Reading the French Caribbean

CHARLES FORSDICK Foreword

Readers, students and scholars of the French-language literatures of the Caribbean – and indeed of the literatures of the Caribbean more broadly – have been greatly indebted to the work of A. James Arnold for a period now of more than four decades. His contribution began notably with Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (1981), but has extended since to a remarkably rich range of other key contributions, including editions and translations of Césaire as well as other major interventions such as A History of Literature in the Caribbean (the three volumes edited for the International Comparative Literature Association between 1994 and 2001). As the author notes in the chapters that follow, he began his career as a student of specifically French literature, writing a doctoral dissertation on Paul Valéry and His Critics (1970). It was research on French and European Surrealism, however, that led him to discern links between the theory of métaphore filée and Aimé Césaire’s Les armes miraculeuses, then readings of Sartre’s Les Mots and Camus’s Caligula in which he detected resonance between French thought and the attack on western rationalism also evident in Césaire. James Arnold is, as a result, one of a number of the pioneers of so-called Francophone studies in the English-speaking world – alongside other key figures such as Celia Britton, Bridget Jones and Roger Little – for whom engagement with the French-language literatures of the Caribbean depended on an initial, essential detour via ‘metropolitan’ writing and thought. James’s role has not simply, however, been that of bringing a marginalised body of writing to the broader scholarly attention it merits. His contribution has been and continues to be more multifaceted: (i) encouraging us to read literature from former French colonies in broader historical contexts, in ways that challenge decisively any residually presentist approach; (ii) attenuating the universalising extremes of postcolonial criticism by asserting the importance of approaching authors such as Césaire genetically and intertextually, that is, as the authors of works whose specificity is reflected in traces of their creative emergence and evolution; and (iii) demonstrating – not least through the establishment of the CARAF book series in the 1980s and the New World Studies series the following decade, both at the University of Virginia Press, but also via the literary history to which I have alluded earlier – the cross-cultural, multilingual, translational nature of Caribbean literature and thought.

The emphasis in James Arnold’s work is on the comparative and the interconnected, with the nuances associated with such an approach emerging equally in his calls for a cautiously granular approach to intralingual analyses of Francophone spaces themselves – an aspect evident, for instance, in the reminder, in the study that follows, that ‘Martinique and Guadeloupe experienced the French Revolution differently from Saint-Domingue and very differently from one another’, with these differential historical experiences continuing to manifest themselves in the present. The ongoing ambition of this critical project is evident throughout the current volume. Reading the French Caribbean draws on its author’s own intellectual trajectory and autobiography, some key aspects of which I have mentioned earlier, and encourages us to read French Caribbean literature ‘from the postmodern to the postcolonial (1981–2025)’ – that is, from the publication of Glissant’s Le discours antillais to the present – in a much broader chronological frame. Setting out what he calls ‘the Lie of the Land’, James presents the historical tropes and imagined geographies, beginning in the early modern period, and evolving at the intersections of exoticism and colonialism through the work of Du Tertre, Rousseau, Voltaire and others, required to understand what he calls ‘the specificity of littérature antillaise’. The originality of the current book lies not only, however, in this active historicisation of the diverse primary corpus it explores, but also in the author’s distinctive but parallel commitment to historicising the ways in which these texts have been read, including in his own contributions, over the past half century. Drawing on his experience as a critic, he shares reflections, for instance, on the slippage between, on the one hand, the international visibility of Césaire and Glissant and, on the other hand, the relative obscurity of their literary output in the 1970s and 1980s in Martinique itself. There are further fascinating insights from personal interactions and conversations with authors – for example, Edouard Glissant’s reflections on the translation of Le discours antillais. Central to this approach are well-founded reservations about the applicability of postcolonial theory – and not least the emancipatory teleologies it often assumes – to the contexts of the Francophone Caribbean: ‘Postcolonial theory posits’, the author notes, ‘the political independence of the former colony. That independence may be incomplete, flawed and subject to subsequent alteration; but it is the goal that Postcolonial theory presupposes’. The analyses that follow reveal the ways in which the French Caribbean (the current DROMs, but equally Haiti itself) actively challenges the Anglocentrism and Anglonormativity of much early postcolonial criticism. They do this by foregrounding the spectre of neo-colonialism evident in the constitutional status of Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana, but also by offering alternative paradigms, especially those around pigmentocracy and creolisation, that diverge from critical and theoretical orthodoxies associated with a predominantly British imperial context (notably that of the Indian subcontinent).

The current book is essential reading for those with an interest in later twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century literatures from the French-speaking Caribbean. Even (or perhaps especially) those familiar with work from that period will be challenged – in the wake also of the work of Jean-Marc Moura and others – to reassess their knowledge, to rethink the ‘Francophone postcolonial’ in relation to the colonial, to acknowledge transhistorical continuities as well as discontinuities. The book provides a concise overview of the literary and intellectual implications of the specifically French engagement with otherness. These contexts are deployed to suggest how the writings of Glissant and others cannot be understood without reference to the early modern period, but the purview is broader, extending to the ‘imperial century’ of the French republican empire. The argument engages actively a number of key scholars in this area – Tzvetan Todorov, Christopher Miller, Chris Bongie – but one of the strengths of the book is the extent to which it also draws into its thesis the work of others (Louise Hardwick and Maeve McCusker, for instance) who have made significant contributions to these debates more recently. It is in this critical frame that the current book refuses to shy away – in the context of a discussion of créolité and créolisation – from discussing the persistent concept of the ethnoclass in the French Caribbean, a reflection rooted again in the history of ideas in the Caribbean itself (and linked to the broader role of key works such as Glissant’s Le discours antillais in changing the debate). This focus on pigmentocracy provides an original frame for a compelling reconsideration of representations of Toussaint Louverture, the case of whom is deployed to ‘advance our understanding of the relationship between conflicted ethnicity and national identity’. Louverture has been subject in recent years to extensive biographical analyses, many of which have extended to considerations also of his representational afterlives. The highly original discussion of Raphaël Tardon in the current volume reinserts Louverture into more pigmentocratic historical debates – as discussed by David Nicholls in particular, who drew on the mid-nineteenth-century Haitian historiography of authors such as Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin. James Arnold builds on his observation that ‘Aimé Césaire made it his business to bury Tardon literarily and ideologically’ to illustrate the Martinican poet’s active instrumentalisation of Haiti for his own political purposes, an element that has not emerged fully from more celebratory accounts of his work.

