Caribbean Textuality and the Metaphors of Métissage
(Continued)
The Departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique are among the remnants of a French colonial empire which now only encompasses a few overseas departments, overseas territories and 'collectivités territoriales'. While their historical past and colonial present relate them to a distant metropole, and now as well to a union of European nations, their history, socio-demographic profile, their cultural traditions and geographical location place them within a Caribbean continuum. This apparent hybridity belies further complexity brought about by the various migratory movements to and from the region and reflected in complex processes of 'métissages'. These processes of geopolitical, ethnic and cultural doubling and transformation have given rise to a literature which explores issues pertaining to the diglossic nature of the region as well as to the search for a Creole identity. The constant slippages in the Signifying process, to borrow the term used by Henry Louis Gates Jr., which characterize Caribbean culture and literature ground our whole project and are the focus of the eleven essays included in this special series. We have opted to divide these essays under two headings which reflect the concerns both of the authors studied and of the relevant critical approaches. Articles featured in "Creolizing the language and the literary trace" serve to anchor the fundamental role played by the struggle between the written and the oral word in the search for identity in the French Caribbean. This linguistic/literary struggle has also led to the creolizing the literary trace left by European authors in an attempt to open new perspectives on Creoleness. The articles included in Part Two entitled "Creolizing the body and the (is)landscape" explore multi-faceted ethnic issues in the French Caribbean, by challenging the usual divisions between masters and slaves and offering new critical perspectives on how to (re)claim the Caribbean land. In so doing, these articles bring us full circle as they explore new languages and delineate the imaginery islandscape which infuses French Caribbean writing.
Though the authors of the essays included here all agree that language plays a fundamental role in the search for Caribbean identity, they offer differing perspectives on the struggle between the inscription of the written word and the preservation of oral traditions. In "Creole identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique and Confiant's Le Meurtre du Samedi-Gloria" , John Erickson explores the structural and thematic similarities between these two novels which both center upon a police inquiry into a suspicious death. The latter however serves as a pretext for an inquiry by the novelists themselves into the question of Creoleness as they explore how an aging black, Indian and white colonial world gives way to a modern, European-dominated one. In these novels, oral storytelling and the ancient art of the 'damier' a form of stickfighting- are both threatened by colonial rule, be it the officials' denunciation of the 'damier' as an African barbaric heritage (Meurtre, 131) or the imposition of the written word as in the notetaking of the authorities at the death scene (Solibo, 85), or the writing of the novelist who risks being killed by his own pen (Solibo, 76). In Solibo, however, Chamoiseau offers the possibility of a cultural métissage that combines the old and the new in a relentless effort to describe and elucidate the character of the Caribbean people.
In "Migrant ImagiNations: Can[n]ons, Creole[s], and Patrick Chamoiseau's Chemin-d'école", Renée Larrier explores the various migration movements which have contributed to the creolization processes, from the masters, slaves, and later indentured servants, who came to 'the cane' to another later significant journey which brought thousands of Caribbean peoples to Europe and North America. She argues that Patrick Chamoiseau's Chemin-d'école [School Days], an autobiographical narrative focusing on the Martinican protagonist's first encounter with the French educational system in the late 1950s, is informed by these movement/migration tropes as the boy who longs to go to school soon experiences a virtual exile from his own traditions and his own language. Larrier analyses the structural characteristics of the work which relate it to the spoken word and thereby initiate a demystification/demythification process which neither ignores nor glorifies the French contribution to Caribbean identity, but celebrates all of the disparate elements of creolization.
In their articles, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri, Marie-Denise Shelton and Christiane Makward explore the contributions made by women to the debate that pits oral traditions against the written word. In "Black Women's Discourse and the Semiology of Cultural Identity: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent surTélumée Miracle and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco", Nne Onyeoziri focuses on the narrative centering of women in these two novels and analyses to what extent the main women characters recognize, reveal and lay claim to an active participation in the major movements of Caribbean history. She argues that, whether the text is written by a man or a woman, whether it is overtly political in its representation of women's lives, or more subdued, it shows how the tale of story-telling itself can be and is being rewritten in the form of quasi-biographies which contribute to an increased awareness of Creole complexities.
Marie-Denise Shelton argues in her essay "Theater and voice", that Ina Césaire and Simone Schwarz-Bart use the stage to recreate a woman-centered space and culture mostly absent from plays written by French Caribbean male authors. The stage allows them to pursue various objectives such as exploring the diglossic world of the Caribbean and the presence of language in its fundamental orality and rejecting the linear timeline in favor of cycles, recurrences and repetitions. In their reshaping of theatrical canons, they prefer the more private spaces in which women share their experience and memories to the vast expanse of narratives.
In "Sur Le Zonzon d'Ina Césaire: un drôle de bricolage" [About Ina Césaire's Zonzon, a makeshift construction], Christiane Makward analyses another literary form which allows Ina Césaire to further explore orality. The title of the essay points to the approach adopted by the critic as she explores the disparate elements which contribute to a collection of tales. In Zonzon Tête Carrée, Césaire explores the fluidity of literary genres, the fluctuating margins between fiction and reality and the uneasy frontier where the oral meets the written. The stories which date from 1842 to the 1950s provide her with an opportunity to become a 'transliterator' as she reveals some of the popular traditions of Martinique, explores the humor which infuses creole life, and seeks to translate the oral traditions of her native island into written form, away from the controversies which arose out of the Creoleness movement.
