique Bonnet, Book Review of ‘Gisèle Pineau, L’Espérance-macadam’, Notre Librairie: Revue des littératures du sud, 146 (2001), p. 99. As holds true for Mootoo’s novel and the Anglophone Caribbean, the issue of domestic sexual abuse has been a taboo in Caribbean societies. Uncovering Trauma 222 reader, while being drawn into the narrative, is left with fragments of both the entire story and links between the different characters, their respective situations as well as different periods of time. As the protagonists avoid establishing the connection between their traumatic past and their ensuing pain, so does the narrative circle around the different incidents and shift backwards and forwards in historical time. L’Espérance-macadam places greater emphasis on different generations of women who suffer from trauma than Cereus Blooms at Night. Like many other women writers Pineau introduces genealogy in her novel in order to illustrate the passing on of certain cultural values and beliefs from one generation to the next.38 While most texts tend to focus on the transmission of cultural values such as traditional oral stories or religious rites and beliefs, Pineau’s fictional personae inherit undesirable character traits and adopt the self-harming method of hiding rather than disclosing taboos. Pineau thus sheds new light on a relatively common literary phenomenon; she problematises an uncritical (oral) transmission of traditional values in contemporary Caribbean societies by illustrating its harmful effects. In her novel Pineau also interrogates Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphaël Confiant’s project of seeking to project a positive recollection of the past insofar as she demonstrates that memories of traumas of the past have sedimented in the characters’ unconscious and have been passed on from generation to generation. This includes the keeping of certain family ‘secrets’ such as the taboo of domestic violence. When compared with Pineau, Mootoo establishes a more direct link between colonialism and the legacy of violence in her fiction insofar as her novel is entirely set in the colonial period. Chandin’s aggression against his daughters, and against Mala in particular, is related to his upbringing by the immoral Christian Reverend Thoroughly 38 The history of and connections between several generations of characters are represented in novels such as Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of My Mother (London: Vintage, 1996); Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1994); Maryse Condé, La Vie scélérate (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1987) and La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995) to name but a few such texts. Uncovering Trauma 223 and his family. In the context of the novel his aggression against Mala can be interpreted as a legacy of colonial violence. He is brought up by Reverend Thoroughly’s family, and as the only East Indian amongst whites, he receives a Christian education in the Reverend’s seminary. At a young age Chandin adopts these Christian ideas and is won over by the Reverend’s life style, his British accent and his ‘accurate’ language. He criticises his wife, for instance, for not speaking ‘correct’ (British) English, but rather the local, allegedly uneducated version (Mootoo, p. 53). Under the pretext of good education and a potential career as ‘Christian teacher, theologian and missionary’, the child Chandin is forcibly separated from his family and adopted by the Thoroughlys.39 This adoption takes place on condition that Chandin’s parents convert to Christianity, emphasising the sense in which the Reverend’s missionary practices are deeply inscribed within the structures of colonial power. Chandin is an example of an initially pious man who has been exposed to colonial violence. He passes on this cruelty to his own family and people by harming his daughter both psychologically and physically. His sexual abuse is reminiscent of the master’s abuse of female slaves. In this manner he perpetuates a particular form of colonial violence when he abuses his daughters in his drunken rage. In Cereus Blooms at Night Mala’s body signals the reiteration of colonial violence, the memory of which haunts her. Because of the physical and mental scars that Chandin’s abuse left, she cannot forget the trauma of her childhood. The images of this trauma come back to her inner eye when her house is searched by the police. Mala remembers ‘what she usually ignored or commanded herself to forget: her legs being ripped apart, something entering her from down there, entering and then scooping her insides out. Her body remembered. Mala remembered’ (Mootoo, p. 175). Mala calls her father’s sexual abuse an ‘invasion’ (Mootoo, p. 175). Through this term Mootoo subtly links the historical invasion of the Caribbean during colonialism with Chandin’s sexual invasion of Mala’s body. She alludes to Chandin’s internalisation of the – psychological – violence that he experienced during his childhood in the family of Reverend Thoroughly. 39 Condé, ‘Flight from Certainty’, p 66. Uncovering Trauma 224 In Mootoo’s portrayal of some of the effects which Christian missionary practices had on local West Indians, she highlights the hypocrisy of characters like Reverend Thoroughly, thereby disrupting imperial discourse and its claims that the allegedly ‘heathen’ colonials needed to be ‘civilised’. She completely undermines this colonial ‘justification’ for European colonial practices. Although Pineau, too, interrogates imperial discourse, the Francophone writer simultaneously indicates the internalisation of the racist colonial assumption that black people are cursed. Her indirect references to colonialism can be related to the fact that her novel is set in the post-Independence era, a time when material traces of colonisation were no longer as obvious as during the colonial period. The motif of curse as a catalyst for aggression is most emblematically represented through the figure of Rosan, who is said to have inherited his father’s vicious character and who therefore within the logic of the text becomes violent in the course of the story (Pineau, pp. 109-10). Rosan’s curse is related to the community’s general belief in fate. This belief can be traced back to the colonial idea that Africans and thus, by extension, African-Antilleans are the descendents of Noah’s cursed son Ham, who was located in Africa.40 In order to justify slavery, European imperial discourses ascribed an inherently evil character to Africans, arguing that the Biblical Genesis indicated their being cursed and doomed to slavery and other forms of oppression. While the belief of some of Pineau’s characters in the curse suggests that this idea has, to an extent, been assimilated by local culture it is, at the same time, related to the widespread notion in the Caribbean that one’s ancestors have determined 40 Bougoul Badji, Les enfants de Cham: Les Africains noirs sont-ils maudits? (Ivry and Dakar: Silex/Editions Nouvelles du Sud, 1997), p. 371, quoted in Joseph Nnadi, ‘Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique: La congruence des mythes du nègre dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau’, Etudes Francophones, 15 : 1 (2000), pp. 75-91 (p. 90). Lorna Milne highlights the significance of the belief in this curse in ‘Violence and Gender’ (unpublished paper, University of St. Andrews, 3 November 2004). Maryse Condé also refers to this common belief in the condemnation of Cham/[Ham] in her discussion of the role that the memory of slavery has for contemporary Antillean societies; Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, preface by Maryse Condé, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’escalvage et de leurs abolitions (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), p. 11. Similarly, Aldrich refers to European colonial attempts to justify white people’s superiority by drawing on Biblical stories; Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996), p. 201. Uncovering Trauma 225 one’s destiny. Interestingly, Antilleans’ supposed acceptance of the idea that supernatural forces influence one’s life contrasts with the European emphasis on rationality rather than intuition. Pineau’s references to the belief in fate hint at the contradiction inherent in French assimilation policy: on the one hand black Antilleans are said to be cursed insofar as they are descents of Ham, but on the other hand it is suggested that they are, through cultural assimilation, almost like white people. In this contradictory logic of French imperialism it thus seems from the colonisers’ point of view that assimilated Antilleans cannot be cursed insofar as they are like white French people. As Pineau explains in an interview, ‘Les Français ne nous parlaient jamais de malédiction ou de «maudition». On était cartésiens. Blanc, c’est blanc’./[French people never told us about curse or “cursedness”. We were Cartesian. White, that is white.]41 While showing the impact that imperialist discourses have had on colonial subjects, the significance of the issue of predetermination in the Antilles simultaneously challenges the Euro-centric colonial binary between rationality and intuition.42 As she does with other binaries represented in the novel, Pineau interrogates stark oppositions and suggests that they are interrelated. Her disruption of this dualism is reminiscent of Mootoo’s undermining of a sharp boundary between colonisers and colonised. As explained above, Chandin’s adoption of colonial beliefs (such as the superiority of English language and culture) can be regarded as a product of colonisation. At the same time, his education allows him to be part of the local elite that holds the same Euro-centric beliefs as many colonisers do. By juxtaposing alleged binaries, both Mootoo and Pineau suggest that there is a need for the urgent interrogation of socially imposed categories. Both writers raise these issues through literary techniques such as the merging of ‘fact’ and fiction (Mootoo) and the use of flashbacks throughout the text (Mootoo and Pineau). While Mootoo emphasizes the 41 Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau’, p. 148. 42 Frantz Fanon discusses this dualism between logic and intuition in imperialist discourse in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1967), pp. 109-40 (esp. pp. 126-32). Uncovering Trauma 226 fluidity between different concepts, completely undermining social and sexual categories as she proceeds, Pineau’s novel indicates that concepts and values that appear to be opposites are, in fact, part of a continuum rather than constituting antagonistic poles. In the logic of the novel this ambiguity between divisions and connections suggests that the colonial and the postcolonial periods can be considered interrelated. As Pineau points out in L’Espérance-macadam, the legacies of slavery and colonialism still have an impact on contemporary postcolonial societies and the assertion of their cultural identities. By introducing the concept of predetermination in L’Espérance-macadam, Pineau addresses ambiguities between ‘Antillean’ and ‘European’ concepts. At the same time she indicates that many of her fictional personae shy away from addressing problems in their community. Their belief in fate has led the inhabitants of Savane to avoid confronting the problem of violence in their society, hiding behind the excuse that their lives have already been predetermined. As I will argue in the last section of this chapter, the roots of aggressive behaviour and its perpetrators have to be named for the community to step outside of the circle of violence. Like the metaphor of the cyclone, the motif of the curse represents the supposedly inevitable return of destruction as well as physical and psychological harm. As Rosan’s case shows, the belief in fate only serves as a partial explanation for a character’s aggression. As with Chandin, Rosan’s violence is intimately related to the colonial past and the history of oppression and displacement of the Caribbean. To an extent, his behaviour towards his family results from his childhood experiences of parental neglect and of having been beaten by his grandmother (Pineau, pp. 110-11). He tries to compensate for the lack of human warmth from his family through achieving physical contact first with his wife, Rosette, and then with his first-born daughter Angela. Submitting her to his will can in the wider socio-historical context be interpreted as a masculine attempt to reclaim the manhood and dignity male slaves were Uncovering Trauma 227 denied under colonial rule.43 Since male and female slaves were equally oppressed during slavery, male slaves usually could not defend their women and assume the traditional role of a protector of the family. As slaves were regarded as chattels rather than human beings, they were simultaneously denied not only their male but also their human dignity.44 The behaviour of men towards women as it is represented in a number of fictional Caribbean texts seems to be intricately linked to the history of slavery. Several male Antillean critics and writers such as Fanon, Glissant, and, to some extent, also Confiant and Chamoiseau have represented Caribbean men either as ‘passive homosexual[s]’ or as the ‘super-male’.45 In his comparison of Glissant’s ideas in Le Discours antillais and Said’s Orientalism Arnold explains that ‘Western imperial discourse had feminized those cultures it had subjugated, in order to justify that subjugation’.46 Within this logic of the ‘erotics of colonialism’ the position of the male is thus already occupied by the coloniser. The only male positions that seem to be available to the colonised are therefore the roles of the ‘passive homosexual’ or the ‘super-male’.47 Women writers, by contrast, have largely focused on the lack of understanding that Caribbean men have shown towards women. Rather than assuming responsibility and caring for their families, most male characters in Pineau’s work abuse or neglect their women.48 The communication and the relationship between the two 43 For further discussion of the relationship between men and women since colonialism see Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau, p. 158; and Beluge, ‘Entre ombre et lumière’, p. 90. 44 Campbell ‘Textualising Slavery’, p.34 45 Arnold, ‘The Erotics of Colonialism’, p. 9. For a discussion of Glissant’s representation of a passive homosexual – the Creole makoumè – see Arnold, ‘The Erotics of Colonialism’, p. 15. On pages 17- 18 he analyses the extent to which Chamoiseau’s writing, especially Texaco, can be read within this logic of masculinity vs. femininity. 46 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1989), pp. 72-73; and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), both, quoted in Arnold, ‘The Erotics of Colonialism’, pp. 7-8. 47 Arnold, ‘The Erotics of Colonialism’, p. 9. 