Building on the rich historiographic context provided, the book provides in addition a compelling account of the ways in which Caribbean authors – notably André Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé – focused on the rape of enslaved African women to counter what Trouillot called ‘silencing the past’ and to construct new, alternative ‘sites of memory’ that counter any lack of historical documents. It explores other areas that merit closer attention, such as the apparent unacceptability of same-sex relationships in Martinican Creoleness. There is also a clear focus on additional questions of gender, notably in the context of Créolité, Antillanité and Négritude. This leads the author to revisit Fanon’s misreading of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise, a topic on which the book casts new light (developing his previous articles on the topic from 2002 to 2003), highlighting in particular the work’s intertextual echoes with Hearn’s Esquisses martiniquaises. Another key strength of the book, as noted earlier, is its focus on the entanglement of literature produced in France with literature in French from the Caribbean. There is a discussion, for instance, of Georges Sylvain’s engagement with La Fontaine, and related issues of the reworking of Haitian folktales.

The result is a new, provocative and often surprising history of contemporary French Antillean literature. The book contains, for instance, a detailed account of the relationships between the Créolistes post-Eloge as well as a refreshingly original presentation of Maryse Condé as novelist of the Black Atlantic. As noted above, James Arnold is already widely celebrated for his work on Césaire, and the Martinican author features again prominently towards the end of the book, with a focus on genetic readings of his work and a discussion of some more rarely studied writings such as essays and occasional pieces from the 1940s to the late 1970s. This is a study that caters for a readership seeking to understand more clearly (and contextualise more fully) French Caribbean writing between 1981 and the present. With its new insights into various authors and topics, it will also be of genuine interest to those already familiar with the corpus discussed but open to analysing it in new ways. Reading the French Caribbean leaves us with the challenge – in the wake of towering figures such as Césaire, Condé and Glissant – of determining where next for French-language literature in the Caribbean. Answers include the emergence of a new, post-Créolité generation of authors, such as Michael Roch (whose work is in dialogue with Chamoiseau and Glissant), Christophe Gros-Dubois and Nadia Chonville, all of whom are associated with what some have called an ‘Afrofuturist turn’. James Arnold provides us with the materials and approaches we need to locate these emerging developments and to identify the continuities and discontinuities with which these contemporary voices are to be associated.

Acknowledgements

‘The Lie of the Land’ draws in part on ‘Perilous Symmetry: Exoticism and the Geography of Colonial and Postcolonial Culture’ (2003), published by Editions Rodopi (New York) in Freeman J. Henry (ed.), Geo/graphies: Mapping the Imagination in French and Francophone Literature and Film, pp. 1–28.

‘Dynamics of a Conflicted National Identity’ draws in part on my article published by Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam) under the title ‘Créolité: Cultural Nation-Building or Cultural Dependence?’ (1997) in T. D’haen (ed.), (Un)Writing Empire, pp. 37–48.

In the same chapter, I am grateful to KITLV Journals (Leiden) for permission to cite my article ‘The Erotics of Colonialism in Contemporary French West Indian Literary Culture’ (1994), New West Indian Guide, 68 (1–2), 5–22.

I wish to express my thanks to the publishers of the books and articles cited in this volume. All citations referenced in the text have been kept within the limits of fair use in critical discourse. Full details can be found in the bibliography.

INTRODUCTION Francophonie and Its Discontents

Early in my career I worked on Modern French poetry, publishing my doctoral dissertation on Paul Valéry and His Critics in 1970. During the late 1960s I read extensively across the work of French and European Surrealists, gradually working towards a theory of associative metaphor [métaphore filée] that gave me a point of entry into Aimé Césaire’s Les armes miraculeuses (1946, The Miraculous Weapons, 2017). Over time, I came to see Césaire’s early poetry, from the 1930s to about 1950, as an effort to grapple with persistent themes in philosophy and history from his perspective as a colonised intellectual. Studying philosophy for the AB and PhD degrees introduced me to dialectics from the Pre-Socratics of ancient Greece to Hegel and Marx. For a time in the 1970s, I worked on Sartre’s autobiography Les Mots (1964, The Words, 1964) and the unpublished 1941 text of Camus’s play Caligula. Taken together, these studies prepared me for the attack on western rationalism I found in Césaire. I published the first book in English on Césaire’s poetry and poetics in 1981. Modernism and Negritude presented his commitment to politics as subsidiary to his poetry, a position that put me at odds with scholars who privileged politics, reading Césaire’s poetry through the lens provided by editions published after 1956. Jean-Jacques Thomas’s approach was similar to mine:

The multitude of Postcolonial readings of the work of Aimé Césaire transforms it more and more into a ‘political machine’ … Above all, Césaire had understood that a poet says what he says by saying it in his own language. (Thomas 2016)