Vinay Swamy focuses on another salient feature of (French) Caribbean literature: the 'calibanization' of European canonical texts with a view to restoring the suppressed Caribbean voice. In "Traversing the Atlantic: From Brontë's Wuthering Heights to Condé's La Migrations des curs", Swamy analyses how Condé makes the 'silences' of Brontë's novel 'speak', as she reterritorializes Brontë's Yorkshire Moors to the Caribbean islands and articulates the importance of social and racial relations in the islands (and in Europe) within the colonial context of the nineteenth century. Swamy argues that, contrary to Wuthering Heights - which caves in on itself in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle, La Migration des Coeurs concludes on an aperture which provides a framework within which the Caribbean's relationship to its past can be problematized and thereby allow for the possibility of imagining a different perspective on its own history.
The second part of this series, "Creolizing the body and the (is)landscape", focuses on ethnic tensions within the Caribbean and the role of space in the forging of Caribbean identities. In "Migrating love or What's love got to do with it? Transcultural love and sex relations in French Caribbean literary texts", Anthony Hurley explores how migratory exchanges in the form of transcultural sexual relationships impact on formulations of national, cultural, gender, and racial identities in various French Caribbean novels and poems. He analyses how through contamination by the experience and effects of force and inequality engendered by slavery, colonialism, and sexism, transcultural love becomes implicitly a deviation from the norm imbued with overtones of physical and social difference and even cultural taboo.
In "Stéréotypes et préjugés dans l'espace créole: Maryse Condé et les 'voisins haïtiens'"[Our Haitian neighbors : presence and prejudice in Condé's creole space] , Lydie Moudileno argues that following recent migratory trends, the image of the Haitian in the French Caribbean has evolved from 'larger-than-life symbol of freedom' to 'an impoverished ill-educated migrant'. She argues that the representation of Haitian characters in three novels by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé clearly contradicts the discourse on an all-inclusive creoleness and suggests a problematic disjunction within the Caribbean. Moudileno however concludes that 'unity within diversity' needs not be a myth torn apart by economic and political rifts and disjunctions within the Caribbean space but rather frames an endeavor to rethink the Caribbean space as it has been shaped by the trends of both emigration et immigration.
In "Maryse Condé entre pulsion de départ et pulsion de retour : une réappropriation de l'espace antillais"[Maryse Condé between the impulse to leave and the impulse to return : reappropriating the Caribbean space], Nora Cottille-Foley analyses to what extent emigration threatens Antilleans with alienation or assimilation unless it is followed by a fruitful return to the homeland. In Hérémakhonon, her first novel inspired by her years spent in France and Africa, Condé presents the disruptive effects of emigration as they prevent the main character from finding inscription in a world away from home. Conversely, in Moi, Tituba, sorcière Noire de Salem, Condé portrays a character whose travels and tribulations eventually bring her back to the Caribbean where she can embrace the mosaic of her identity and contribute meaningfully to her island home. In "Récit d'un 'retour au pays pas natal'": Jardins et migrations dans L'exil selon Julia de Gisèle Pineau" [A Tale of 'return to the 'not-native land' : Gardens and migrations in L'exil selon Julia by Gisèle Pineau], Sylvie Durmelat underlines how the Parisian location of the performative declaration which opens In Praise of Creoleness problematizes this theoretical contruct. Durmelat wonders whether this apparent contradiction between the declaration and its location illustrates how migration to metropolitian France may be a departure without return, or whether it opens new perspectives which the writers of In Praise of Creoleness hardly explore. In both Un Papillon dans la Cité and L'Exil selon Julia, Pineau focuses upon a young Caribbean girl exiled in France who maintains a strong emotional bond with her grandmother. The island garden which the grandmother maintains provides not only food, medecine, and aesthetic pleasure but enable her to transmit her skills to younger generations and to build a 'not-native' country to which they can (re)turn for emotional substenance.
"Rêver-Pays" [Dream-land] by Delphine Perret focuses on the progression of the perception of Martinique from island-home to country and indigenous space in Patrick Chamoiseau's Ecrire en pays dominé. She argues that after claiming the body of the island and "dreaming" a new Martinican country, Chamoiseau follows the Creole logic of métissage to its end as he opens up his islandspace onto the diversity of the world. He thus reinvents imaginery constructs to announce "que mon pays connaîtra un jour, des élans plus libres, un imaginaire neuf loin des consommations et des Assistanats, dans l'échange créateur avec la Caraïbe, les terres américaines, avec l'Europe, avec le Total-Monde." (314) [my country will know one day freer exchanges, a new imagery away from consumerism and hand-outs, in a creative exchange with the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe and the Whole-World].
The range of issues addressed by this collection of articles appears to be of particular importance at this juncture of Caribbean development. From the tacit recognition of its distinct historical experience and sociocultural features implicit in the French Caribbean being named a 'région monodépartementale', to the call by French President Jacques Chirac at the recently concluded Franco-Caribbean summit held in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe on March 10. 2000 for allowing the Caribbean DOMs, at least, a greater degree of autonomy and intra-regional integration, the discursive and cultural goals of pluralism, co-operation and self-affirmation originally articulated in the 1980's through antillanité and créolité appear to be bearing fruit. At the same time, given that France has even more recently signaled its intention to terminate its role as a financial co-underwriter of the Caribbean Development Bank a 'non-borrowing member', in economic parlance it would not be unreasonable to conclude that its continuation of its extra-territorial Caribbean relationship now appears increasingly problematic. In concrete terms, then, these pieces may be said to signal the point where the esoteric world of discourse and theory meets the practical world of politics and protest, of cultures in transition and transformation, of migration and métissage. These intersections of interconnectedness compel us to rethink both the present and the future of Caribbean studies ; they bridge transient boundaries of geography and "race", of history and modernity, all centered by the Creole complexities of the Caribbean landscape. Whether métissage, in its many guises form the ethnic to the linguistic, is finally read as the product or the catalyst of the Caribbean's many migration patterns, one thing is clear the shape and substance of Caribbean writing in general, and of French Caribbean writing in particular, embody the richness of the multivalent mosaic that is Caribbean identity.