48 Pineau admits that she seldom represents men in a positive light in her fiction, although she does not write against men. See Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau’, p. 158. Uncovering Trauma 228 sexes seem as difficult and as marked by oppression and violence in L’Espérance- macadam as in Cereus Blooms at Night. Rosan’s abuse of his own daughter can be interpreted as a reiteration of colonial violence from which his ancestors, including his grandmother, suffered. During the French colonisation of the Antilles, and particularly during the period of slavery, many families were forcibly separated. In these circumstances, children often grew up without parental care, and were looked after by their grandmothers. Just as Chandin, insofar as he adopts imperialist beliefs and reiterates forms of physical as well as psychological colonial oppression, can be regarded as a product of colonialism, so have Rosan and his father internalised colonial violence. As the reader learns towards the end of the story, Rosan’s and Eliette’s father is the very same person, the individual whom we get to know either unnamed or as ‘Ti-Cyclone’. With this nickname Séraphine parallels his sexual abuse, hence human violence, with the destructive natural phenomenon of the cyclone of the following day. As the hurricane devastates the Caribbean, so does ‘Ti- Cyclone’ destroy the structure and integrity of his family. The parallel established between Rosan’s father and the cyclone also suggests that ‘Ti-Cyclone’s’ violence will be reiterated either by himself or by his son as the hurricane recurs at certain intervals. Rosan’s grandmother believes in the repetition of ‘Ti-Cyclone’s’ crime, which implies that Rosan is said to have inherited his father’s bad blood and is thus prone to iterate his father’s villainy (Pineau, pp. 109-10). Because of his assumed curse, he is neglected both by his parents and by his grandmother. As Rosan’s abuse of his daughter indicates, there is no obvious trigger for his aggression. Rather some higher power, a power which his father has, unbeknown to him, passed on to Rosan, drives him to ill temper and violence. The assumption that Rosan is cursed reinforces the sense that the reiteration of violence is inescapable. Due to this particular character trait he seems to be predisposed to repeat the crime that his father committed several decades earlier, even if no imminent origin can be imputed to the onset of his paedophilic behaviour. In contrast to Rosan’s abuse, Chandin’s violence against his daughter is a consequence of his anger and disappointment at his wife’s disappearance with her girlfriend and Chandin’s former lover. Having directly been influenced by British social norms, most of the male Uncovering Trauma 229 characters portrayed in Mootoo’s novel reiterate the very violence and oppression which they have experienced from the colonisers. Unlike L’Espérance-macadam, Cereus Blooms at Night does not convey the sense that violence is endemic in the Caribbean but refers to specific triggers for aggressive behaviour. Such catalysts tend to be related to imperialist discourse and colonising practices. This difference between the two novels might be read in light of the fact that Mootoo represents ways in which violence occurred during the colonial period, whereas Pineau concentrates on portraying its legacy in postcolonial societies. The Francophone writer shows the extent to which aggression is sown across Guadeloupean society, thereby relating incidents of cruelty that occurred in the island communities during the twentieth century to the colonial period. Significantly, however, both writers foreground the connection between colonial and domestic violence in Caribbean societies, thereby addressing a problematics that has been a taboo in the Caribbean. Read alongside each other, both novels indicate that the problem of domestic violence has been an important issue, which has commonly been suppressed in the different cultures and societies in the Caribbean. As the connections between Mootoo’s and Pineau’s representations of distinct forms of violence have shown so far, their writing transcends literary and cultural differences between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. In L’Espérance-macadam Pineau represents a society in which men still dominate to a large extent and where some men like Rosan use women to release their social or personal frustrations.49 The colonial society of Lantanacamara as depicted by Mootoo’s novel is characterised by the same tendency. Because of the succession of unsettling incidents such as Lavinia’s and Sarah’s elopement, Chandin’s regular drinking and his abuse of his daughters, the family is completely marginalized in the town of Paradise. This also means that nobody takes any real interest in Mala’s fate. Just as Angela is at Rosan’s mercy, so is Mala at Chandin’s. 49 Véronique Bonnet, ‘Gisèle Pineau: voix féminine dans le champ créole’, Notre Librairie: Revue des littératures du sud, 146 (2001), pp. 96-98 (p. 98). Uncovering Trauma 230 Apart from focusing on women’s suffering from oppression, both writers simultaneously investigate the ways in which such violence is hidden and gradually disclosed. Attempts made by the different female characters to uncover and deal with the traumas of their past structure the narratives of Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam. The two novels have relatively complex structures that include a fragmented narrative, flashbacks and multiple narrative voices. The reader is gradually introduced to the events that connect the various fictional characters in both novels because the fictional events can only be assembled and connected in retrospect. In Cereus Blooms at Night the self-conscious introduction and conclusion by the omniscient first person narrator Tyler frames the story. Mala’s fragmented memories of her past are mediated by Tyler, who claims to be the only ‘one who ended up knowing the truth, the whole truth, every significant and insignificant bit of it’ (Mootoo, p. 7) [emphasis in original]. The fact that Mala’s (hi)story is recorded by Tyler and not by herself implies that she cannot ultimately confront ‘the whole truth’ herself. In contrast to Pineau’s fictional personae, Mala’s body and psyche are too deeply scarred for her to speak about and thus potentially overcome her trauma. The narration is frequently intersected by Tyler’s comments on incidents and the behaviour of Lantanacamarans. This implies that the reader is kept at a certain distance from the characters and the incidents in the story. The issue of colonial violence, too, is fictionally explored from the perspective of a narrator who is not immediately involved in the events he presents in his story. In his attempt to account for the various details of Mala’s past, Tyler assembles fragmented stories about the different members of the Ramchandin family and about characters that have known or have somehow been related to the Ramchandins. These different accounts cover the period between Chandin’s childhood, with references to his parents, who were East Indian indentured labourers, until Mala’s old age at Paradise Alms House. Even though the narrator concentrates on the portrayal of the life of one particular character, he simultaneously embeds Mala’s personal history in the wider historical context of the Caribbean. L’Espérance-macadam, by contrast, keeps the narrative within the consciousness of characters that tell their stories in the novel. The reader gains an insight into a specific Uncovering Trauma 231 Guadeloupean community from the perspectives of various locals. In contrast to Cereus Blooms at Night, where the reader can step back from events, he/she gets the sense in Pineau’s novel of being trapped in this violent society. In L’Espérance-macadam we learn in chapter six, two chapters before the end of the novel, about the fact that Angela has been sexually abused by her father and has been the victim of the same crime that Eliette’s father committed sixty years earlier. Eliette’s story, too, has to be assembled in retrospect. Since she does not face her past until Angela discloses her experience of sexual abuse, it is only at the end of the novel that the reader can establish a connection between the cyclone of 1928 and Eliette’s trauma and become aware of the relatedness between Eliette and Angela. Eliette’s fragmented narrative conveys the sense that Pineau’s novel uncovers secrets that are taboos in Guadeloupean society. In L’Espérance-macadam the reader’s sense of being caught in the story is reinforced by the link established between the structure and the cyclone. There seems to be a constant threat of past and/or future violence throughout the novel from which neither the characters nor the reader seem to be able to escape. Pineau’s narrators all refer to incidents of cruelty, and the reader has to rely on the narration of those characters who are trapped within this cycle of violence. There is no third-person or omniscient narrator in L’Espérance-macadam who could have presented the characters’ situation in Savane Mulet in a slightly more detached way. As the cyclone suggests that the repetition of violence and destruction is inevitable in Savane, so does the circular structure give the reader the sense of being drawn into the narrative. Although Cereus Blooms at Night has a fragmented structure, too, the reader is kept at more of a distance from the story than in L’Espérance-macadam. Mala’s story is presented by the third-person narrator Tyler, a character who is not related to the Ramchandin family but happened to get to know Mala. While Eliette, the principal narrator in Pineau’s novel, tells her own story, Tyler, the first person and omniscient narrator, is more detached from the incidents that happened at Hill Side. Like the reader he is an outsider to the town of Paradise, who only learns about the ‘scandal’ at that place through his patient Mala. As he starts identifying links between Mala’s fragmented memories, he gradually gets more involved in the story. The fragmentation Uncovering Trauma 232 discloses his concerns with his own sexuality and, at the same time, mirrors Mala’s confused and fractured memories of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father. The fragmented narrative structure of Cereus Blooms at Night and the cyclical one of L’Espérance-macadam suggest that the traumas from which the different fictional personae suffer cannot be addressed in a direct way. The narratives thus convey the characters’ need to circle around (in L’Espérance-macadam) or, in Cereus Blooms at Night, retrospectively revisit fragments of their respective shocking experiences, which cannot or must not be spoken about, in order to uncover and possibly overcome them. The thematic and structuring metaphors of Sleeping Beauty and the cyclone parallel the writers’ different representations of recurring violence in Caribbean societies. While Mootoo focuses on the impact that a specific act of violence has on one particular character, Pineau explores various forms of crime within an entire community. As in the story of Sleeping Beauty, one female protagonist, namely Mala, is the centre of attention in Mootoo’s novel. The image of the cyclone, by contrast, highlights that an entire community is affected by the destructive forces of the hurricane, which symbolises the cycle of human violence. The cyclone metaphor thus reinforces this sense that violence in Savane is as unpredictable and pervasive as natural catastrophes. Thus far, I have investigated the representation and effects of trauma as experienced by Mootoo’s and Pineau’s female protagonists – traumas which constitute some form of reiterated colonial violence. In the following section I will analyse the significance of fantasy in Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam, and investigate the extent to which fantasies help the victims of violent assaults temporarily to escape their painful memories. In the context of wounding and healing, the metaphors of the cyclone and Sleeping Beauty can be interpreted in light of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through these images both writers fictionally explore the relationship between trauma and fantasy. As Rose reveals, the notion of fantasy has a complex theoretical history of contradicting definitions.50 While it conventionally tends to be understood as an illicit 50 Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Uncovering Trauma 233 and private state of mind, Rose, in her interpretation of (Freudian) psychoanalysis, points out its collective and future-orientated nature.51 As such, fantasy, she argues, plays an important role in social interaction insofar as it influences processes of social exclusion and the development of collective identity.52 Inasmuch as fantasy relates to the past – both individual and collective – it ‘is never only inward-turning’ but links individual and community as well as past and present. Thus ‘fantasy is […] a way of re- elaborating and therefore of partly recognizing the memory which is struggling, against the psychic odds, to be heard’.53 As Jackson points out with specific reference to the context of literary modernism, it expresses ‘that which cannot be said’ within the boundaries of what is commonly perceived as ‘real’ or possible.54 It is thus a literary mode of subversion. This re-elaboration of traumatic events of Mala’s, Angela’s and Eliette’s past takes place in both novels in the characters’ imagination. I will investigate the extent to which fantasies help Mootoo’s and Pineau’s female protagonists to face and try to overcome their traumas while, at the same time, undermining socially imposed boundaries and norms. As the structures of the two novels reveal, the fictional personae are unable to confront the traumatic experiences of their past directly. In order to cope with their situations, those female characters that have suffered from neglect and violence try to escape reality in a number of ways. They resort to two main strategies of repression and resistance, namely silence and social withdrawal and the flight into an illusory, alternative world. While Pineau personifies the cyclone as ‘The Beast’ and links it to paternal sexual abuse, Mootoo resorts to the image of Sleeping Beauty in order to characterise Mala’s flight from her status as a victim of abuse and oppression. As a 51 Rose, States of Fantasy, pp. 2-3. Jackson similarly underlines that ‘literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context’, although it ‘might struggle against the limits of this context’; Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 3. 52 Rose, States of Fantasy, p. 3. 53 Rose, States of Fantasy, p. 5. 