Caribbean Textuality and the Metaphors of Métissage
by Pascale de Souza and H. Adlai Murdoch
This special edition of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures on the topic "Migrations and Métissages" has its genesis in the increasing discursive and critical attention garnered in recent years by the regional concepts of antillanité, or Caribbeanness, and créolité, or Creoleness. The former, first broached by Edouard Glissant in Le discours antillais in 1981, takes a geopolitical as well as a discursive approach to contesting the ongoing pattern of island dependence and metropolitan domination engendered in the French Caribbean by the practice of overseas departmentalism. By taking cognizance of the "multi-relation" that undergirds the region, Glissant writes, a new creative and cultural context for Caribbean identity can be effectively forged. Créolité, on the other hand, was first elaborated in the Eloge de la créolité by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant in 1989, and is a "literary movement [that] has been for the past ten years the only noteworthy one in the entire Caribbean," as Michael Dash recently wrote (238). Essentially an artistic framework that draws on linguistic, cultural, and historical patterns of pluralism within the region to express the totality of the Caribbean experience, "Créolité," as Dash continues, "is essentially a strategic defence of the ideal of diversity in a world threatened by the disappearance of cultural difference" (239). The ethnic intersections engendered by these multiple movements give rise to the patterns of migration and métissage that are explored in this collection of essays.
The interstitial status of the DOMs, or overseas departments of France -- ostensibly an integral part of the metropole but maintaining an insistent ethnic, cultural, and historical difference -- serves both to provide a framework for issues of migration and its attendant corollaries and to help us interrogate our long held assumptions concerning the ambit of the term postcolonialism. Thus it might perhaps be best to begin by questioning the term "postcolonial" itself, with its attendant ambiguities of formal decolonization, settler versus exploitation colonies, neocolonialism, and the continuation of political and economic domination by the metropole. These complex conjunctions feed into a series of critical distinctions that have been made in attempting to define the term "postcolonialism." As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin suggest, while, on the one hand, its "semantic basis ... might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the imperial power," alternate readings use the term in a much larger sense, generating a perspective that "cover[s] all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day" (1-2). Yet it is immediately clear that even such wide -- and widely accepted -- definitions cannot account for the somewhat anomalous geopolitical standing of the French Caribbean territories.
If the abandonment of the colonial umbilicus may be read as the most recent avatar of modernity in the region, then the dualities of departmentalism can be read as the exception that proves the rule. But it is also a given of the modern period that colonialism, more particularly in its Western expansionist guise that peaked around the end of the nineteenth century, has impacted in one way or another the attributes and characteristics of much of the world's population. Indeed, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin insist that "More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism" (1). With colonialism as a process necessarily at the center of a globalizing network of cultural crossings and ethnic intersection, it ultimately traced a phenomenon of cultural hybridity whose widespread impress came to be seen as the hallmark of the modern period. It is the specific shape adopted by this process in these islands that leads us to consider its corollary of Caribbean creolization.
If, then, the importance of postcolonial cultural hybridity as a form of resistance for the French-speaking Caribbean -- a factor which arguably played just as integral a role in the English-speaking Caribbean's relations with its imperial metropole -- is that it joined with the geopolitical specificities of departmentalization to allow the emergence of an aesthetics of Francophone Caribbean difference through the creolization of its literature and its culture, what are the terms and conditions that will convey the "Caribbeanness" of this creolized discourse? Further, how do the migrations and métissages of the post/colonial encounter impact French Caribbean literature and culture today? While, on the one hand, the colonial process is undoubtedly at the core of centuries of global interaction, it cannot account for the entirety of contemporary ethnic and cultural subjectivity, as Stuart Hall suggests: "Colonisation ... can only be understood now, in terms, not only of the vertical relations between coloniser and colonised, but also in terms of how these and other forms of power-relations were always displaced and decentred by another set of vectors -- the transverse linkages between and across nation-state frontiers and the global/local inter-relationships which cannot be read off against a nation-state template (1996a: 250; emphasis in the original). It is in these terms that creolization must be understood to have occurred in a Caribbean context; not simply as part of a global phenomenon of colonially-driven cultural exchange, but as a critical principle of local geopolitics in which particular patterns of pluralism are transformed through social and historical forces into the constantly shifting strategies of the creole.
The mutability of métissage provide perhaps the most telling perspective on the capacity of its "neither/nor" paradigm to subvert and transform the hierarchical binaries on which the colonial encounter were largely predicated. During the nineteenth century, the birth of so-called "scientific racism" posited the notion of the hybrid as monstrous, degenerate, the very incarnation of infertility. This is a point that Françoise Lionnet makes well in her Introduction to her book Autobiographical Voices: "Racial and cultural 'mixing' has always been a fact of reality, however fearfully unacknowledged ... It is in large part because of the scientific racism of the nineteenth century that hybridization became coded as a negative category" (9). This insistence on racial and cultural purity thus coded the hybrid as unnatural and degenerate, a product of the colonial condition that betrayed longstanding principles of ethnic and cultural purity.
But these principles, used to bolster the tremendous expansion of European colonial activity in the latter half of the nineteenth century and to rationalize its accompanying mission civilisatrice, carried within them both the seeds of their eventual destruction and the instantiation of ethnicity as a category beyond "race.". Over the long term, the transformative power of métissage would become proleptic rather than analeptic, a form of identitarian inscription whose full potential would come to be realized in a wider postcolonial future rather than in a univocal colonial past. In denying the dominant notions of ethnic and cultural separation, métissage draws transformatively on these essentialist notions of discursive division in order to deliberately subvert the assumptions of singularity that are the generative ground of both metropolitan and departmental difference. The principle of anxiety that grounds the colonial network of hierarchical oppositions is thus made to confront the return of its own repressed Other; the unnameable sterile monster of the infertile hybrid now marks a site of strategic multiplicity, engendering a third term which is less than either one but simultaneously more than the sum of both. The advent of what was once the stereotypically hideous métis, transformed through its corollary of a creolized culture of difference, now denotes a viable alternative to the negative colonial myth of binary otherness.