54 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 37. Uncovering Trauma 234 result of Chandin’s aggression Mala escapes not only into her own world of imagination but also isolates herself entirely from society and loses contact with Ambrose. Having been abandoned by her family and her best friend, Mala has no opportunity to talk about her childhood experiences. Once Ambrose has left the premises of the house on Hill Side after Chandin’s abuse, Mala is entirely on her own: ‘[Mala] looked into the yard. “Asha? Aunt Lavinia? You there? Mama? Boyie?” she whispered’ (Mootoo, p. 228). She is thus denied verbal communication with her family and within Lantanacamaran society. In L’Espérance-macadam several female victims of male aggression develop different strategies of escape. Eliette, Angela and Rosette try to flee from haunting memories of their painful pasts as well as from continuous violence in Savane Mulet into ‘alternative’ worlds. Rosette’s hope of finding solidarity in the Rastafarian community on the other side of the river is directly linked to their belief that there is an Edenic Africa of their ancestors to which they can return. The assumed existence of a black brotherhood and the expected salvation through geographical relocation prove to be as illusory as Angela’s and Eliette’s strategies of repressing their memories of trauma by falling into silence and withdrawing from society. Both stop speaking for a number of years after these experiences and become taciturn, morose and unable to respond emotionally to their families or wider community.55 Angela, Eliette and Mala suffer from similar psychological disorders after having been sexually abused. Their escape strategies of seclusion and silence resemble each other. In the communities of Paradise and Savane Mulet, most people ignore Mala’s, Eliette’s and Angela’s fate. Feeling marginalized by their families, friends and the wider community, these female protagonists initially consider physical and verbal withdrawal from society the only way to avoid further physical and psychological pain. Interestingly, Mootoo’s and Pineau’s representations of a colonial West Indian and a postcolonial Antillean community respectively resemble each other in the societies’ 55 Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 222. Uncovering Trauma 235 reactions towards apparently socially transgressive behaviour (incestuous relationships, sexual abuse and domestic violence). Thus there seem to be continuities in women’s experiences of male violence across historical periods and different social contexts. However, the illusory worlds into which Mala, Angela and Eliette flee differ considerably. Pineau’s characters create a peaceful human community in their minds, and they occasionally have contact with other people. Eliette, for instance, encloses herself in her house and yet occasionally visits her neighbour Rosette in order to ‘dépoussiérer la solitude’/[remove the dust of her solitude] (Pineau, p. 37). Mala’s refuge, by contrast, resembles a fantasy world: ‘[Mala] was unlike any woman he had ever seen. It was as though he had stumbled unexpectedly on a lost jungle, and except for the odours he would have sworn he was in a paradise’ (Mootoo, p. 155). At her premises on Hill Side she interacts with her natural environment in a very particular language that is partly babbling and partly a form of non-verbal communication. Her deliberate refraining from linguistic utterances is very different from the silence of Angela and Eliette. In order to stress the deep psychological impact that the experience of sexual abuse has made on these two women, Pineau repeatedly mentions their long periods of taciturnity within her narrative (Pineau, pp.124, 128, 197, 203, 214-15 for instance). Concentrating on the situation which triggered Eliette’s and Angela’s silence, Pineau refers to their ensuing taciturnity in a few short sentences or a sub-clauses only. For instance, Séraphine tells her daughter that ‘tu avais perdu la parole’/[you had lost your voice] (Pineau, p. 128) and similarly the narrator reveals that Angela ‘voulut crier encore une fois, mais elle avait perdu la parole’/[wanted to shout again, but she had lost her voice] when Rosan abuses her (Pineau, p. 215). Their silence is embedded in the enumeration of forms of physical harm inflicted upon these characters. Pineau’s juxtaposition of short sentences or sub-clauses which are not linked to each other through conjunctions conveys a sense of acuteness, which is reinforced by the matter-of-fact tone in these sections. Eliette’s taciturnity is directly evoked with the passage of the cyclone, which Séraphine gives as the origin of Eliette’s psychological disturbance: ‘A cause du Cyclone de 1928, tellement mauvais qu’il lui avait fait perdre la parole pendant trois ans pleins, l’avait blessé à la tête et au ventre, l’avait dépossédée Uncovering Trauma 236 de toute foi en elle-même.’/[Because of the Cyclone of 1928, so bad that it had made her lose her ability to speak for three entire years, had injured her head and belly, had taken away all belief in herself.] (Pineau, p. 124) In contrast to Eliette, who has long been left to believe that the cyclone traumatised her, Angela connects her suffering and silence more explicitly to her father’s abuse: ‘C’est à compter de ce jour qu’Angela apprit à se taire, à garder le silence pour pas faire de peine à sa manman, à son papa’/[It was from that day on that Angela learnt to keep quiet, to keep silent in order not to hurt her mother, her father] (Pineau, p. 203). Angela primarily keeps quiet about her pain in order not to betray either of her parents. Believing that speaking out might disrupt the seeming peace in her family, she swallows her grief. Despite these references to Eliette’s and Angela’s silence in the novel, Pineau does not elaborate on their conditions in great detail. The characters thus remain as mysterious to the reader as to the other fictional personae in Savane Mulet. By creating this sense of disquiet, Pineau reinforces the reader’s impression of being trapped in the circle of violence. We, as readers, seem not to get more details about the protagonists’ state of mind and their motivation for their withdrawal than other characters in the novel. The sullenness and taciturnity of these two fictional personae are primarily portrayed as psychological disorders. In contrast to Mala’s condition, Eliette’s and Angela’s mental disturbances can potentially be healed, provided they are consciously confronted by Pineau’s protagonists. Eliette’s silence over a period of three years can be regarded as a result of the traumatic experiences of physical and mental harm inflicted upon her both during the cyclone of 1928 and her father’s sexual abuse. Angela’s silence, by contrast, is, to some extent, imposed by Rosan (Pineau, pp. 212, 217). Her father repeatedly emphasizes that she must not disclose the family ‘secret’ to anybody, let alone to Rosette: ‘Chut! Ne dis rien à ta maman. Jamais… Ne trahis pas notre secret!’/[Sssh! Do not tell anything to your mother. Never… Do not betray our secret!] (Pineau, p. 214). Rosan later argues that such forms of physical contact are common in every family and hence nothing to worry about (Pineau, pp. 214, 226). Angela does keep this ‘secret’ so as not to upset her mother and disrupt her seemingly close family. It is not until she is older and grows in Uncovering Trauma 237 self-confidence that Angela eventually decides to bring the vicious circle of Rosan’s violence to a halt. In contrast to Eliette, who remains ‘dévorée par l’impuissance’/[devoured by her lack of power], Angela – like Mala – has been rebelling against her father’s violence for a long time, albeit unsuccessfully.56 Eventually she manages to liberate herself from Rosan by breaking her silence and denouncing her father to the police. Running the risk of being called a traitor, bringing her family into disrepute within the local community and being expelled from the house by her mother, Angela breaks the circle of violence using her own initiative. She thus sets an example for other physically or mentally oppressed characters who have been unwilling to face reality, notably her mother and Eliette. Angela’s courageous act initiates her own as well as her aunt’s and Rosette’s gradual recovery from trauma. Rosette starts reflecting on her escape into the Rastafarian ideology and her own fantasies, and Eliette confronts her own memories of sexual abuse when she eventually agrees to listen to Angela’s story. Ormerod refers to Eliette’s willingness to face her own past as the ‘moment of catharsis’.57 Angela’s rejection of continuous submission to violence and male domination initiates a change of consciousness within the community of Savane Mulet that leaves tentative hope for a better future at that place. The catharsis of the individual characters is paralleled by the image of the cyclone Hugo of 1989, which destroys large parts of Savane and thus forces the community to reconstruct their settlement. Due to locals’ awareness of the ‘Babylonic’ place they have been living in, this cyclone has a redeeming connotation. There is hope that the cyclone will cleanse Angela’s body of physical and mental wounds and that Savane might return to a more peaceful state, which would be more in the spirit of Joab and his paradise (Pineau, pp. 284, 300). This possibility of social change after the cleansing gale of the 56 Christiane Makward, ‘Entretien avec Gisèle Pineau’, The French Review, 76: 6 (May 2003), pp. 1202-1215 (p. 1211). 57 Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 223. Uncovering Trauma 238 cyclone or, figuratively speaking, of the characters’ self-disclosure, is related to solidarity amongst the inhabitants of Savane.58 Only if the community stands together and makes a joint effort to rebuild their settlement and their lives, can future oppression and personal isolation be avoided or kept at bay. Through the metaphor of the cyclone Pineau thus relates individual traumas to the wider society. She emphasizes that personal and collective history are interrelated. This movement from individual to community is characteristic not only of Pineau’s fiction but also of the Creolists’ work. As I discussed in Chapter Three, Chamoiseau stresses the sense of community in the newly founded settlement of Noutéka which contrasts with the individualism during slavery. As these writers show a collective consciousness can only be developed if individuals confront their own past. The issue of healing through self-disclosure and the chance to recover are important elements in Pineau’s fictional works.59 While she tends to paint a rather bleak picture of the world in her texts, she always indicates that there is hope for change. In most of Pineau’s novels every conclusion simultaneously constitutes a beginning.60 Despite the difficulties involved, many of her characters manage to overcome misery and harm. Thus ‘l’espérance-macadam’, the seemingly futile hope of deprived people, eventually turns into ‘l’espérance’, hope with the onset of the reconstruction of the place and community of Savane Mulet.61 Angela’s and Eliette’s gradual recovery from the 58 In an interview Pineau points out the extraordinary solidarity that can be found ‘uniquement au moment des cyclones’/[only at the moment of cyclones]. She emphasizes that ‘[l]es lendemains du cyclone […], avec la reconstruction, la solidarité, la volonté d’effacer les traces’/[the day after the cyclone […], with the reconstruction, solidarity, the willingness to efface the traces of the gale]; Makward, ‘Entretien’, p. 1210. 59 Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 212. 60 In an interview Pineau explains that Edouard Glissant and particularly his novel Le Quatrième siècle has influenced her way of thinking in this respect. Edouard Glissant, Le Quatrième siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995); and Beluge, ‘Entre ombre et lumière’, p. 89. 61 The Martiniquan expression ‘macadam’ refers to people on the margin of society. ‘L’espérance macadam’ is thus the hope of the dispossessed; Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau’, p. 149. Ormerod stresses the idea of a journey and road that is implied in the term ‘macadam’ and points out that ‘l’espérance Uncovering Trauma 239 physical and mental wounds is an example of this development from ‘espérance macadam’ into ‘espérance’. While Pineau emphasizes the ‘healing power of self-disclosure’, to use Ormerod’s words, and thus the characters’ opportunity to recover from their traumatic experiences, Mootoo’s protagonist remains marginalized, largely silent and split in her personality throughout the novel. Mala’s social seclusion and unstable character are most obviously expressed in her particular type of language. In both novels the issue of healing has verbal manifestations, insofar as the act of speaking is represented as a crucial aspect of potential recovery from trauma. Mootoo fictionally explores manifestations of verbal and non-verbal language in great detail in Cereus Blooms at Night. She interrogates colonial oppression and its reiteration by locals not only in terms of physical and mental harm but also with regard to language. After the traumatic incidents of sexual abuse and murder Mala retreats into a distinct form of ‘language’ that is reminiscent of Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic chora. Kristeva defines this term and its particular usage within psychoanalysis as a provisional, uncertain and fluent form of expression that precedes and constitutes a basis for the Lacanian mirror stage. According to Kristeva, the chora is an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation.62 macadam’ leads some of the fictional personae to ‘wrong choices or acts of destruction’ or to illusory hope; Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, pp. 219-20. 62 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Margaret Waller and intro. by Léon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), p. 25 [emphasis in original]. She explains further that the semiotic chora that usually characterises an early stage of a child’s development can only be compared to vocal or kinetic rhythm, in other words to gestures or sounds: ‘Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularisation, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’; Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26. Uncovering Trauma 240 Pre-linguistic babble and sign language mark a transition period in a child’s development. Since the child has not yet reached the stage of speaking, it tries to express itself through sounds and gestures that it copies from other people. In the child’s development the semiotic chora is a provisional form of articulation because it is only used until the child can communicate verbally. While Kristeva introduces the notion of the chora in the context of semiotics, I find it applicable to the use of language in this text. Kristeva bases her concept of the semiotic chora on certain aspects of Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage. According to the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, self- recognition during the Lacanian mirror stage takes place at the age of six to eight months.63 After the figurative death of the child Pohpoh, Mala may be said to enter the Lacanian mirror stage a second time as an adolescent.64 The dual relationship between self and other is characterised by the person’s, or, in psychoanalytic terms, the child’s ‘consciousness collaps[ing] into its double without keeping distance from it’.65 The subject’s movement between identification with and rejection of the other can equally be applied to Mala’s case. Mala keeps her memories of the past alive. In her nostalgia, she feels she has to care for Pohpoh, who represents these memories. This becomes obvious when she tells herself that her first duty is to look after Pohpoh as soon as difficulties emerge (Mootoo, p. 172). The child Pohpoh, whom Mala imagines she can protect, serves as a substitute for 63 Anike Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. by David Macey (London and New York: Routledge, 1977), p. 79. 64 In Lacan’s theorisation, this stage is characterised by the child’s first conscious confrontation with another person that eventually leads to the child’s self-recognition. It is the ‘first dual relationship between the child and his like – another child, his own image reflected in the mirror, the mother herself of her substitutes […]’, Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, p. 78. Rather than assuming ‘subjectivity’, the child becomes aware of his/her previously fragmented body. Lemaire explains that ‘[a]ccording to Lacan, the most this relationship can do is to constitute a registration of the totality of a body previously lived as fragmented’; Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, p. 78. 65 Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, p. 81. Uncovering Trauma 241 a human relationship in which she can give love and is cared for at the same time. Since her mother, Asha (her sister) and Ambrose abandon her, she seeks consolation in looking after Pohpoh. Condé goes so far as to call Pohpoh ‘a fetish [Mala has made] of her own past’.66 The older Mala grows, the more distant her childhood becomes, and the more comfortable Mala becomes with that part of her former self that Pohpoh represents, namely the wounded body: Over the last few years Mala had grown fond of this particular Pohpoh. She had rather disliked her many years before when they were one and the same. But these days she wished that she and that Pohpoh could have been two separate people, that they could have been best friends, or even that she could have been the mother of Pohpoh or at least her older sister. She would certainly have lifted her up in her arms, held her, hugged her and protected her as well as Pohpoh had protected Asha. (Mootoo, p. 173) There seems to be a shift between Mala’s past and her present. This fluidity is typical of Mootoo’s novel, serving to disrupt literary, sexual, social, ethnic and cultural boundaries. As Mala’s social marginalization both at her house at Hill Side and in the home for the elderly indicates, the transgression of socially imposed boundaries in the text is not socially sanctioned. The novel focuses on social ills rather than representing a catharsis of Lantanacamaran society. As a fictional text Cereus Blooms at Night can interrogate the appropriateness of boundaries but ultimately it cannot change social constellations and norms. Although Mootoo’s call for social change in Caribbean societies remains within the fictional realm, the novel ‘opens up a discursive space in which to rethink’ such norms.67 While the Anglophone writer interrogates artificial, social boundaries by moving between Mala’s childhood and her life at the home for the elderly, Pineau’s merging of 66 Condé, ‘Flight from Certainty’, p. 69. 67 I agree with Donnell, who makes this point in relation to discourses about sexual identity; Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, p. 243. Uncovering Trauma 242 different historical periods emphasizes the interrelatedness of past and present.68 The Francophone writer thus acknowledges the significance of colonial history and its violent legacy for contemporary Antillean societies. By merging different periods Pineau accounts for and simultaneously tries to overcome the burden of history, which still haunts the Caribbean.69 Pineau’s fictional exploration of different manifestations of the legacy of colonial violence conveys a sense of inescapability insofar as the whole community of Savane is affected by repeated incidents of aggression. She highlights that this legacy still pervades postcolonial Antillean societies as a whole. This implies that a communal effort needs to be made to overcome the effects of colonial oppression and its reiteration in postcolonial societies. Pineau’s novel seems to underscore the significance of the development of a collective memory for her characters to become aware of the interrelation between colonial history and postcolonial present. Uncovering occluded stories of the past appears to be a necessary process for Pineau’s fictional personae to understand their present lives and to develop a sense of a collective cultural identity. Pineau’s allusions to the colonial period and her representation of several generations of her characters suggest some continuity between past and present. While Pineau represents the postcolonial period in which colonial violence figures as a legacy of colonialism, Mootoo teases out the dynamics of the colonial period. The narrative remains within the colonial period of the early and mid-nineteenth century, and shifts between past and present converge on the female protagonist. Compared to Pineau, Mootoo focuses more closely on memories of the traumatic past of an individual character and subtly merges them with the protagonist’s present situation. Despite these different perspectives both writers represent very similar social problems in their novels. The different angles from which they represent women’s suffering complement 68 In an interview she explains that past, present and future are closely related in her consciousness: ‘Dans mes textes, les temps se mélangent, parce que pour moi, il y a aujourd’hui, mais hier n’est pas encore mort et demain n’est pas encore là’/[In my texts [different] times mix, because for me there is today, but yesterday is not yet dead and tomorrow has not yet arrived]; Ndagano, Gisèle Pineau’, p. 161. 69 ‘Le passé, il est déjà fait. […] Il nous marque. Il pèse. Il nous hante’./[The past has already been made. […] It marks us. It weighs heavily. It haunts us.]; Ndagano, ‘Gisèle Pineau’, p. 161. Uncovering Trauma 243 each other insofar as they strikingly represent a continuous preoccupation with the issue of violence from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Mootoo shifts between Mala’s childhood and her later memories of that time. She gradually exposes Mala’s reasons for her silence and her social withdrawal in the fragmented narration, which the reader can only reassemble in retrospect. It seems that we need to be introduced to the stories of all the different fictional personae that have played an important role in Mala’s life before we can understand her own (hi)story. Thus every section of her life story is embedded in the wider context of other characters’ lives in Lantanacamara. On a structural level this interrelation of the stories of the different characters is reinforced through Mootoo’s alternation between their stories. Mala’s withdrawal from her social surroundings and her refusal to communicate with other inhabitants of Lantanacamara seems to grow with her increasing disappointment about other characters’ reactions towards her family (hi)story. In order to deal with trauma the issue of alternative forms of language plays an important role for Mootoo’s protagonist. The post-traumatic Mala cannot literally be compared to a child which implies that her adoption of a form of expression that is reminiscent of the semiotic chora does not mark a necessary transition period in an adult’s life. The point I would like to make is that, with her murmuring and grunting, she creates her own form of articulation. Her non- verbal language constitutes in fact a form of feminist resistance to phallocentric language.70 This means that Mala refuses to engage with male-centred colonial Lantanacamaran society. Thus she is not merely a passive victim of male colonial violence but actively seeks to resist that society – although this attempt is ultimately futile. Like a child’s babble her sounds turn out to be almost incomprehensible to the other inhabitants of the town of Paradise, especially since Mala does not imitate human sounds and gestures but the noises of animals. It is crucial to bear in mind that, in 70 The aspect of resistance is implied in Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic chora insofar as it ‘is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death’; Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 28. Uncovering Trauma 244 contrast to the child, to whom Kristeva’s and Lacan’s concepts refer, Mala has already acquired language but most of the time chooses not to express herself verbally. She thus tries to defy the phallocentric language of the colonisers of Lantanacamara that many locals have adopted. In so doing Mala deliberately distances herself from colonial influences on the island. She refuses to adopt British language and culture as well as mimicking it. She does not play into the colonisers’ hands by using their expressions and at the same time criticises those Lantanacamarans such as her father or the doctors and nurses in Paradise Alms House, who colonise the island from within the local community. Mala opposes both forms of colonisation by refusing to engage verbally with the locals, creating her own language instead. Eventually she cannot, however, detach herself entirely from a society to whose concepts even her language is connected. Remaining a marginalized character throughout the novel, Mala can only interrogate but not change social boundaries and norms. In their novels Mootoo and Pineau address the issue of self-acceptance after the experience of trauma. Mala, Eliette and Angela have to confront and live with their traumatic experiences of physical and psychological violence in order to be able to recover from their mental scars. Only if they embrace their lives, emerge from their seclusion and face reality can they attempt to make slight changes in the very society that has harmed them in the first place. Such an opening of themselves towards their social surroundings is a prerequisite for social changes that they might initiate. In Cereus Blooms at Night Mootoo focuses not only on the necessary confrontation of Mala with her past but extends the issue of self-acceptance to the wider social context. It seems that ultimately Mala can only overcome her childhood trauma if she is accepted within Lantanacamaran society regardless of her past. Mootoo interrogates Mala’s social marginalization because of her family history, and in so doing she unsettles sexual categories. Her narrative thus calls for a greater openness towards different forms of sexuality as represented by the similarly marginalized characters Otoh and Tyler. In Cereus Blooms at Night Mala remains a secluded character who keeps longing for her innocent childhood until the end of the story. This means that the writer does not suggest any immediate healing of either Mala or Lantanacamaran Uncovering Trauma 245 society. The protagonist’s social withdrawal and her resorting to non-verbal communication indicate a need for change, but she does not actually manage to initiate any social transformation. Pineau, by contrast, suggests in her text that social change is possible, provided that individuals take responsibility for their lives, make an effort to face reality and to overcome their traumas. I agree with Ormerod’s contention that Pineau emphasizes the ‘healing power of self-disclosure’ and thus intimates that there is hope for the characters to overcome their traumas.71 ‘L’espérance-macadam’, the futile hope of the dispossessed, can be turned into ‘espérance’, hope, once the inhabitants of Savane Mulet have come to face and accept their past. While Mootoo interrogates colonial domination through Mala’s specific type of language, Pineau’s fictional character Rosette tries to escape the oppressive Guadeloupean society by temporarily following a particular ideology, namely Rastafarianism. The representation of this movement allows Pineau to explore fictionally the theme of displacement, which is a recurring trope in contemporary Caribbean and notably French Caribbean literature. Although the rewriting of Caribbean history from the local perspective is of major concern to both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean scholars and writers, there seems to be a particularly heightened sense of the recuperation of collective memory in the Antilles.72 The history of geographical and cultural uprooting and oppression is not specific to the Antilles but has marked societies within the entire Caribbean archipelago. Significantly, however, the awareness of this colonial past has been occluded in the Antilles for a longer period of time than in the West Indies. Until the late 1980s and 1990s Antillean history has primarily been represented as being subsumed by French metropolitan history. In Eloge de la créolité Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant mention this interrelation between 71 Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 220. 72 McCusker provides a lucid examination of contemporary developments in the representation of Caribbean history; ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, pp. 438-50 (esp. pp. 440-41). For further discussion of the recuperation of Antillean history see also Mary Gallagher, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing Since 1950: The Shock of Space and Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 47, 54-57. Uncovering Trauma 246 French metropolitan and Caribbean history. In fact, they consider Caribbean history to be the history of the French colonising power. This holds true not only for their theoretical texts but also for their fiction. As was explained in Chapter Three, ‘History’ with a capital ‘H’ is presented as the history of French colonisation that imposed, inter alia, French administration and literary models on the Antilles. This tendency has to be seen in the context of the continued dependence of these French overseas departments on the ‘hexagone’. The relationship between Antilleans and French people is highly ambiguous. Legally and according to French assimilation policy Antilleans are French; yet they tend to be racially discriminated against, hence made to feel ‘different’.73 At the same time their particular history has rarely been accounted for in France. Despite the legal classification of slavery as a crime against humanity in 2001, the current French government has sought to emphasize positive aspects of French colonialism such as the education of the (African) population by French teachers or medical support provided by metropolitan doctors.74 Significantly, as Claude Askolovitch explains, French politicians seem to have assumed that the Antilles have always been an integral part of France and that, consequently, the ‘loi de la honte’/[law of shame] addressed not the Antillean but the African past.75 Although demonstrations against article four of the law of 23 February 2005 which took place both in France and in the Antilles have led to the recent cancellation of the law, the very implementation of this law in the first place signals 73 As Young points out, this ambiguity is engrained in the imperialist doctrine of assimilation: ‘on the one hand, [the French doctrine of assimilation] […] assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings, their common humanity as part of a single species, and considered that however “natural” or “backward” their state, all native peoples could immediately benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture in its most advanced contemporary manifestation. On the other hand, this very assumption meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institution of the people being colonized – it saw difference, and sought to make it the same – what might be called the paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism’; Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 32. 74 Dominque Dhombres, ‘Audrey, Nicolas et la Martinique’, Le Monde, 8 December 2005. 