Given the paradoxes of the post-Columbian Caribbean experience of modernity, the ethnic and cultural axes of the region have long been defined by a penetrative pluralism, what Antonio Benitez-Rojo calls "a supersyncretic culture characterized by its complexity, its individualism, and its instability, that is to say, creole culture, whose seeds had come scattered from the richest stores of three continents" (46). It seems legitimate, therefore -- in the light of the multivalencies of the resulting admixtures that have become the primary markers of Caribbean cultural identity -- to locate in the constant slippages of the Caribbean creole the primary framework embodying the elements of dynamism and displacement, multiplicity, indeterminacy and metamorphosis that have become the region's defining sign and whose interlectal, relational space its authors have sought to re-present. In a sense, then, the interstitial complexities mapped by the French Caribbean territories render them perhaps the ultimate regional paradox; products of a Caribbean process of creolization mediated by the modernist traces of language, history and culture, but tied to the metropole in a political double bind that renders them neither completely French nor West Indian, but more than the sum of both. For while it may be claimed on the one hand that most of the islands of the region -- all former colonies of anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, or netherlandic Europe -- share particular patterns of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural métissage that are the heritage of the colonial encounter, on the other, with the advent of independence or self-government for most of these territories since the 1960's, this implicit sameness is immediately undercut by the ongoing state of ambivalence settled on the French territories with the advent of departmentalization in 1946.
If, then, the paradox of departmentalism produces French Caribbean subjects who are both French and West Indian, what separates them from their independent Caribbean counterparts is an ongoing relationship to the metropole proving paradoxically that, as Richard Burton puts it, this subject "has in some large measure interiorized, even as he contests them, its values, thought-patterns and, most crucially of all, its language" (186). With the doubleness and dichotomy resulting from this dilemma posing increasing challenges to the inscription of French Caribbean modernity, the process of writing contestation into being -- particularly through the subversion of the colonizer's language -- would necessitate the establishment of a specific framework that would re-present the deliberate dissymmetries of the overseas departmental subject. By situating these negotiations in narrative terms, the resulting subjective strategies hinged in large part on the symbolic pluralism of the region's ethnic subjects and the structural multiplicities of the Creole language. Such strategies allowed regional authors to choose not to contest their domination by the French language, but, in contradistinction to Burton's position, rather to subvert this domination by rewriting and reshaping it from the inside, articulating new, counter-discursive terms for post-colonial difference out of their creolized middle ground. With each inhabitant of these territories effectively a diglottic subject, this simultaneous negotiation of the worlds of home and away sets the stage for the discursive elaboration of Caribbean creole pluralism through the symbolic re-presentation of language, ethnicity and culture.
These discursive strategies thus confront the conundrum of French Caribbean subjectivity through what Edouard Glissant has called an irruption into modernity, one that achieves an epistemological breach with the colonial heritage even as it turns the terms of this heritage into a framework for Frenchness, or francophonie, that differs significantly from the implicit universalism of its metropolitan paradigm. Indeed, it is the strategic doubleness of Caribbean francophonie, integrating and reproducing as it does a cultural axis of Caribbeanness alongside a francité that is no longer quite one, that articulates the critical interstitiality of the French Caribbean postcolonial condition, and thereby implicitly instantiating what Stuart Hall terms "the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects" (1996b: 443). Articulating an alternative to metropolitan universalism and assimilation, such paradigms inscribe, in Richard Terdiman's words, "discursive systems by which writers and artists [seek] to project an alternative, liberating newness against the absorptive capacity of ... established discourses" (13; emphasis in the original). These Caribbean modernist counter-discourses would transform the varied totality of their French and West Indian traces into a tertiary discursive and cultural synthesis, shaping new sites and strategies for the articulation of an independent creole identity particular to the regional experience.
For it is in the transpositions, confluences, and syntheses of Caribbean culture, both within and without regional borders, that we may locate the subversion of traditional notions of boundaries and communities that initiates innovative sites of nationness and modernity. Following the post-World War II flood tide of independence and self-determination, successive waves of immigration took hundreds of thousands of African, Caribbean, and Indian subjects to settle in the former colonial capitals, where the resulting ethnic and cultural intersections would slowly change the face of these centers of geopolitical dominance. The diegetic traces of the colonial encounter, which had structured the region's double identity as a liminal site of incommensurable insufficiency, were relocated in a discursive and popular framework which reproduces a creolized Caribbean identity across these transnational cultural communities. What I am proposing, then, is an articulation of the related issues of doubling, hybridity, and métissage as an inaugural framework that writes the difference of the region as both French and West Indian. Importantly, however, such categories are linked to, but are also ultimately to be differentiated from the larger phenomenon of creolization, in which the pluralist political traces of the colonial encounter in the Caribbean, along with its ethnic and cultural admixture and ceaseless movements of migration and exchange across the body of the Caribbean Sea, produced a society that traces its multiplicities of peoples and places, language and cultural practice into a composite network of affiliation; whose multiple terms, then, are greater than the sum of its parts, and whose discourses simultaneously translate and transform the multivalence of their specific sociohistorical experience. It is the style and substance of these discourses that the essays in this volume set out to map and to explore.