75 Claude Askolovitch, ‘La Mémoire blessée’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15-21 December 2005, pp. 22- 25 (p. 22). Uncovering Trauma 247 combien la France de 2005 était rattrapée par la question du passé colonial de la République et, au-delà de son passé esclavagiste. Et comment ce retour d’un refoulé historique nourrit au présent des identités traumatiques concurrentes. Etre noir en France, être beur, c’est de plus en plus se proclamer victime de l’Histoire, descendant d’esclaves, de déportés africains, de colonisés, d’immigrés/[the extent to which the France of 2005 was captured by the question of the colonial past of the Republic and, furthermore of its involvement in the slave trade. And how this return of a suppressed history nourishes at present competing traumatic identities. To be black in France, to be beur [French people of North African origin], increasingly means to proclaim oneself a victim of History, a descendant of slaves, of deported Africans, of colonised, of immigrants].76 The recent increasing preoccupation of Antillean politicians and intellectuals with the history of the region constitutes an attempt to overcome the ‘schizophrenic’ state of Antillean societies as torn between the metropolis and the Caribbean archipelago and to 76 Antoine de Baecque, ‘Colonisation: la fronde des historiens’, Libération, 17 October 2005; http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article-331575. In Martinique Sarkozy’s cancellation of his visit to the Antilles, which was stipulated for 8-10 December 2005, was regarded as ‘une première victoire’/[a first victory]; AFP, ‘Nicolas Sarkozy reporte son voyage aux Antilles’, Le Monde, 7 December 2005; p. 11. Article four of the law passed on 23 February 2005 was meant to enforce that ‘les programmes scolaires reconnaissent en particulier le rôle positif de la présence française outre- mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord, et accordent à l’histoire et aux sacrifices des combattants de l’armée française issue de ces territoires la place éminente à laquelle ils ont droit’/[the school programmes acknowledge, in particular, the positive role of the French overseas presence, especially in North Africa, and grant history and the sacrifices of combatants of the French army from these territories the eminent place which they are entitled to] ; reprinted in AFP and AP, ‘L'art. 4 sur la colonisation déclassé’, La Croix, 30 January 2006; http://www.la- croix.com/article/index.jsp?docId=2257312&rubId=4076. The constitutional downgrading of this article on 31 January 2006 – the announcement that the law had a regulatory, not a legislative character – now allows the government to abolish the second line of this article (the part that highlights the ‘positive role’ of colonialism); AFP and AP, ‘L’art. 4 sur la colonisation déclassé’. Uncovering Trauma 248 develop a collective cultural identity.77 The recollection of both the suffering and resistance of the colonised can be regarded as part and parcel of this process.78 This holds true for Pineau’s writing, too. Although she grew up in France and has thus been influenced, to an extent, by French culture and literature, she emphasizes her Guadeloupean roots. Her personal experience of marginalization and her sense of living in an exile of sorts in France have influenced her fiction.79 While Pineau does not explicitly address the relationship between France and the Antilles in L’Espérance- macadam, she still draws the reader’s attention to the themes of history, memory and displacement, which are related to the experience of colonial violence. Amnesia, the repression of memories and geographical as well as cultural uprooting are reinforced in this novel through Pineau’s representation of the Rastafarian community. In their attempt to reconnect to their ancestors’ African origins the Rastafarians hint at Africans’ displacement during slavery.80 The fictional portrayal of this group, the ideology of which attracts Rosette and spurs her imagination, allows the writer to focus on collective memory rather than singling out an individual’s approach towards communal as well as personal history. In contrast to most inhabitants of Savane who, like Eliette and Angela, suppress memories of their past and, at the same time, withdraw from society, the Rastafarians jointly turn their attention to their roots. This communal remembrance attracts Rosette and temporarily gives her a sense of belonging. As recent 77 As Askolovitch notes, Yann Montplaisir argues that ‘[p]our l’instant, on est condamné à la schizophrénie’/[at the moment we are condemned to schizophrenia]; Askolovitch, ‘La Mémoire blessée’, p. 24. 78 For a discussion of the representation of French colonial history and Antilleans’ attempts to develop a collective memory of their past see the Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, pp. 15-27. 79 Several of Pineau’s novels address the themes of exile and displacement by focusing on characters that feel torn between the French and the Antillean cultures. See, for instance, Un Papillon dans la cité (Paris: Sépia, 1992), L’Exil selon Julia (Paris: Stock, 1996) and L’Âme prêtée aux oiseaux (Paris: Stock, 1998). 80 For further references to the link between the displacement of African slaves from their native countries and the marginalization of both the Rastafarian community and Savane in L’Espérance- macadam see Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, pp. 219-20. Uncovering Trauma 249 studies have stressed, the emphasis on the community as opposed to the individual has, until the last decade, characterised French Caribbean writing to a greater extent than West Indian fiction.81 Both Glissant and the Creolists have emphasized that the past and future of the individual are inseparable from the community. In Glissant’s words, ‘la parole de l’artiste antillais ne provient donc pas de l’obsession de chanter son être intime; cet intime est inséparable du devenir de la communauté’/[the words of the Antillean artist thus do not derive from the obsession to sing his/her inner being; this inner being is inseparable from the becoming of the community].82 Similarly, the Creolists’ focus on a rhizomatic and collective Creole identity has to be read in light of this attempt to recover the obliterated Antillean collective consciousness.83 Rosette seems to be attracted to the Rastafarians because of their collective acts of remembrance. Significantly, however, she considers this communitarian recollection to substitute rather than to complement her personal confrontation with her own past. By emphasising that the various characters in L’Espérance-macadam have to face their own histories before changes in the wider community can take place, Pineau highlights this interrelation of individual and community in Caribbean societies. While Pineau and Mootoo both fictionally interrogate various forms of (reiterated) colonial oppression by showing its impact on various characters, they focus on different aspects. Mootoo’s protagonist intends to undermine colonial discourse and oppression through language, whereas the Francophone writer links individual attempts to cope with trauma and violence through communal approaches towards displacement and 81 See McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, pp. 439-40; and Mary Gallagher, ‘Contemporary French Caribbean Poetry: The Poetics of Reference’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 11: 4 (October 2004), 451-62 (p. 451). This trend has slightly shifted since the 1990s, a decade which saw a ‘remarkably concentrated upsurge in autobiographical writing’ by Francophone Caribbean authors; McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 439. 82 Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), p. 439. 83 As McCusker argues and as I have discuss in the Introduction, the widespread preoccupation with the colonial past was connected to the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean and the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Francophone Caribbean; McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, pp. 439-40. Uncovering Trauma 250 memory. Rosette’s escape from the misery and violence in Savane Mulet into Rastafarianism constitutes as much a critique of the reiteration of colonial oppression as does Angela’s and Eliette’s taciturnity. In the Rastafarians’ view Rosette moves from Jah’s Babylon to the potential paradise by crossing the bridge over the river, which separates hell-like Savane from the supposedly Edenic Rastafarian settlement.84 In Mootoo’s novel Mala’s silence and her later non-verbal form of communication disrupt colonial discourse. Pineau, by contrast, interrogates binary thinking, which has pervaded both Christian belief and colonial discourse, by portraying Rosette’s illusory refuge from reality in the Rastafarian community. Their marginalization by the inhabitants of Ti-Ghetto is reciprocated by the Rastafarians’ refusal to interact with people in Savane except for those who seem willing to leave that settlement. In their view Savane constitutes the very Babylon which has been prophesied by Jah and that is doomed to perish.85 In contrast to the locals of Ti-Ghetto, the Rastafarians live in harmony with nature, and they therefore believe that they do not attract any disasters to their community. Savane, by contrast, seems to have attracted evil since Joab died and his little paradise vanished. According to the Rastafarians, the inhabitants of Ti-Ghetto are punished for their deeds by the cyclones that devastate the place on a regular basis. In this context the cyclone has a moral and even apocalyptic significance.86 Cyclone Hugo is directly referred to as ‘Vent d’Apocalypse’ [sic]/[Wind of the Revelation] that might bring about the ‘Fin du Monde’ [sic]/[End of the World] (Pineau, p. 273). The necessary rebuilding after the hurricane simultaneously implies, however, that there is hope for the creation of a more peaceful community, which will resemble Joab’s original paradise on that site (Pineau, pp. 279, 283). The gap between the Rastafarians and the inhabitants of Savane Mulet is symbolised by the river that separates the two settlements. The language barrier reinforces the social 84 For references to Savane as ‘Babylon’ see, for instance, Pineau, pp. 17, 255, 277. 85 For further references to the association of Savane with Babylon see Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 219. 86 Ormerod, ‘Displacement’, p. 219. Uncovering Trauma 251 and ideological divide between these two communities. As Rosette does not speak English, she fails to grasp the deeper meaning of certain concepts of Rastafarianism such as the link between the belief in a spiritual, if not also actual, return to an allegedly Edenic Africa of their ancestors and the musical expression of this aspiration in Reggae (Pineau, p. 165). Bob Marley’s song ‘No Woman No Cry’ inspires Rosette’s imagination and helps her mind wander off into a fantasy world, but she does not directly associate this type of music with the wider Rastafarian longing to be rescued from the present Babylonic world and to return to Africa. Through her fictional representation of a Rastafarian community within her Francophone novel, Pineau hints at a geographical and temporal travelling of ideas of a black brotherhood. Interestingly, however, no mention is made in the novel to any connection between the Rastafarian community in Guadeloupe and Rastafarians in the Anglophone Caribbean. This implies that for the Francophone Rastafarians the adoption of both this particular ideology and the English language primarily serves as a means of differentiating themselves from Savane Mulet. Even though ideas of a black brotherhood worldwide and black people’s return to an Edenic place have obviously spread beyond the Anglophone Caribbean, the absence of cross-cultural connections between Francophone and Anglophone Rastafarians problematises this very notion of a black brotherhood. Rather than establishing links between the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, the Rastafarian community in Guadeloupe isolate themselves on the island and in relation to other ideologically like-minded communities. The ideological, spatial and linguistic isolation of the Guadeloupean Rastafarians thus reinforces the illusory nature of Rosette’s attempted escape from her own reality. The futility of a search for an idealised pre-colonial state in the Caribbean is reinforced in L’Espérance-macadam through Pineau’s references to the tales that Rosette invents. These stories are based on the Biblical Genesis, and they are reminiscent of the paradise that the Rastafarians seek. Through her imagery, which refers to natural phenomena, Rosette adapts the Biblical story of creation to the Antillean context. The expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden is paralleled by economic greed and the exploitation Uncovering Trauma 252 of human beings who were classified as ‘inferior’, which characterised colonial practice. Rosette’s paradise is not an entirely Utopian world but rather refers to a pre-colonial state when people were working their land as free men and women: ‘[l]es hommes, les femmes et les enfants travaillaient la terre. Mais le travail n’avait pas la figure de l’esclavage, parce que la pluie et le soleil aimaient l’Espérance’/[the men, women and children worked the land. But the work did not take the form of slavery, because the rain and the sun liked Hope] (Pineau, p. 199). Her tales stress the existence of sincere hope, which she would like to see projected into her own reality. Rather than imagining a paradisiacal state, which cannot be attained on earth, Rosette seeks a more balanced world where hope prevails rather than pain and despair. Speaking in metaphors, the cyclone, which devastates the region with irregular frequency, would thus initiate reconstruction rather than merely destruction. Rosette longs for solidarity and an understanding, peaceful community of Guadeloupean inhabitants. Mala, by contrast, invents her own world in which she lives completely withdrawn from other human beings and interacts solely with her natural surroundings. While Pineau questions binary oppositions that characterise, to some extent, both Christian belief and European thought by adapting the Biblical Genesis, Mootoo interrogates social conventions implied in verbal language by juxtaposing human dialogue with Mala’s non-verbal form of communication. Mala’s particular type of language is developed out of sounds from her natural environment rather than from human linguistic interaction. In her isolation in the house on Hill Side Mala refrains more and more from linguistic utterance, which, to her, is too deeply anchored in social conventions. Images, by contrast, appear to lend themselves more easily to interpretations that do not represent ‘mainstream’ views. Since in everyday conversation the visual element usually plays a minor role, focusing on imagery suggests an alternative to dominant discourses. Thus Mala resorts to images and feelings: In the phase just before Mala stopped using words, lexically shaped thoughts would sprawl across her mind, fractured here and there. The cracks would be filled with images. Soon the inverse happened. A Uncovering Trauma 253 sentence would be constructed primarily of images punctuated by only one or two verbalisations: a noun tentatively uttered in recognition, a descriptive word confirming a feeling or observation. (Mootoo, p. 126) The fractures and cracks in Mala’s thoughts seem to mirror the physical and psychological scars that result from her sexual abuse. As society’s verbal language, with which Mala has expressed herself so far, is inscribed in her mind, so are the scars on the surface of and inside her body. In Mala’s transitional period between vocal communication and her focus on images and sounds, she realises that she cannot adequately express her emotions verbally because words appear too restrictive: ‘That verbalisation, she came to understand, was not the feeling itself but a name given to the feeling’ (Mootoo, p. 126). Rather than trying to put her emotions into words, the meaning of which is socially produced, she intuitively follows her bodily sensations. Words seem to disconnect Mala from the messages her environment sends out: The wings of a gull flapping through the air titillated her soul and awakened her toes and knobby knees, the palms of her withered hands, deep inside her womb, her vagina, lungs, stomach and heart. Every muscle of her body swelled, tingled, cringed or went numb in response to her surroundings – every fibre was sensitized in a way that words were unable to match or enhance. Mala responded to these receptors, flowing with them effortlessly, like water making its way along a path. (Mootoo, pp. 126-27) While verbal language chiefly stimulates the mind, Mala’s receptiveness to the sounds of her environment affects all the different parts of her body. The body can thus be compared to a recipient for sensual stimulations from outside. Rather than merely absorbing such signals, Mala’s body can respond to them intuitively. With the help of her language that focuses on visual elements Mootoo seeks to evoke a similar sensual response in the reader. Rather than approaching the novel rationally, the reader is invited to engage with the text on an emotional and almost sensual level. All the different parts of Mala’s body react to the flight of a gull. Mala’s old and stiff extremities arise to new life, and her entire body is filled with energy. The enumeration Uncovering Trauma 254 of the inner parts of Mala’s body suggests that every single organ, ‘[e]very muscle’ and ‘every fibre’ absorbs the waves of energy transmitted by the gull’s ‘flapping’ of its wings. With the help of this parallelism, emphasis is placed on those inner organs that are vital for the working of the human body. In their response to the environment, the various body parts work together in such a harmonious way that verbal expression could not satisfactorily mirror it. As this passage illustrates, language has to be highly visual in order to reflect Mala’s physical and emotional reactions. The accumulation of sensually evocative verbs such as to swell, to tingle, to cringe or to go numb builds up to the climax of her entire body responding to her surroundings. Mootoo draws the reader’s attention to the sense with which Mala responds to her natural environment, for instance to the small natural signal of a gull’s flight, by comparing her body to a stream of water. Her movements seem to be as graceful as the flow of this natural liquid or a bird’s flight. Mala’s rootedness in her natural surroundings is underlined by the adjectives ‘knobby’ and ‘withered’ which describe her knees and her hands. The alliteration in ‘knobby knees’ encourages the reader to visualise Mala as an old tree above the top of which the gull is flying. ‘[T]he palms of her withered hands’ allude to the old leaves hanging from the branches of the tree. This association of Mala with a tree recurs in the novel when Otoh almost mistakes her for the big mudra tree in her garden or for a shrub. She appears to be absorbed by the flora around her: ‘[Mala] sat in a rocking chair beside the tree, her eyes closed. Her figure was all but lost in the blueness of the mudra’s trunk. […] [Otoh] could so easily have missed her, mistaken her for a shrub’ (Mootoo, p. 155). Physically and sensually incorporated into her natural environment Mala seeks to adapt her form of communication to her surroundings. Verbalising impressions would interrupt the sensual flow in Mala’s body and, to a certain degree, detach her from her surroundings. For Mala, this particular type of body language serves as an alternative to the verbal language of the society from which she is marginalized. Instead of communicating with people, she concentrates on bodily sensations. Words are inevitably loaded with certain connotations that reflect social beliefs and norms. Mala’s Uncovering Trauma 255 body language, by contrast, appears to be more immediate and less contaminated by socially inscribed norms and values. Interacting with her surroundings in the most basic form of human communication, namely in an adoption of the pre-Oedipal and pre-linguistic form of the semiotic chora, Mala no longer really belongs to society or culture. Instead, she has created her own imaginary world that contrasts with the oppressive human surroundings in the community of Paradise. Although I would argue that Mala’s character has changed considerably after the childhood trauma so that she may be regarded as figuratively reborn, it must be acknowledged that hers is a post-linguistic abstention from speech rather than pre-linguistic babble. While the adult Mala can still use verbal language, she chooses to remain silent most of the time. Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora, by contrast, refers to a child that still has to learn how to speak. Yet, Mala’s specific form of non-verbal language is reminiscent of the characteristics of the semiotic chora. As was argued earlier in this chapter, Mala’s reaction to colonial violence – violence that is expressed in physical aggression, psychological torture or the coloniser’s language – is a withdrawal from society and a refusal to adopt its language. L’Espérance-macadam and Cereus Blooms at Night are part of the wider trend of ‘memorial writing’ that characterised Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean postcolonial literature of the 1990s.87 More specifically, both novels suggest that there are continuities in Caribbean women’s writing from that period which uncovers occluded (traumatic) (hi)stories. Unlike some of their male contemporaries such as Maximin, Chamoiseau and Glissant, these women writers do not concentrate on heroic forms of colonial resistance by male characters but on the impact that colonialism has had on women. Just like Mootoo and Pineau, they portray the state of mind of their female protagonists in their attempts to overcome the traumatic experiences of their past. This chapter has revealed continuities between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing on the one hand and between representations of women’s experiences 87 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 440. Uncovering Trauma 256 during the colonial and the postcolonial period on the other. In particular, I have investigated similarities between Mootoo and Pineau’s portrayals of the psychological impact that violence has had on women in Caribbean societies. Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam share certain elements with the autobiographical novel, which McCusker characterises as being marked by ‘a specifically female experience – frequently one of suffering and alienation’.88 I would argue that the specific female trajectory of Cereus Blooms at Night and L’Espérance-macadam foregrounds connections between different island societies that transcend colonial, linguistic and cultural boundaries. By relating domestic violence to the horrors of slavery and colonialism which have haunted Caribbean societies, Mootoo and Pineau combine issues that are still of vital importance in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean societies alike. Their specific exploration of violence in relation to gender and sexuality opens their novels up to discussions about the politics of gender, a problematics which, indeed, moves beyond distinct cultural contexts. While Mootoo and Pineau focus on women’s suffering from male violence, writers such as Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé portray cross-cultural friendships and solidarity among some of their female characters. As Sam Haigh argues, Condé’s novel Moi, Tituba sorcière… noire de Salem (1986) alludes to friendships between women of different cultural origins across the Americas.89 Cross-cultural and transcolonial connections are portrayed in Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Condé’s La Migration des cœurs (1995).90 In both novels the female protagonists transgress not only social and 88 McCusker, ‘“Troubler l’ordre de l’oubli”’, p. 439. 89 Sam Haigh, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe (Leeds: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000), p. 211. 90 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. by Angela Smith (1966; London: Penguin, 1997); and Maryse Condé, La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). Like Lionnet I use the term ‘transcolonial’ to highlight the spatial dimension of links between colonisers and colonised; Françoise Lionnet, ‘Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage in Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs’, in Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues, ed. by Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 65-87 (p. 69). More specifically, this expression will be applied in order to underline colonial connections between Uncovering Trauma 257 ethnic but also cultural categories. The latter is reinforced by their travelling across the Caribbean archipelago and, in Wide Sargasso Sea, by the protagonist’s mixed Anglophone and Francophone cultural heritage. (I will return to the unsettling of colonial, linguistic and cultural boundaries represented in Wide Sargasso Sea and La Migration des cœurs in my Conclusion.) Caribbean women’s writing since the 1990s has increasingly problematised divides based not only on ethnicity and culture but also on gender. Insofar as women writers such as Cliff, Mootoo, Pineau and Condé have addressed themes that have been taboos in societies across the Caribbean, their texts can be placed within the wider context of Caribbean literature, literature which transcends and challenges colonial and linguistic divisions. L’Espérance-macadam and Cereus Blooms at Night move, to some extent, beyond the realm of the individual out into the wider community. While Mala’s life story is at the centre of Cereus Blooms at Night, Mootoo embeds her protagonist’s suffering from male aggression in the wider context of reiterated colonial violence in Lantanacamara. The interrelation between individual and community is reinforced by the fragmented structure of the novel. Throughout the text Mootoo’s first-person narrator moves between relating episodes from Mala’s life and from other characters in the town of Paradise. In Cereus Blooms at Night the various characters thus allude to different literary themes and social problems. For instance, in her portrait of fictional personae such as Otoh and Tyler, Mootoo hints at the problematics of gender boundaries and homophobia in Lantanacamaran society. Pineau, by contrast, focuses more specifically on physical and psychological violence as it has characterised Guadeloupean society for generations. She therefore establishes a more sustained link between individual stories the Caribbean and several European colonising powers rather than merely the relationship between the colony and the dominant coloniser. Trivedi had used the term ‘transcolonial’ in his critique of the concept of ‘postcolonial’ in the context of ‘home’, (un)belonging and Bhabha’s interpretation of the ‘Third Space’; Harish Trivedi, ‘The Postcolonial or the Transcolonial? Location and Language’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1: 2 (1999), pp. 269-72 (p. 270). While he uses this term in a more abstract, theoretical way than I do, he, like Lionnet, highlights the spatial aspect of (post)colonial encounters. Uncovering Trauma 258 of trauma and the wider collective memory than Mootoo. In her novel violence and individuals’ reactions to it are always clearly connected to wider social issues. Personal and communal experiences are interrelated as is symbolised by the recurring metaphor of the cyclone, which sweeps across the whole island, affecting the entire community. By closely linking personal and collective experiences Pineau fictionally uncovers silenced stories which shed some light on the history of the Antilles.91 Pineau’s focus on the community and on the Caribbean and more specifically, Antillean context of her novel is reinforced by her choice of imagery. Apart from linking the individual and the community, the image of the cyclone becomes a structuring and thematic metaphor in L’Espérance-macadam. In the novel this image alludes to the cyclical repetition of criminal acts in the settlement of Savane Mulet, suggesting a link between individual suffering and violence in the wider community, and also carries a moral connotation of the wind of the Revelation that destroys the ‘Babylonic’ place of Ti-Ghetto. While the Rastafarians interpret the devastation of Savane Mulet as the fulfilment of Jah’s prophesy and some sort of heavenly revenge for the evil of mankind, this destruction simultaneously offers a chance for reconstruction. By juxtaposing apparent opposites such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, destruction and reconstruction, hope and despair as well as ‘reality’ and imagination, Pineau highlights the interrelation between these different elements. Despite her focus on misery and violence, which are underlying motifs throughout her novel, the text ends on a rather positive note, namely the chance to turn ‘l’espérance macadam’, the futile hope of the dispossessed and disadvantaged, into ‘espérance’, real hope. Pineau’s novel foregrounds potential changes in Guadeloupean society such as the confrontation with the painful past and the direct naming of the roots of violence. Cereus Blooms at Night, by contrast, merely stresses the need for change. Mala’s retreat from society and her silence are self-harming and in the end do not suggest any real 91 For further discussion of the relationship between individual stories and national narrative see Lucía M. Suárez, ‘Gisèle Pineau: Writing the Dimensions of Migration’, World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, 75: 3-4 (2001), pp. 9-21 (p. 11). Uncovering Trauma 259 solution to the problems encountered by the colonial society of Lantanacamara. Chandin’s iteration of colonial violence and the fact that Mala is abandoned by friends and family members results in her abstention from verbal language. Her resorting to non-verbal communication is an escape from reality. It may be interpreted as an attempt to live in an imaginary world that resembles the world presented in fairy tales. To counter the colonial reality on the island, Mala flees into a dream-world. Her non-verbal form of communication indicates the need for change rather than presenting a solution to problems arising from the colonisation of Lantanacamara or of the real country, Trinidad. Mala’s form of non-verbal communication cannot replace verbal language, and its subversive potential marginalizes the rebellious character rather than leading to change in society. The intimation of an alternative to dominant discourse is, however, equally important because the mere refusal to conform may already point out the ills of that particular society. Mala’s rebellion through her abstention from verbal utterance does not offer any solution, but it indicates the need for changes in the society of Lantanacamara/Trinidad. By disrupting linguistic, sexual, social and cultural boundaries throughout the text, Mootoo interrogates the imposition of apparently impermeable, fixed borders between artificially established categories. Her novel thus seems to call for a greater acceptance within Lantanacamaran society of those individuals that do not conform to social norms and who face homophobic, oppressive and socially exclusive behaviour in this society. I would argue that this fluidity, which characterises the entire novel, can be extended to the context of literary categories. Although the novel is situated during nineteenth- century British colonialism, the text goes beyond this temporal framework insofar as Mootoo addresses issues such as homophobia, sexual abuse and violence in more general terms that are particularly relevant in contemporary Caribbean societies. Thematically as well as stylistically Mootoo thus stress the relevance of the experience of colonial oppression for contemporary Caribbean societies. In L’Espérance-macadam Pineau, too, emphasizes that the legacy of slavery and colonialism still has an effect on Caribbeans’ cultural identity. While Mootoo concentrates on the origins and different Uncovering Trauma 260 forms of colonial violence and its adaptation by local West Indians, Pineau portrays its impact on contemporary Antillean communities. Despite these different perspectives both novels can be regarded as important literary contributions – literary contributions which represent women’s perspectives – to the recent attempts (in politics, education and the arts) at a collective remembrance of the history of slavery and colonialism. Conclusion By investigating the extent to which literary tropes and theoretical concepts have travelled across the Caribbean and by comparing prose narratives from different Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean islands I have disclosed intra-Caribbean connections which have been overlooked by criticism that is based on one academic subject only. As my comparison has shown, notions such as cultural identity and representations of the legacy of colonial history have developed parallel to one another in the linguistically divided archipelago and/or been revisited and re-contextualised. Despite the common history of colonisation, slavery and processes of de-colonisation, Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing has until the last decade predominantly been examined in isolation, within one linguistic context only. Sustained and thorough comparative studies that move beyond this divide are scarce. While my study is part of a growing trend in postcolonial literary criticism that draws on theoretical concepts developed both in the Anglophone and the Francophone context, it is more specifically situated at the intersection of two major linguistic domains. In contrast to most existing criticism my study has sustained this cross-linguistic examination of Caribbean fiction within each individual chapter. This approach has allowed me to analyse Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean texts alongside each other and to bring to light commonalities without glossing over the specific historical, cultural and literary contexts of each field. Through a close reading of selected narrative fiction I have contextualised and explored significant underlying linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between various Caribbean societies. The themes of migration, transformation and creolisation have been at the centre of my investigation. It has been asserted throughout the thesis that the complexity and diversity of Caribbean cultures and writing have to be accounted for in comparative studies in order to avoid drawing premature, simplified and generalising conclusions about ‘Caribbean’ writing. The term ‘Caribbean’ is problematised because characteristics of one specific linguistic area are Conclusion 262 often implicitly extrapolated to the entire Caribbean in criticism that is based in one academic discipline only. Bery and Murray underscore this argument by pointing out that [l]inguistic isolationism tends to encourage the reading of postcolonial literatures in relation to the language and culture of the former colonial power and, in so doing, to undervalue multiple processes of influence, thus subtly reasserting the binary models of colonial thinking. A consciously comparative approach is one way of circumventing these dilemmas.1 The following brief comparison of Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maryse Condé’s narrative La Migration des cœurs (1995) will illustrate the extent to which criticism has focused on specific linguistic and literary contexts.2 By building on incisive existing criticism on these texts I will develop a new comparison that focuses on cross-cultural connections hinted at in these two novels. In so doing I intend to demonstrate the productivity of a cross-cultural, comparative interpretation of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean through this specific case study. My comparison of Wide Sargasso Sea and La Migration des cœurs will build on and simultaneously develop further some of the notions of cultural identity addressed in this thesis. Specifically I will examine the interrelation between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean cultures in a brief investigation of the identitarian concepts of ‘West Indianness’ and what might be called ‘Caribbeanness’ that emerged during the 1960s and the 1990s respectively. While Wide Sargasso Sea has attracted a wide range of literary criticism, the novel has largely been read within the British colonial context to which it ‘writes back’.3 The very 1 Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray, eds, Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 3. 2 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. by Angela Smith (1966; London: Penguin, 1997); and Maryse Condé, La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). 3 Most postcolonial critics have situated Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea within this literary trend of militant literary revisionism, which was at a height between the 1950s and 1970s. At that time it offered postcolonial writers the opportunity to interrogate European classical texts which place the Conclusion 263 concept of ‘counter-discourse’ seems to be based on the ambiguous and dualistic relationship between the (former) coloniser and colonised. The problematic ‘centre’/‘periphery’ binary is maintained insofar as the postcolonial rewrite is posited as militantly responding to the colonial ‘pre-text’. As a consequence of this foregrounding of the link between the (former) colony and the metropolis, little attention is commonly paid to cross-cultural influences and transcolonial links. Nevertheless, as endnotes and brief explanations in their work indicate, some critics show an awareness of the Francophone context portrayed in this text.4 I will concisely develop these ideas and draw them together into a final assessment of the significance of cross-cultural influences in Caribbean societies. Published almost thirty years after Wide Sargasso Sea, La Migration des cœurs cannot be regarded as a revisionist text in the same way as Rhys’ novel. Recent criticism on Condé’s text acknowledges the existence of intertextual borrowings and cultural links colonial ‘subaltern’ at the margin of the narrative. For further discussions of this phenomenon see Theo D’haen, ‘Caribbean Migrations: Maryse Condé on the track of Emily Brontë’, in Histoire jeu science dans l’aire de la littérature, ed. by Sjef Houppermans, Paul J. Smith and Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 202-14 (p. 202); Theo D’haen, ‘(Post)Modernity and Caribbean Discourse’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, ed. by A. James Arnold, (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997), pp. 303-21; and Theo D’haen, ‘Re-Presenting the Caribbean’, in L’Exil et l’allégorie dans le roman Anglophone contemporain, ed. by Michel Morel (Paris: Editions Messene, 1998), pp. 102-15. In most postcolonial interpretations of Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel has been posited as an emblematic postcolonial text that ‘writes back’ to a colonial novel. See, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, ed. by Fred Botting (London and Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1995), pp. 235-60. By writing a different version of the story of Brontë’s Bertha, Rhys questions the authority of the English classic and, by implication, of English imperialist discourse. As various postcolonial critics have contended, Rhys gives the ‘subaltern’ colonial character Bertha of Jane Eyre a voice and writes her into the story. See, for instance, Spivak, ‘Three Women Texts’; Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9: 1-2 (1987), pp. 27-58; D’haen, ‘Re-Presenting the Caribbean’, pp. 103-15; and D’haen, ‘Caribbean Migrations’, pp. 202-14. 4 Angela Smith, for instance, acknowledges the Francophone context represented in the novel in the endnotes to her edited publication of Wide Sargasso Sea; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. by Angela Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. 131-33, 138-47. Conclusion 264 beyond the Francophone context. The fact that Condé adapts, even ‘cannibalises’, a British rather than a French canonical text already suggests that her novel cannot be contained within the Francophone cultural and literary context. During the last decade La Migration des cœurs has increasingly been associated with the concept of ‘literary cannibalism’.5 As Condé points out, the Martiniquan writer and critic Suzanne Césaire was ‘the first intellectual who invented what we now call literary cannibalism (i.e., a rewriting and magical appropriation of the literature of the other)’.6 Césaire argued that ‘[l]a poésie martiniquaise sera cannibale ou ne sera pas’/[Martini[qu]an poetry shall be cannibal or nothing at all].7 The Martiniquan writer thus posits literary cannibalism as the basis for ‘poetical self-birth or parthogenesis’ [sic], to use Condé’s words.8 Instead of imitating French literary tropes and forms, Antillean writers figuratively have to eat, digest and thereby transform the former. In many of her recent novels, and most evidently in La Migration des cœurs, Condé makes use of the technique of ‘literary cannibalism’.9 As the diversity of intertextual 5 Kathleen Gyssels, ‘«Histoires de la femme et de chien cannibales»: Réécritures et intertextualités inaperçues ou inavouées (Condé/Chamoiseau)’, conference paper in print for the Proceedings of the conference at KUL/LILLE III, May 2005, ed. by Lieven D’hulst and Jean-Marc Moura (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, forthcoming). Gyssels compares Condé’s ‘cannibalisation’ of source-texts in her recent fiction with that of Patrick Chamoiseau. See also Maryse Condé, ‘Des Héros et des cannibales: réécriture et transgression dans la littérature des petites Antilles de langue française’, Portulan (Oct 2000), 29-38 (p. 38). Matibag traces the ‘discursive morphology’ of the terms ‘cannibal’ and ‘anthropophage’ and the context-specific significations at different times during colonialism; Eugenio D. Matibag, ‘«Cannibalisme tenace»: Anthropophagic Fictions in Caribbean Writing’, in L’Héritage de Caliban, ed. by Maryse Condé (Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe: Editions Jasor, 1992), pp. 147-64. 6 Maryse Condé, ‘Unheard Voice: Suzanne Césaire and the Construct of a Caribbean Identity’, in Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, ed. by Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong Leek (New York, Bern, Frankfurt, Paris: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 61-66 (p. 62) [emphasis in original]. 7 Suzanne Césaire and Aimé Césaire, eds, Tropiques 1941-1945 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978), quoted in Condé, ‘Suzanne Césaire’, p. 64. 8 Condé, ‘Suzanne Césaire’, p. 64 [Condé’s translation]. 9 Moi, Tituba sorcière… noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986) is the first novel in which Condé incorporates intertextual borrowings. More recent texts in which she deploys this literary Conclusion 265 borrowings in Condé’s fiction indicates, her ‘source-texts’ are not restricted to any particular cultural or literary context. Wuthering Heights is the main but not the sole intertext of La Migration des cœurs.10 Other literary references and borrowings include Simone de Beauvoir’s novel La Cérémonie des adieux and, in the English translation, Windward Heights (1998), also Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.11 I would contend that Condé’s fiction transgresses the category of ‘Caribbean’ literature and addresses literary tropes that are of worldwide and less context-specific significance. The nature of La Migration des cœurs as a literary rewrite seems to situate the narrative within the wider context of what might be called ‘World Literature’.12 By rewriting European (and North American) canonical texts, Condé appropriates them as works of ‘universal’ interest. In La Migration des cœurs she draws on the romance motifs of love, passion and revenge that constitute the main strands both in Brontë’s and in her own novel.13 technique are Célanire cou-coupé (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000) and Histoire de la femme cannibale (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003). For further discussion of her ‘cannibal’ texts see, for instance, Gyssels, ‘«Histoires de la femme et de chien cannibales»’, pp. 1-13. 10 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 11 La Migration des cœurs, epigraph; Maryse Condé, Windward Heights, trans. by Richard Philcox (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 308. Lionnet concisely analyses Condé’s appropriation of the theme of death intimated in the epigraph from de Beauvoir’s novel; Françoise Lionnet, ‘Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs’, in Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues, ed. by Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 65-87 (p. 73). 12 Apter discusses the relevance of ‘World Literature’ in the context of postcolonial literature, advocating a comparative reading of postcolonial texts within the wider framework of contemporary comparative literature studies; Emily Apter, ‘“Je ne crois pas beaucoup à la littérature comparée”: Universal Poetics and Postcolonial Comparativism’, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2: 1 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 7-11. 13 For further discussion of La Migration des cœurs as a rewrite see Chris Bongie, ‘Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature’, Postmodern Culture, 14: 1 (2003), pp. 1- 36. Bongie reads the novel as a ‘pastiche’ of the British original that neither praises nor rejects its pre-text, and he refers to the human emotions of love, passion and revenge as ‘universal’ sentiments; Bongie, ‘Exiles on Main Stream’, pp. 17, 19. Conclusion 266 In his thought-provoking discussion of literary revisionism and the relationship between literary and cultural studies, Chris Bongie interprets La Migration des cœurs in light of Jameson’s concept of pastiche. He asserts that we might well read Migration as a pastiche of the postcolonial revisionist novel: a work that, by self-consciously exiling postcolonial revisionism to the mainstream, refuses to play along with the evaluative distinctions that undergird the postcolonial ideology, forcing us to confront the modernist limits of that ideology, while continuing to inscribe, weakly, the memories of resistance that it assumes.14 As this quotation conveys, Bongie suggests that La Migration des cœurs goes beyond the specific Caribbean postcolonial context insofar as it reworks literary themes such as romance motifs which appeal to a wider readership – both academic and popular.15 Devoid of any resistant values that characterised the first generation of literary rewrites, the novel seems to move beyond the binary between colonial and postcolonial literature and can thus be placed more generally within mainstream literature. I would argue that Rhys and Condé both foreground intertextual borrowings and appropriations as a means of interrogating concepts of cultural identity, an issue that has preoccupied Caribbean writers and critics since the first decades of the twentieth century.16 Wide Sargasso Sea intimates that the notion of a ‘West Indian’ cultural identity which only considers the British colonial heritage is too narrow insofar as other colonising powers, especially the French, have also considerably influenced the Anglophone Caribbean. Rhys’ novel thus complicates any approach that solely considers the relationship between Great Britain and the West Indies. I would argue that Wide Sargasso Sea undermines the idea of a British-Caribbean identity by displaying 14 Bongie, ‘Exiles on Main Stream’, p. 17. 15 In his article Bongie relates Condé’s novel to middle-brow (popular) texts such as Tony Delsham’s Dérives (Schœlcher: MGG, 1999) and Marie-Reine de Jaham’s Le Sang du volcan (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997). 16 While all literary work is inevitably to some degree intertextual, Rhys and Condé use this literary practice consciously and very explicitly in these novels. Conclusion 267 not only colonial but also transcolonial relationships. Her questioning of the colonial link can be considered in light of a rising national awareness and the emergence of independence movements in the Anglophone Caribbean during the 1960s and 1970s, at the time when her novel was published. At the same time, Wide Sargasso Sea problematises notions of ‘West Indianness’ that oppose not only the British colonial supremacy but also neglect transcolonial and cross-cultural interpenetration within the Caribbean. In Rhys’ novel the interrelation between Anglophone and Francophone influences in the Caribbean is subtly intimated in representations of linguistic and cultural interpenetration, intra-Caribbean migration and personal relationships. Several characters such as Antoinette’s mother Annette, the servant Christophine and Tia are Martiniquan and thus introduce Francophone culture and language into the Anglophone Caribbean. Having been born and brought up on the Anglophone Caribbean island of Jamaica, Antoinette has been influenced by British colonial education and culture. This cultural heritage allows her to connect to Rochester. Significantly, Antoinette’s Anglophone origins are juxtaposed with her Francophone cultural heritage. Having been introduced to French Caribbean language and culture by her mother, Antoinette has come to understand and appreciate Christophine’s language, behaviour and beliefs. Unlike many Jamaicans – both white planters and African-Jamaicans – she moves beyond surface differences between Anglophone and Francophone as well as European and African-Caribbean cultures, differences such as language and attire. Antoinette’s openness towards Francophone Caribbean culture allows her to connect to Christophine on a personal level. Her trust of Christophine is attested to further by the fact that this Martiniquan woman becomes Antoinette’s surrogate mother, who offers her advice and moral support. Antoinette’s position between Anglophone and Francophone as well as between European and African cultures enables her to relate to the different ethnic and cultural groups in the Caribbean. However, it also makes her feel torn between and, in fact, marginalized by them. Throughout the novel Antoinette’s mixed cultural heritage is portrayed as both problematic and enriching. Conclusion 268 In Wide Sargasso Sea cross-cultural and especially transcolonial influences in the Caribbean are not only illustrated by Rhys’ choice of characters; they are reinforced further through migration between the Caribbean and Great Britain as well as within the archipelago, especially between Jamaica and Dominica. Interestingly, Dominica is portrayed as an island that has been influenced not only by the British but also by the French colonisers. Traces of Francophone culture are still visible in the Dominican landscape (Rhys refers to the road behind Granbois that was constructed by the French; p. 65), the French-inflected Creole patois and the apparent hostility of the island towards white British (Young Bull explicitly addresses the wilderness and alleged ‘lack of civilisation’ of this island in a conversation with Rochester; p. 41). By representing cultural interpenetration between the different Caribbean islands – both within the West Indies and between the Anglophone and Francophone islands – Rhys undermines identity concepts that focus solely on the colonial link. In La Migration des cœurs Condé extends notions of cultural identity beyond the Caribbean context. By representing ‘universal’ human emotions such as love, nostalgia and sorrow, Condé seems to place her novel not merely in the Caribbean but in a wider global perspective. Such general human values are alluded to in Razyé’s conversation with Doña Stéfania Fonséca: ‘[w]hen it comes to feelings, whites and blacks are one and the same. There’s no difference between their trials and tribulations. All humans dream of being reunited in Heaven with those they have lost’ (Condé, p. 15). Razyé’s assertion that human emotions are universal and that they can consequently overcome cross-cultural differences is represented as problematic throughout most sections of Condé’s novel. The various main characters, notably Razyé and his son First-Born as well as their respective lovers Cathy and Cathy II, remain socially marginalized because they try to overcome ethnic, cultural and class boundaries in colonial Caribbean societies. Significantly, however, Razyé’s imagination of the overcoming of ethnic and cultural divides is taken up again at the end of the novel. The open ending of La Migration des cœurs can be interpreted as suggesting that both personal relationships and ‘universal’ values and human emotions can help to reduce the significance of cultural differences in cross-cultural personal relationships. This potential for such Conclusion 269 relationships is powerfully represented by the character of Anthuria, the daughter of Cathy II. Having been mothered by the black Dominican woman Ada, the child is then accepted by First-Born as well as by First-Born’s white Guadeloupean sisters Hosannah and Irmine de Linsseuil. The final sentence of Condé’s story suggests that cultural, ethnic and class conflicts may eventually be overcome in the Caribbean: ‘[s]uch a lovely child could not be cursed’ (Condé, p. 348). While the main part of the narrative represents ethnic and cultural tensions which have marked colonial Caribbean societies, the novel is framed by allusions to cross-cultural relationships – relationships which can potentially overcome these tensions. La Migration des cœurs can be read as interrogating socially imposed boundaries and as proposing a focus on more general human values instead. Significantly, however, the open ending of the novel leaves the reader with questions about the ambivalent relationship between different cultures in the Caribbean.17 This means that La Migration des cœurs problematises cultural diversity and cross-cultural contact even as it hints at the potential for such connections. Condé’s references to ‘universal’ human values and emotions relate cultural diversity in the Caribbean to other cultures and societies worldwide. Although La Migration des cœurs is clearly situated in the context of nineteenth-century colonial Caribbean societies, Condé’s evocations of more general human values and emotions as well as her ‘cannibalising’ of fiction from a wide range of cultural and literary contexts simultaneously situate her novel within ‘World Literature’ in more general terms. Interestingly, Condé thus seems to portray the very connections between the Caribbean and societies worldwide that are alluded to in Eloge de la créolité but not in fictional texts by the Creolists. As this brief analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea and La Migration des cœurs has revealed, a comparative reading across the linguistic divide is necessary in order to account for the 17 A similar ambivalence is implied in the theoretical concepts of hybridity and créolité. As I have argued in Chapter Four, writers such as Pauline Melville express some scepticism as to the assumption that the concept of creolisation accounts sufficiently for cultural differences and ethnic tensions that are related to the cultural diversity in the Caribbean. Conclusion 270 complexity of Caribbean societies and for the cultural interpenetration within the archipelago. The juxtaposition of these two novels has also indicated that differences between Rhys’ and Condé’s narratives primarily stem from different literary contexts rather than from an intrinsic gap between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. As such Wide Sargasso Sea and La Migration des cœurs are striking examples of how productive a comparative study of Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature can be. My comparison of these specific novels has signalled the shift in Caribbean postcolonial literature since the 1950s and 1960s from writing that was situated in relation to the metropolises to an engagement with ‘World Literature’. My specific focus on the technique of literary revisionism has allowed me to relate Rhys’ and Condé’s representations of cultural identities to the literary contexts at the different times when these two novels were written. I have suggested that La Migration des cœurs interrogates literary categories such as postcolonial literature. Condé’s use of ‘literary cannibalism’ opens up questions about where postcolonial literature might be going. Her fiction alludes to the relationship between the Caribbean and ‘the global’ even as it addresses the legacy of colonialism and the predicament of specific Caribbean postcolonial societies. A similar trend can be discerned in texts by writers such as Cliff and Mootoo that problematise issues of gender and sexuality. Insofar as novels like Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night have been interpreted from within the academic domains of postcolonial and gender studies, they transcend and thus interrogate disciplinary boundaries.18 Interestingly, this apparent literary trend towards relating Caribbean ‘postcolonial’ literature to ‘World Literature’ is not commonly reflected in contemporary literary criticism. In fact, several Anglophone and Francophone critics have recently re-appropriated the concept of ‘postcolonial’ in order to problematise the relationship between ‘the global, the regional, and the local’.19 This trend in literary criticism towards a re-appraisal of the 18 Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Dutton, 1987); and Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (London: Granta, 1996). 19 The recent renaming of the journal World Literature Written in English as Journal of Postcolonial Writing and of the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French as Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies testifies to such (re-)appropriations of the notion Conclusion 271 ‘postcolonial’ seems somewhat at odds with the attempt of some contemporary ‘postcolonial’ ‘Caribbean’ writers to move beyond this very category by situating their writing more explicitly in relation to a wider ‘global’ human condition. I would argue that these two apparently oppositional developments represent, in fact, distinct and interrelated strands within contemporary (Caribbean) postcolonial writing. Texts by writers such as Cliff, Mootoo and Condé indicate that contemporary Caribbean fiction cannot solely be interpreted in relation to postcolonial condition. Their fiction underlines that Caribbean postcolonial writing constitutes a specific albeit not a neat and closed literary canon, which can be situated in ‘World Literature’ in more general terms. These writers move beyond the literary category of Caribbean writing even as they situate their fiction in the Caribbean context. Rather than dismissing literary categories outright I would argue that, at present, concepts such as ‘postcolonial’ and ‘Caribbean’ literature can be useful in accentuating specific historical and literary contexts and in avoiding generalisations. As the texts analysed in this study have demonstrated, the history of slavery and colonialism as well as the ethnic and cultural diversity that have marked Caribbean societies have been major touchstones in most Caribbean writing. Specifics such as these need to be accounted for in literary interpretations in order to avoid conflating distinct literary traditions. At the same time, for the reasons mentioned above, greater attention needs to be paid to connections between categories such as ‘Anglophone’ and ‘Francophone’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘Western’ literatures. Otherwise we risk reiterating the arbitrary division of the Caribbean during colonialism. Throughout this thesis I have highlighted stylistic and thematic connections between Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature, connections which are present if we read fiction from these two linguistic fields side by side. I have presented a series of ‘postcolonial’. In an advertising brochure for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing the editors explain that the journal ‘explores the interface between the postcolonial writing of the modern global era and the economic forces of production which increasingly commodify culture’; Journal of Postcolonial Writing, brochure XH01610D, distributed March 2006, p. 1. Conclusion 272 case studies that have signalled the direction into which postcolonial studies might develop. As all my chapters have demonstrated, the development of a Caribbean identity has been of vital importance for Caribbean societies since the first decades of the twentieth century. The texts discussed in Chapter Two have explored notions of Caribbean migrant identities in relation to metropolitan society, thereby addressing the problematics of immigration and integration which are still of major importance in the interplay between metropolitan and (Caribbean) migrant cultures. In her seminal novel Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys moves beyond this relationship between former coloniser and colonised and represents transcolonial connections within the Caribbean and between the archipelago and Great Britain and France. As such her novel seems to anticipate trends in identity discourses that emerged during the 1970s (notably Glissant’s concept of antillanité) and which focused on connections within the Caribbean that interrogated colonial, cultural and linguistic boundaries. This interrelation between different cultures within and beyond the Caribbean has been central to critical debates and literary representations of Caribbean cultural identities during the last two decades. As my comparison of Divina Trace and Texaco in Chapter Three has demonstrated, both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers have, more recently, emphasized connections between the Caribbean and societies worldwide even as they have explored notions of Caribbean cultural identities that are located within specific Caribbean contexts. This transcendence of the Caribbean context is powerfully represented in Condé’s fiction. In most of her novels the fictional personae migrate between different regions in the Caribbean, the Americas more generally as well as to other continents. This close link between the Caribbean and other contemporary societies is reinforced by her intertextual references to writing of what might be called ‘World Literature’. Like Condé, other contemporary woman writers have complicated notions of ‘a’ Caribbean cultural identity not only by drawing attention to cross-cultural connections within and beyond the archipelago but also by exploring issues of gender and sexuality. While representations of issues such as domestic violence, sexual identity and homophobia are situated within distinct Caribbean societies, the significance of these problematics reaches beyond the archipelago. Conclusion 273 In conclusion, as my examination of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction has revealed, there is a trend in Caribbean writing to address themes that challenge colonial, linguistic and cultural boundaries within the archipelago. Caribbean fiction has opened itself up towards literary themes that transcend the Caribbean while, at the same time, highlighting the specifics of this cultural context. 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